Zen Jeweler: When Basketball Was Really Played With a Basket

Published

17 years ago

July 2, 2008

INSTORE Staff

Parables by Jeff McCandlessThere’s no basket in basketball … but there once was.

In 1892, when James Naismith nailed a peach basket to the wall of a gym, basketball was born.

It took the game’s first proponents a year however to figure out the game would be a whole lot more fun if they didn’t have to use a ladder to recover the ball every time a basket was made. So they replaced it with one that had a hinged bottom.

But the real story is that it took another 10 years until they realized it would be OK to remove that hinged bottom, so the ball would just go through the basket every time. That was a total of 11 years and two innovations to get to the point where it was easy to retrieve the ball in a basketball game.

More than 100 years later, we can’t imagine having a basketball hoop with a bottom, and we can’t imagine it took 11 years to come up with those two simple changes. Seems like a no-brainer, right?

THE TAKEAWAY: Listen to the innovators on your staff. They are holding a net in their hands right now.

Four Decades of Excellence: How Wilkerson Transformed a Jeweler's Retirement into Celebration

After 45 years serving the Milwaukee community, Treiber & Straub Jewelers owner Michael Straub faced a significant life transition. At 75, the veteran jeweler made a personal decision many business owners understand: "I think it's time. I want to enjoy my wife with my grandchildren for the next 10, 15 years." Wilkerson's expertise transformed this major business transition into an extraordinary success. Their comprehensive approach to managing the going-out-of-business sale created unprecedented customer response—with lines forming outside the store and limits on how many shoppers could enter at once due to fire safety regulations. The results exceeded all expectations. "Wilkerson did a phenomenal job," Straub enthuses. "They were there for you through the whole thing, helped you with promoting it, helping you on day-to-day business. I can't speak enough for how well they did." The partnership didn't just facilitate a business closing; it created a celebratory finale to decades of service while allowing Straub to confidently step into his well-earned retirement.