The Vikings might or might not have a winning season in a given year, but by all accounts, the organization is run professionally. The players wear snazzy uniforms, show up for games on time and most weeks, victorious or not, entertain millions of fans while playing in a state-of-the-art stadium.
Such operational successes are no accident. Vikings owners organize their football enterprise according to a proven management model, hiring capable people who share their vision while arranging employees in a hierarchy of responsibility and holding them accountable.
Now compare that model to one with far greater responsibility: ensuring that Minnesota lakes and rivers are clean; its wild lands and the critters they support are conserved; its state parks and similar areas are established and maintained, and its forests are sustained in ways that support loggers, loggerhead shrikes and everything in between.
Here's that model:
A couple hundred people — 201 to be exact — show up in St. Paul, as they will Monday when the Legislature convenes, to begin elbowing and jostling their way to what they consider victory.
For some, "victory'' is defined as ensuring that many of the state's lakes and rivers are not managed as pristine natural resources, but as wastewater and farm-runoff ditches.
Other legislators consider the further weakening of wetland- protection laws as wins, while still others reign triumphant when they convert public resources to private use for financial gain.
Amid such horse trading, a few legislators — too few — consider the continued welfare of the state's natural resources foremost among their sworn duties and push back against the clamoring hordes who seek their conversion to subdivisions, shopping centers or endless fields of corn and soybeans.