Just Give Him a Ball or Company to Run

Most working stiffs are 9-to-5 guys. And the trick is to turn those eight hours into three of actual production.

What you do is, you come in to work. You hang up your coat, then you go hunt up a colleague and you go out for coffee. You catch up on the latest gossip. You hang around the water cooler a lot.

You shuffle papers, call your bookie, have the switchboard tell callers you’re “in a meeting.” Maybe you go out for a shine.

You turn the lunch hour into two. First of all, you pretend it’s a business lunch even if the only business you discuss is the Chicago Bears. You loiter at the newsstand a lot. Research, you convince the auditor.

Back in the office, the idea is to let somebody else stick his neck out. It’s the key to corporate success. It’s sure the key to longevity.

That’s why I find it hard to understand the incomprehensible, totally unprofessional behavior of a young business executive in the well-respected conglomerate doing business as the Los Angeles Raiders, Inc.

Marcus A. Allen has done a great deal for that firm, about on the order of what Lee Iacocca has done for Chrysler. He has boosted sales, dumbfounded competition, opened up new markets.

If anyone was entitled to sit and do his nails and try to decide where to go to dinner on the expense account it would seem to be this quasi-chief executive officer, Marcus Allen.

The last thing you would think he would want to do is rock the boat.

Instead, Marcus Allen has set the art of how to succeed in business without really trying back by decades.

Allen’s stock in trade is to carry or catch the football. He does that better than almost anyone in the game, give or take a rival executive like Walter Payton or so.

But lots of things can happen to you, career-wise, when you go back into the basic rough and tumble of everyday commerce. You can fumble the ball. You can drop the pass. You can get knocked down behind the line of scrimmage. You can get stopped on the goal line.

The really experienced executive bucks these chores to unwary junior partners, eager beavers on the way up, guys trying to be noticed, guys who, so to speak, don’t have their names on the door yet.

When you’re an exec who’s got it made, what you do in football, for instance, is wait for the easy ones, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, for example, and you say, “I’ll handle this one.” You duck the tough ones.

Otherwise, you run the risk of the office staff whispering, “The old boy doesn’t have it any more. Got caught from behind by a tackle the other day” or “Couldn’t put it in from the one against the Bengals. Can you believe it?”

Even management seemed content to let Marcus play the Mr.-Allen-is-not-available-at-this-time-care-to-leave-a-message? game. When Marcus asked to run more, the managing general partner, Al Davis, suggested the beach at twilight.

But Allen wasn’t interested in coupon-clipping, gliding toward his pension. He wanted the action. He wanted to be on the floor of the exchange.

He got noisy about it earlier this season. He felt he was getting like the executive whose phone stops ringing, whose number stops being called, who is not counted on anymore, who is treated like a guy who has been put out to pasture and carried on the books as a consultant.

Allen violated every canon of the business code. He screamed to be allowed to earn his pay. He didn’t want to be just another vice president going around cutting ribbons.

He didn’t like the way the company was going and he thought he could do something about it if they’d bring him back on line. That’s a no-no for the exec looking for a cushy place to rest on his laurels or to keep out of the eye of the stockholders, or the industry analysts, in this case, the sportswriters.

Marcus didn’t have to do it. His salary was guaranteed for several years. His pension is vested. He could have artfully covered his aspects, picked his spots, run the ball out of bounds, said, “Give it to somebody else” on the one, showed up with mysterious ailments on the days they played the Seahawks, not gotten open when he knew the 49er secondary was waiting over the middle.

But, the company was going bad and CEO Allen decided it was because they had stopped using his talents.

He took charge again. He risked his reputation, to say nothing of his knees and ankles. He’d either turn the company around or he’d have to have lunch in a bag at the desk by himself every day.

The firm had just lost marketing decisions to the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers when Marcus loosed his blast of dissatisfaction. He wasn’t content just to take his paycheck and polish his Mercedes.

The Raiders won five straight games after Marcus’ outbreak. They gave him the ball, all right. He gained more than 100 yards in six of the last seven weeks. He reached 1,000 yards gained faster than any Raider exec in history.

The team won five straight games after his eruption, and six out of eight.

Sunday’s game illustrated his worth to the company. A desultory game of almost sandlot football, it was Cincinnati 6, Raiders, 6, in the fourth quarter, a sort of thinly disguised scoreless tie, when they began to get Marcus Allen the football.

With about three minutes to play, Allen’s firm had fourth-and-two on the rivals’ 31-yard-line. A flat pass to Allen over the middle and it was first-and-10 on the 13. Two plays later, he scored the game’s only touchdown for the victory and a season-saving sales move.

In the locker room later, someone wanted to know whether Allen’s outburst earlier in the year had resulted in his role change and his getting the ball more. “Oh, no,” he said. “It had to do more with the inexperience of the quarterbacks. We had to change the philosophy.”

As you can see, a good company man to the last. No 9-to-5 guy Marcus. If he ran a restaurant, he’d want to wash the dishes, too.