Frank Deford, a syndicated sports writer, recently wrote a column about Jeremy Lin: Looking For Lin In All The Wrong Places. I know what you’re thinking. What can we in business learn from a sports writer? A lot, it turns out. Deford highlighted an issue that is just a pervasive in sports as it is in business: assets hidden in plain sight. Lin is not just good; he is a phenomenon who had his own Top 10 list on ESPN last night. But for Lin to be discovered “a half-dozen weird happenstances happened to occur — the owners’ lockout, salary-cap manipulations, trades that fell through, injuries and, at last, a coach’s sheer desperation.” Lin’s discovery should never have been the product of weird happenstances.

He led his high school basketball team to a state championship and played on a Division 1 college team for four years.  He was the first player in the history of his conference to record at least 1,450 points, 450 rebounds, 400 assists and 200 steals. In short, he was in plain sight all along. But he was not a product of the conventional channels to the NBA: Lin played at Harvard (who has only had four players ever in the NBA and, before Lin, no one since 1953). Deford laments that “nobody in basketball had the perception or the guts to say: You know, I don’t care what anybody else thinks, this kid Jeremy Lin has it… but none of the geniuses — not one scout, one coach, one general manager — could see what everyone sees now when it’s fashionable. None of the people paid to envision, could envision.”

Hidden assets in businesses require the same two things to be discovered: the imagination to look beyond conventional wisdom and the courage to be an advocate for challenging conventional wisdom in your organization.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/02/15/146856935/looking-for-lin-in-all-the-wrong-places