New Boss Ward Wants USOC to Serve Athletes

Last week, Lloyd Ward was selected chief executive of the U.S. Olympic Committee. This weekend, he got a taste of what the USOC traditionally has too often been all about.

Petty, personality-driven politics.

At Ward’s first meeting of the USOC’s policy-making Executive Committee, the arguing literally went on for hours over how to assign weighted percentages to an internal voting system. “Silly,” one insider said after emerging. “A travesty,” another said.

Taking it all in, Ward recounted Saturday in an exclusive interview with The Times, his first interview since becoming CEO, he said to himself: “Here are passionate, committed people who believe in what they believe. They not only have tremendous passion but a tremendous capacity to stand up and be counted on those things that matter. It really was quite remarkable.”

The USOC’s remarkable capacity for devouring its own has done in prior CEOs--most prominently, Norm Blake, a corporate turnaround artist who lasted only nine months before resigning last October. Scott Blackmun, his replacement, lost the job to Ward after a lengthy and divisive search process.

The challenge, the 52-year-old Ward said Saturday, is to stay focused on what truly matters. A former Maytag CEO widely acknowledged as a marketing expert, Ward was brought into the USOC to shape it into a service organization--in his words, a “servant-leader organization”--that ministers to athletes while also cultivating relationships with key corporate sponsors as well as individual donors.

Ward said his vision for the USOC encompasses two “overarching objectives”: to win Olympic medals and “to win the hearts and minds of Americans every day.”

Implementing that vision means a mind-set change, he said. Traditionally, a business pyramid, if applied to the USOC, might show athletes and the likes of small-town American donors to the Olympics at the bottom; at the top would be the CEO. Ward said the pyramid must be turned upside down--so that “the broad base of athletes and society at large” are on the top.

“When you look up [the pyramid], who are you serving? They’re not serving me,” Ward said. “I’m serving them.”

If such business jargon seems jarring when applied to the Olympics, the reality is that the USOC’s budget exceeds $100 million annually. For 20 years, from Los Angeles in 1984 through Atlanta in 1996 to Salt Lake City in 2002, the USOC has been able to leverage its growth by marketing domestic Games.

No more. The next Olympics in the United States won’t be until 2012, if then.

Ward, who played basketball in college at Michigan State, said he told staff at USOC headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colo., at a get-acquainted session a few days ago, “Do not think of me so much as the CEO. Think of me as the head coach.”

He said Sandy Baldwin, the USOC’s president, who heads the Executive Committee as well as the much-larger, all-volunteer board of directors, ought to be seen as “the athletic director.”

Here in Salt Lake, the “coach” helped broker a compromise that finally ended the Executive Committee’s wrangling. The lengthy tiff even ended with various factions pledging mutual support.

“I think Lloyd provided some terrific leadership,” Herb Perez, a member of the Executive Committee, said afterward.

Enjoying the moment, a small victory and a first step in securing his vision for the USOC, Ward nonetheless said, “They did all the hard work. Sometimes you just have to be a catalyst for progress.”