Kwesi Adofo-Mensah: Taking Calculated Risks, Building Relationships, and Wall Street Background
K. Joudry
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It looks like the Vikings will hire Kwesi Adofo-Mensah for their GM opening. For this reason, we’re offering up this piece to help give readers a little bit of a sense of who he is.
Luke Braun offers some interesting thoughts on Adofo-Mensah by connecting his approach to football decisions with his background studying economics:
What makes Adofo-Mensah an exciting candidate is this pragmatic, quantifiable approach to the game. Gone would be the days of gut feelings and old-school character judgments. Adofo-Mensah would not live in fear of possibly getting punished for taking a risk. Instead, he’d evaluate that risk and the costs and benefits of taking it. Much like placing some capital into a volatile stock, there’s a way to harness that volatility and turn a profit.
Browns GM Andrew Berry has some high praise for him:
You could see how he had been able to build relationships across a number of different groups during his time at San Francisco in a role that can be very challenging, because you have to be able to not only develop (analytic) insights, but communicate them and get people to buy in. And then the other thing was just his breadth of understanding of the sport and football operations. So even though he had formally just led the 49ers’ research group, you could tell that he understood team building, people, relationships and managerial skills at a much higher level.”
Star Tribune draws attention to his background in athletics, university, and on Wall Street:
Before spending seven years with the 49ers, Adofo-Mensah, 40, played basketball at Princeton, graduating from there with a degree in economics and working on Wall Street trading energy derivatives. He worked in a football research and development job for San Francisco, before the Browns hired him to join General Manager Andrew Berry’s front office in 2020.
There is a really interesting interview over on Browns.com with Kwesi Adofo-Mensah that Vikings fans may enjoy. Here is his response to going from a “commodities trader” to the NFL:
I get asked that question a lot. I would say that my whole life, and not just my professional life, I have been really passionate about decision making under uncertainty. I think Wall Street and my commodity trading background is a reflection of that. I think my graduate school in economics is a reflection that. I think playing basketball is a reflection of that. What draws people to sports from an academic environment is that you get a chance to apply some of these academic principles and the things that happen kind of subconsciously on the court or on the field. In a sense, some people see that as very different, but I do not see it as very different in my ability to kind of pool information to make a bet on the direction of the market versus pooling information to making a bet on the direction of an NFL player. I think those are similar processes. Obviously, they are different skillsets and different information sources. I came into San Francisco kind of as a tabula rasa, a clean slate and just learned from those guys and learned the methodology that they use. Ultimately, you are just making decisions under uncertainty, and there are certain things that carry over across those fields.
The Vikings have plenty of uncertainty in their immediate future, so Kwesi Adofo-Mensah may end up being a great hire. The salary cap needs a fair bit of work to get it back in working order. Someone who can be really wise with the purple finances would go a long way in getting this team back to relevance soon.
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