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Warning: The episode does contain a brief mention of a death by suicide. If you are struggling, help is available — In the United States, you can speak with someone today by calling the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or dialing 988.
My guest for Episode #72 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Scott O'Neil. He's the CEO of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, a global sports and entertainment company that includes some of the most iconic and innovative teams and brands in the world, including the Philadelphia 76ers (NBA) and the New Jersey Devils (NHL).
UPDATE: Scott is now the CEO of LIV Golf, as of January 2025.
With more than 20 years of experience in the NBA, NHL and NFL, Scott has worked in the NBA league office, was formerly the President of Madison Square Garden Sports, and he's now the author of Be Where Your Feet Are: Seven Principles to Keep You Present, Grounded and Thriving – which is available TODAY!
Scott was also featured recently in this fantastic Wall St. Journal article: “For Sports Executive Scott O’Neil, Failure Is the Best Teacher.”
Questions and topics include:
- Scott's “favorite mistake” when working for the NBA league office
- Why trying to reach teenage girls through NSYNC, as an attempt to grow the WBNA audience, was a mistake, and why it “failed miserably”
- The mistake of not being more hands-on
- Why relationships matter and how Scott came to appreciate this
- Have to be able to fail… the Sixers were in first place when we recorded this, and they lose one third of the time
- The Sixers are famous for “the process” — were there ever times when you thought the process was a mistake?
- “Trust the process” — no shortcutss to the top, short-term pain for long-term gain
- How do you know when to stick with “the process” vs. adjusting to a new plan or approach?
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- Full transcript
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Automated Transcript (May Contain Mistakes):
Mark Graban:
Our guest today is Scott O’Neil. He’s the CEO of Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment, a global sports and entertainment company. If you don’t recognize the company name, you probably know some of their iconic and innovative teams and brands, including the Philadelphia 76ers (NBA) and the New Jersey Devils (NHL).
Scott has more than 20 years of experience in professional sports — NBA, NHL, and NFL. He’s worked in the NBA league office and was formerly President of Madison Square Garden Sports.
Scott is the author of a book coming out in June: Be Where Your Feet Are: Seven Principles to Keep You Present, Grounded, and Thriving. Scott, thanks for joining us — how are you?
Scott O’Neil:
Mark, thank you. First off, I want to thank you for your podcast — it’s fantastic, and I think it’s making a difference. For those of us who have made millions upon millions of mistakes, it’s kind of heartwarming to see other people have gone through the fire as well.
Mark Graban:
Well, thank you for that, Scott, and thank you for sharing a story today. For those who aren’t watching on YouTube — if you’re just listening — you won’t see the New Jersey Devils jerseys… sweaters, I think we’d call them.
Scott O’Neil:
In hockey, yes, we call them sweaters. These are all our retired jerseys: Scott Stevens, Scott Niedermayer, Ken Daneyko, Marty Brodeur, and Patrik Elias — five of the all-time greats in the game of hockey for the Devils.
Mark Graban:
They certainly are. And they had some good matchups with my Detroit Red Wings back in the ’90s.
Scott O’Neil:
Yeah, I heard you mention the Stars before too. Have you adopted the Stars a little bit?
Mark Graban:
A little bit — Dallas has been home for a while — but I’m one of the many people who goes to the games wearing a Red Wings sweater in Dallas. There are so many of us.
Scott O’Neil:
Yeah, that’s a unique challenge for that market. Dallas is a transient city — definitely hard. Here in the Northeast, it’s hardcore sports fans. We get it.
We’ve got a game tonight, and after going through COVID, it’s been a blessing just to be in front of fans and get back to whatever the “new normal” will be. I’m excited, happy, positive… life is good.
Mark Graban:
Good. It’s been a year of so many changes in the sports world and adaptation, so thank you for taking some time to do the episode today.
As we normally do, we like to jump right in. Scott, looking back at all the things you’ve done, what would you consider to be your favorite mistake?
Scott O’Neil:
It’s a wonderful question — something I’ve been thinking a lot about since we agreed to do this podcast. Unfortunately, I had countless things to draw from.
