CANDOR AND THE CUP
By Ray Paulick
I was all set to name Satish Sanan the winner of the first annual John Mayer Foot in Mouth Award for comments he made on Steve Byk’s “At the Races” Sirius/XM satellite radio show last Tuesday from which he was quoted in a Bloodhorse.com article as saying Churchill Downs was the “worst” racing organization and each of the Breeders’ Cups at Lone Star Park and Monmouth Park was a “disaster.”
Then I thought I’d better listen to the show before throwing Sanan under the bus with Mayer, the pop star who made some outrageous remarks in a just-published Playboy magazine interview about former girlfriends Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Aniston, among other subjects. Since the interview was published, Mayer, a profilic Twitterer, said he has “been trying to prove to people I’m not a douche bag.”
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Sanan has to take that drastic of a measure.
FULL COLUMN: http://www.paulickreport.com/blog/candor-and-the-cup/
CONCLUSION: This industry needs people with the candor, the fresh perspective and the creative business acumen that Sanan has brought to Breeders’ Cup and other industry organizations, including the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders’ Cup, where he is member of a committee addressing issues related to structural changes and horse racing’s broken business model.
The candor sometimes gets him in trouble. “There is a group of people particularly pissed off at me,” he said on the radio show, “not as to what I’m trying to achieve or what the group is trying to achieve, (but about) what I had said about the alphabet soup organizations…People are taking it personally, some of the officers of some of these organizations. Candidly, the old saying in business is if you are trying to solve a business problem, generally speaking people who are part of the problem are people who are going to object to it.”
It’s that kind of candor and blunt talk that doesn’t endear Sanan to some people, but I get the feeling he doesn’t really care about that. We haven’t gotten very far in this business by having boards who rubber stamp cautious executive decisions, discourage open dialogue, and keep electing the same people year after year after year.