Mike Tannenbaum chased his dream to top of Dolphins By Dave Hyde South Florida-Sun Sentinel Family cut him off. School debts piled up. He took an unpaid job with the minor-league baseball team in Pittsfield, Mass., selling outfield billboard ads and pouring cheese over concession-stand nachos, while covering rent by working 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. in the post office. That job earned Mike Tannenbaum the nickname, "Clavin," as in Cliff, as in the postal worker character in the sit-com "Cheers." How hard do you chase your dream? Tannenbaum entered law school in New Orleans and took another unpaid sports job, this one with the New Orleans Saints. His boss, Bill Kuharich, now a Cleveland Browns executive, didn't believe he was serious and assigned him to shred documents. For three months. "I decided I'd be a world-class shredder, the best one there ever was," Tannenbaum said. He eventually was promoted. He then drove people to and from the airport. How hard do you chase your dream? Tannenbaum sits behind his desk as the Dolphins' executive vice president of football operations, and you can sense the unconventional path of this unconventional executive by the two stories an
assistant must put on this desk each day. They can any be two stories. There's just one catch: They can't be about sports. On Friday, between football meetings, phone calls and a Dolphins scrimmage at night, Tannenbaum read an analysis of the Republican Presidential debate and the heat-dome effect in the Middle East where temperatures hit 165 degrees. "Mike got me doing that, too," said Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who Tannenbaum represented in his work between NFL jobs as an agent. "You might have to be immersed in these jobs to know just how much something like that can help, just to refresh the mind, maybe to help see something clearer." "Get out of your comfort zone," Tannenbaum says, a line which might best explain Tannenbaum's unusual rise in sports. He wasn't a star athlete like many sports leaders. Tannenbaum's athletic apex was twice winning the one-on-one campus basketball tournament at the University of Massachusetts. ("Played hard defense, forcing them to their off-hand," he says of the winning strategy.) Nor was he from an athletically-charged family. His father was a hard-working electrical engineer. His parents, upon hearing their son turned down an insurance job after college, drove two hours to meet him and told him to, go ahead, chase the sports dream, but they wouldn't help him financially.
"They wanted to know when I was going to get a real job," Tannenbaum said. Tannenbaum came by his love of sports growing up in Needham, Mass., with the 1980s Boston teams. The Celtics were at a dynastic peak, and he snuck into Boston Garden to watch the 1984 NBA Finals. His yellow Labrador is named, "Larry," as in Larry Bird, the Celtics' Hall of Famer. But it was to team architect Red Auerbach that Tannenbaum assigned high sports priestdom. That drafting of Bird a year before he could play ("Great foresight," he said). That trade with Golden State for Kevin McHale and Robert Parish ("Amazing"). Out of law school in 1994, Tannenbaum compiled a comprehensive study of that year's NFL free-agent signings dozens of pages of spreadsheets, financials, data analysis and sent them to every team in search of a job. Cleveland Browns coach Bill Belichick hired him. Two years later, Bill Parcells called to offer him a job with the New York Jets (where Belichick and Eric Mangini went). Tannenbaum turned down the job and hung up. Parcells called again. Tannenbaum declined again. "I was scared of him," he says. Tannenbaum eventually moved on to the Jets. He was in charge of player contracts and, over time, his football acumen and management style developed. He drew up a contract for running back Curtis Martin that handcuffed New England and landed the Jets a
top player. He became insider with Parcells. When named Jets' general manager, he thought outside the football box in a ways that still define him. He began an annual program where each front-office employee had to interview someone successful. They'd all then meet for a barbecue to exchange notes. "It was a belief that professional development is for all of us," Tannenbaum. "I did it, too. I wouldn't ask someone to do something I wouldn't do." Among the people he interviewed: Under Armour founder Kevin Plank, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Connecticut men's basketball coach Jim Calhoun and investment banker Jimmy Lee, who imparted a gem toward building a successful organization. "He prepared hours and hours for a dinner every year with his top executives and their (spouses)," Tannenbaum said. "Then, at the dinner, he went around the table and thanked the (spouse) for the sacrifices they made. 'I know so-and-so missed a birthday party.' " That was a psychological lesson in getting more from employees. But it's a four-square chart from an interview with former General Electric CEO Jack Welch that Tannenbaum flips to a page in the Dolphins corporate notebook to show. Welch talks of four types of managers: Those that share the company's values and deliver results; those that share the values and don't deliver results; those that don't share values but deliver results; those that
don't share values and don't share results. "We put every player on our roster in one of these boxes," he said. The ones in the fourth quadrant are easy. "Those are the ones you get rid of." Developing others to move up to the next box, or maintain their standing at the top, is his job, as he sees it. But he's not a force-of-personality czar like Parcells or a dictatorial character like Nick Saban. "He's someone who brings people together, gets them to work together," Kerr said. "You sit down and talk to Mike, you feel like you're talking to your buddy," said Cleveland Cavaliers coach David Blatt, who also was represented by Tannenbaum during his time as an agent. "At the same time, you know there's some serious intelligence over there." Here's a story: Tannenbaum and Mangini were named general manager and coach of the Jets in 2006. They were friends. Their wives were friends. But after the 2008 season Tannenbaum fired Mangini. Two weeks later, when Mangini was named Cleveland coach, Tannenbaum knocked on his door with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne to celebrate. Four seasons and two AFC titles later, Tannenbaum was fired by the Jets. Ask him what he learned, he talks of locker-room leadership and on-field playmakers, of finances and risk-based management "a million things," he says. But here's what he learned out of football for a couple of years. "I missed being with a team, everyone
working each day toward a common goal." And there's only one goal. "You want a ring," he said. The world's best shredder and kid named Clavin is still chasing that dream.