When I was 22, I remember listening to a speaker tell a big audience — which I was part of — “Every great leader fails. Every great leader gets fired. Every great leader drags a company into the ground.” And I kept thinking, “Yeah, not me. I’m going to do it right. I’m going to climb the ladder, and things are going to go smoothly.”
Well, I did take a company into the ground. I have been fired. And I’ve made so many mistakes along the way.
That has become a core principle in how we run our business: it has to be okay to fail. You have to fail forward and fail up. Rough seas make the best sailors. You have incredible opportunities to learn from mistakes.
My favorite mistake goes back to my days at the NBA league office. I was a young — and not-so-up-and-coming — executive at the time, fighting my way through a big company. I’d never worked at a company that size before — over 1,000 employees.
I’d just come from HoopsTV, which I’d run into the ground — 50 employees. I loved the small-company vibe, where you could make any decision in the world in a room with four people.
At the NBA, I found myself running into wall after wall. My onboarding experience was really difficult — I went three months without a computer, phone, business cards, or any expense checks being cut. And as a young guy traveling five days a week, that was not ideal.
I was getting increasingly frustrated, even though I was working harder than ever, thinking I was doing everything right. I raised my hand to help out with the WNBA — and in a big company, people said, “Why are you jumping on a sinking ship?” But I have three daughters, I love basketball, I love women’s basketball, and I coach girls’ basketball.
In my first meeting with the WNBA, they had this big plan. Val Ackerman, the president at the time — still a dear friend — said, “We need to reach teenage girls.”
I raised my hand — still wet behind the ears — and said, “I have a friend who manages *NSYNC, the biggest boy band in the world right now, and he owes me a favor. Let’s reach out to him.”
There was muted enthusiasm, but *NSYNC’s manager gave us videos, autographs, and dropped their new album at our games in 15 cities. We set up co-promotions with iHeart radio stations in every WNBA market. It was incredible — the kind of program you’d design from scratch if you had no restrictions.
And it failed miserably.
Being young and “knowing everything,” I started to point fingers: “These guys don’t get it. No wonder this league is struggling.”
Two days later, I got a call from Jeff Robinson, head of HR at the NBA, for a six-month check-in. He asked how it was going. I said, “Honestly? It sucks.” I told him about my onboarding issues and how we’d teed up the best promotion possible — and it failed.
He asked, “What role did you play in its demise?”
“Me? Are you kidding? I brought in the biggest boy band in the world.”
But he pressed: “What role do you think you played?”
He asked how often I was on the road. Proudly, I said, “Every day. Usually five or six days a week.”
“This is a matrix organization,” he said. “You have to know someone in each box to move things forward. Do you know the folks in marketing? Digital media? Broadcast? Operations? The WNBA staff?”
My answer was “No” every time.
His lesson was clear: you need relationships. People need to know you and like you, and they’ll help.
I started coming off the road two days a week — one day in the Secaucus, NJ, office with the entertainment folks (I didn’t even know we had a Secaucus office at the time), and one day in our Manhattan office. I’d walk around, grab a Coke, have lunch, and just say hello.
Those relationships — and that conversation with Jeff — transformed my NBA experience. I wouldn’t have stayed otherwise, and they probably wouldn’t have wanted me to. I ended up staying almost eight years.
When my boss left, Commissioner David Stern said, “There’s only one person who can run this group” — and it was me. Not because I was the most ready, but because everyone he asked said, “You’ve got to talk to Scott.”
That one small mistake — being myopic, thinking I could work my way through any situation without seeing the big picture — taught me that the world works through people and relationships.
Mark Graban:
So it sounds like, to use a sports analogy, there was a teamwork lesson in there. Scott, maybe you were playing — to use a basketball analogy — iso ball or hero ball. Your usage rate was high, but the team didn’t win. Is that a fair analogy?
Scott O’Neil:
Truly — and the irony is, as a recovering rec-league point guard, that’s not me. That’s the irony of it. Every time I dig a hole for myself, every time I make my biggest mistakes — aside from ones that are environmentally driven — it’s because I’m not out of the box, I’m not palms up, I’m not focusing on others and the world around me.
