[Rankin] ... Kevin Durant continuing to address #NBA viewership being down. "I take this serious. I'm locked in as to why people don't want to watch us play."

https://x.com/DuaneRankin/status/1872176949801504956?t=sOlhzun3lYo5ImePn8Xpwg&s=19

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u/Skunk_Gunk [CLE] LeBron James 2d ago

The biggest thing that leagues don’t account for when going this route is that they are losing the next generation of fans by doing this. People rarely start to follow teams/leagues unless they grow up with it. The league needs to think about the next 20 years just not the next quarter, could say this about 90% of companies though to be fair.

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u/QuietRainyDay 2d ago

99% of companies

They've all been poisoned by finance/accounting departments that have reduced every single strategic decision to short-term profitability metrics.

They'll pretend like they care about the long term. But the way finance works makes long-term thinking almost impossible. It's simply too hard to accurately quantify the value of long-term investments and radical new ideas.

Even relatively wise executives who understand that some long-term decision must be based on something beyond Excel spreadsheets get overruled.

Source: used to be a finance bro that built the stupidass Excel spreadsheets that trampled so many good ideas (regrettably)

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u/gabs_ 2d ago

Do you think that there is something that might change the tunnel vision style of management? Or you hold a dystopic perspective and that's why you changed careers?

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u/QuietRainyDay 2d ago

Dystopic tbh with you

I worked in finance for almost 10 years and it only got bleaker the further up the ranks I rose

I saw how corporate finance departments had a total chokehold on decision-making. We had FP&A analysts (25 year olds with MBAs and minimal business knowledge) attached to every business unit. In theory these people are supposed to help the businesses quantify the financial impact of their decisions.

In reality, they are spies for the CFO, who in turn is a spy for the shareholders- and whose job it is to ensure that every nickel and dime is spent in the most conservative, short-termist way possible.

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u/gabs_ 2d ago edited 2d ago

I feel like a guinea pig of those experiments. I work as a software developer and my company has brought McKinsey on board. They are implementing a bunch of lean management crap: running experiments with understaffed teams, at some point wanted to measure our productivity by the number of points that we delivered but gave up (a junior engineer might deliver more points if they are doing many easy tasks in a row, whereas a senior might deliver less if they are contributing to the high level design of applications and only doing a task here or there). Also, high budget for hires, non-existent budget for raises.

So yeah, everything feels short-term like you've said.