Hinkie and His Manifesto
Sam Hinkie resigned as GM of the 76ers yesterday with a bizarre 13 page manifesto. A 13 page manifesto! Who the hell does that? Hinkie does, that’s who. The full manifesto is available here, thanks to ESPN.
I supported Hinkie’s plan to have the Sixers suck terribly in order to get a couple of top lottery picks, clear out a ton of salary cap, and rebuild. Unfortunately, he’s had a run of bad luck with the lottery—never having gotten the top pick while being the worse team—and the Joel Embiid injury.
The manifesto shows a guy obsessed with successful business people and studying their investment or entrepreneurial methods. Some of the names he drops are: billionaires Warren Buffett, Seth Klarman, Elon Musk, Charlie Munger, Jeff Bezos, Howard Marks. He quotes Abraham Lincoln, mathematicians, physicists. All brilliant people.
He also mentions 76ers Executive Assistant Marlene Barnes, who has been with the Sixers since 1977. She has worked with 11 GMs. About her work with Hinkie, he says:
She adapted wonderfully, and now is a regular Slack wizard along with much of our staff, has seamlessly plugged into one productivity hack after another, and has ordered more books from Amazon than she ever thought possible.
ORDERED MORE BOOKS FROM AMAZON THAN SHE EVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE. After reading the thirteen pages of the manifesto, this is obviously an issue. Perhaps, just perhaps, the dude should’ve spent a little less time secluded and reading and slightly more time interacting with people.
Hinkie’s value was in his vision to see that a tank season or two is necessary in the NBA. That was his Paypal (Elon Musk) or Amazon (Jeff Bezos) moment. He didn’t need to study their business methods beyond that. That was the genius of Hinkie and that should be appreciated and applauded.
The investors he seems to admire and quotes often in his manifesto consistently do one thing again and again. They invest in undervalued equities with large growth potential while minimizing risks. That’s the application that can be made to being a GM in professional sports. That’s Joel Embiid. That’s Dario Saric. That’s stockpiling picks, assets. There’s no need to read volumes on their lives. Hinkie had that covered. If one thing is obvious, he needed to get his head out the books and stop worrying about quotes of successful people.
The guy hated talking to the public. Reports are rampant that agents hated dealing with him. If Hinkie was going to obsess on reading, maybe he should’ve read books such as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People or John Maxwell’s Winning the People. That seems to be a glowing issue that he doesn’t address in his manifesto, as far as I can remember. I read it at 7a.m. with crusty eyes and could’ve missed it.
Of all the theories he mentioned in the manifesto, I don’t think he mentions one about finding one’s own weaknesses and strengthening them or building relationships with people. Hinkie seemed to disregard the importance of that side of business. Not one quote from anyone on networking or relationships.
A GM has to be able to do the numbers AND sit at a restaurant with players and agents and socialize. Name-dropping successful business people and their theories at the dinner table or bar isn’t gonna cut it in a world where relationships matter if your team’s dollars are equal to those of another team’s.
That was Hinkie’s blindspot and probably led to his resignation.
Oh, by the way, Hinkie has an Abraham Lincoln quote in his manifesto:
Abraham Lincoln said “give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
That’s troublesome. Two minutes of research proves that this is not a real Lincoln quote, according to the University of Michigan’s Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln and multiple other sources.
I hope Hinkie did better research into his players than he did his quotes.
Finally, while the Sixers were the worst team in the league they never got the top draft pick. Perhaps he’s just a dude with bad luck. If that’s the case, good riddance.
HOWEVER, one cannot be happy with Jerry Colangelo bringing his son in as General Manager. Nepotism sucks. A father supervising his own son is not the most ideal quality-control. I’m not saying that Bryan Colangelo isn’t qualified. He’s had success. I just wish it wasn’t a father-son front office relationship.
God help our 10-9-8-76ers!