I once had a good friend, Ryan G., who’s now at Under Armour, say to me — we were playing in a basketball league, and in a huddle I said, “Okay, what do you want to do?” And he said, “Oh, I’m going to score.” He wasn’t the captain, but I thought, that’s an interesting insight in a basketball context.
So to come in and try to be the quote-unquote leading scorer… that’s not who I am, it’s not in my DNA. That hero-ball analogy is a wonderful one — and a stinging one. So thanks for that.
Mark Graban:
Sorry! But I thought there was an analogy there. I appreciate you sharing the reflection.
Going back to it, why do you think that promotion failed? You described it in a way where teenage girls, *NSYNC, radio — it all made sense. When you say it failed, what was the measure? And what were the causes?
Scott O’Neil:
The measure was ticket sales — ticket buyers — and it had a de minimis impact.
Why did it fail? In four markets, the promo items never even got out of the distribution center, which is crazy. And that’s operations, relationships — all that stuff.
If I had to do it again, I’d be more hands-on: engaging one-on-one with the head of marketing, the head of broadcasting, operations, distribution. I think it would have been more successful.
But again — you trip, you fall, you fail, you learn. That has to be the formula for life. Intellectual curiosity is something I’ve learned from every great leader I’ve been around — they’re all learning all the time.
Mark Graban:
You talked earlier about the idea that you have to be able to fail. That’s discussed a lot in innovation and startups.
I think about the Sixers — they’re in first place right now, number one in the East as we record this. Even they lose about one-third of the time. No team — not even the legendary Bulls with Michael Jordan, or the Warriors in their prime — wins every game.
How do you reconcile the hyper-competitive nature of sports with the recognition that sometimes you’re going to lose? You have an MBA from Harvard Business School — I’m sure people coming out of Harvard don’t think their projects will fail a third of the time. How have you come to grips with that?
Scott O’Neil:
I’ve never thought of it exactly in those terms, but it’s an interesting perspective.
First off, I’m a terrible loser. I still don’t get comfortable with it. Years ago, when I was with the Knicks, Rangers, and Liberty, my wife said to me one night, “Look, your teams are all rebuilding. How many nights are you going to be miserable? One out of every three nights? This doesn’t work — you need a new system.” That was a really insightful lesson from her.
In business, we can’t innovate if we’re not moving forward — and if you’re pushing hard enough, you will fail sometimes. If you’re not failing enough, you’re not pushing the envelope.
If you do the same thing over and over again, you get the same results — and we don’t want the same results. As I tell my kids, “If you do what everybody else does, you get what everybody else gets.”
In this day and age, you make a mistake — and I’ve made many — and you can be slaughtered in the media and on social media. I’ve been slaughtered there, and it has to be okay if you want to do something great.
Mark Graban:
Your mistakes are public ones — you’re the CEO of an organization, leading franchises people care deeply about. That’s a whole different level of emotion and potential dissatisfaction. It’s one thing for someone to have a bad meal at a restaurant and tweet about it, but with sports, it’s different.
Scott O’Neil:
Sports holds a special place in the world. I believe it’s more noble than “just a game.”
The pandemic really underscored that for me. I had the opportunity to be down in the bubble in Orlando, which was remarkable. One thing I noticed was that I was mentally healthier there.
Even without fans, walking into an arena and seeing security guards, ushers, ticket takers, and colleagues — and then watching the best athletes in the world — it felt like everything was okay with the world.
We need that escapism, the rooting, the fanaticism, the screaming and dancing — just like we need concerts back. We need that sense of community. Sports and entertainment bring us together. This past year, so much has divided us — politically, racially, geographically — and sports is about unity, love, coming together, and rooting for something.
Mark Graban:
When I think of passion — especially with the Devils — I think of the Seinfeld episode where David Puddy paints his face.
Scott O’Neil:
Yes! We had him do a couple of promos. He’s quite a character.
Mark Graban:
I think in the show, his friends thought painting his face was a mistake. They were appalled.
