As a father of 3 boys, I really appreciate moderation especially when it has to do with sporting events and restricting alcohol sales. Other than our team losing, nothing can ruin a baseball or football game more than an obnoxious or belligerent drunk (or two) in close proximity to my family.
Elliot, Samuel, & Aaron
And it is not just me who feels this way so do my boys. Several weeks ago at the Packers Bears game, my son Elliot told me he was totally bugged by the slobbering, intoxicated fool in front of us. He said: “Dad, I much prefer the Badger (University of Wisconsin) game. The fans are so much more normal.” Well, actually I’m not sure his assessment is correct, but I do know that they don’t sell alcohol at those games. Coincidence, I think not.
Since this is a topic of interest and top of mind, I decide to pursue reading an article about curbing excessive drinking at Australian sporting events. In fact, the article was about a specific 3 day auto race (the Bathurst 1000) where spectators were limited to a “slab of beer” per day. Good, I thought, keep those fans in line. Make sure people have some semblance of control. And then I saw it; a slab of beer is the equivalent to 24 beers, a full case! They call this moderation! I was dumbfounded.
I needed some sort of intellectual resolution otherwise I would obsess about the ridiculousness of this “slab” thing way too much.
I remembered something from my college philosophy 101 class about Aristotle and moderation. Since it has been way too many years since college, I honestly could not remember the specifics so I went to the Internet to do some research (see what I mean about becoming obessed).
Aristotle believed that every ethical virtue is an intermediate condition between excess and deficiency. Aristotle identifies the virtue as being the ‘mean’ of the situation. Thus, there is no way to form a strict set of rules that would solve every practical problem. “The virtuous person sees the truth in each case, being as it were a standard and measure of them.”
So maybe I could reconcile this quandary by chalking it up to circumstance. The “mean” changes based on the situation. So a slab of beer in Australia is like stopping beer sales in the 7th inning of a professional baseball game. Or maybe I’m just grasping and nobody really needs to drink 24 beers in a single day.
However, I do appreciate moderation beyond sporting events and alcohol consumption. In particular, I appreciate Pinstripe’s approach over the past 12 months to the economy and Recruitment Process Outsourcing. We took a prudent and level approach. We didn’t go over-board in either direction. Instead, Pinstripe wisely and selectively invested in people and innovation across multiple disciplines. When the economic cloud lifts we will be positioned well in the marketplace to both help our existing clients rebound and have capacity for new clients. In our jaragon we say that we have positioned ourselves to be a “breakaway” company when the economy comes back.
I wonder if other RPO suppliers have taken the Pinstripe approach. I know we’ve lost a few competitors during this downturn and we’ve all heard the rumors about layoffs at some RPO firms. And if RPO is like other industries, there must be some RPO firms running operations so austere and under-resourced that gearing up when there’s a rebound will be difficult or nearly impossible.
Yes, moderation is a good thing.
Entries (RSS)
[...] have the promise of a great fan experience. A colleague of mine recently blogged about the topic of sporting event drunkenness at college football games. I totally agree with putting unique measures in place, such as the rules the University of [...]