WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE USTA? By Javier Palenque

The article below is an adaptation to tennis of an HBS Executive education article on Deep Purpose Organizations published the week of October 3, 2022, in HBR- executive insights)

Earlier in the year, I read a book called “Deep Purpose” by Harvard professor Ranjay Gulati. I encourage anyone working in the for-profit business and most certainly the USTA executives to read and study this book. It would do tennis in America much good if they cared to learn some of the key lessons professor Gulati tries to teach and convey.

Nonprofit organizations are driven by their foundational purpose — a core mission to benefit society in some way. That mission inspires every action the organization takes. One would think that this statement should be the driving force behind a not-for-profit and certainly the USTA. Unfortunately, the opposite is true, the USTA states a mission, yet measures everything except the impact of the mission. This fact alone should tell you that there is a major problem at the board level and the executives who are not held accountable for the mission they claim they uphold. It makes no sense to keep track of the profit margins of “Honey Deuces” and not the impact of lack of participation by age, zip code, and race in the 42,000 zip codes the USTA is entrusted with growing. The lack of metrics is by design so there is never bad news to report to the fans. Therefore, the executives with the blessing of the board, conflate participation levels of never-before-heard numbers, from third parties and never from the USTA data itself. This is creating and conveying a false narrative of the state of the sport.

For a long time in America, conventional wisdom held that a company’s purpose was simply to turn a profit and deliver shareholder value and that companies operating in free markets would naturally tend to serve the public interest. In recent decades, however, that perspective began to shift, with executives increasingly becoming skeptical of the capitalist system and traditional business “best” practices. This caught the notice of Ranjay Gulati, Paul, and R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business at Harvard Business School, who found himself in more and more conversations with executives looking for advice on how they might achieve meaningful social impact. Just for…