Scott O’Neil:
Yeah — Puddy was a face painter and lived in New York City, rooting for the New Jersey Devils. So, good on him.
Mark Graban:
One more sports question before asking about the book. The Philadelphia 76ers are famous for “The Process.”
With my work in other industries, there’s process in healthcare, process for vaccines — so my ears perked up the first time I heard about “The Process” in sports. Can you explain, in a nutshell, what it was? And were there times you thought it was a mistake?
Scott O’Neil:
“The Process” was coined by Tony Wroten, one of our journeyman guards. He said the coaches told them to “trust the process,” and it stuck.
It meant we weren’t going to take shortcuts to the top. We were willing to take short-term pain for long-term gain.
When I started in 2012, we had no cap space, just two first-round picks over five years, and our business was bottom-five in every metric. We’d also just made a trade widely considered one of the worst in NBA history for Andrew Bynum.
Our GM, Sam Hinkie, used to say, “If you want to go to the moon, you don’t grab a ladder.” So we made long-term moves: trading aging veterans for draft picks and young prospects, building through the draft.
Now we have Joel Embiid — this year’s MVP — and Ben Simmons, a monster defensive player and three-time All-Star. These two will guide the franchise for the next decade.
Were there times we questioned ourselves? Every day. The scrutiny was intense, and it felt like the world was against us. But Philly’s an underdog city — “Philly vs. everybody” — and that helped build the base we have now.
Today, the value of our organization is up five times in seven years. We have the largest season ticket base in the league.
Through it all, we stayed “50-win ready.” That meant building the whole organization — operations, marketing, branding, ticket sales, sponsorships, communications — so that when the team was ready, we’d be ready to pop.
It was fun, with incredible people doing world-beating work in the face of incredible headwinds. But I’m glad we’re on the other side now — and I wouldn’t want to do it again.
Mark Graban:
And I appreciate you reminding me it wasn’t just “the process” but “trusting the process.” There must have been temptation to find a shortcut.
Scott O’Neil:
Sam used to say, “There are only shortcuts to the middle.” That applies to life, relationships, parenting, business — everything.
Mark Graban:
Toyota’s first management principle is to make decisions based on the long term, even at the expense of the short term. Sounds like a parallel.
Scott O’Neil:
For sure. It’s hard to do. And in sports, we’re in a fishbowl. We’ve got media, families, neighbors, corporate partners, season ticket holders — all around us, squeezing and leaning in. Keeping that long-term focus under pressure is the key.
Mark Graban:
Let’s talk about your book, Be Where Your Feet Are. What led you to write it? Who’s the audience?
Scott O’Neil:
Sadly, my best friend, Wil Cardon, took his own life about a year and a half ago. Five kids, amazing family, wonderful friends, very successful in business — and he was suffering from depression.
After his funeral, I spiraled a bit. The book became my purpose for healing.
It’s a mind-body-soul meets purposeful-living book for anyone who wants to be great and lead others. It’s not a victory lap — there are stories from friends, colleagues, people I admire: M. Night Shyamalan, Paul Rabil, Marion Bartoli, David Stern.
You’ll read about their failures and struggles. Paul Rabil losing confidence on the field, for example — the best lacrosse player ever. How is that possible?
The book shares those stories, my insights from what I’ve seen and learned, and a practical journey to grow — to learn, lead, and love. I think it’s a valuable book right now, because we all need to heal and reconnect.
Mark Graban:
Thank you for writing it. I’m sorry for your loss. I hope everyone checks out Be Where Your Feet Are. Scott, thank you for sharing your stories and reflections.
Scott O’Neil:
Mark, thank you — and thanks for your continued work in educating and inspiring. We need more of you out there.
Mark Graban:
I’m going to root for the Sixers the rest of the year. I became a Spurs fan when I lived in San Antonio, but I’ll pull for Philly now.
Scott O’Neil:
Let’s go! Love to have you at a game if you’re up east.
Mark Graban:
I’d love that. I’m not painting my face, though.
Scott O’Neil:
Thank you.