Business Insight Zone

Please bear with a slightly self-indulgent post as I gaze longingly at the Labor Day weekend. Good?

It may have become clear to you that I’m a big baseball fan. For my money, Joe Posnanski is the best baseball writer working, so I’m an avid reader of his blog. He had a great post this week in which he contrasted the stunning — indeed, previously unimaginable — breakthroughs of Einstein to the often hidebound approach of the management of Major League Baseball franchises.

The crux of his argument: perennially bad teams like the Pirates or the Reds or Posnanski’s own hometown Royals would be better off taking radically different approaches to the way baseball is played. We’re not talking about letting a player swing the bat on a 3-0 count — we’re talking about using four outfielders at a time, or having only 10 pitchers (instead of 12 or 13) on a roster.

The example he develops, borrowed from his friend, the great baseball thinker Bill James, is that a team like the Pirates might cease scouting or drafting any pitchers who throw harder than, say, 90 miles per hour. If you’re a baseball nut, by all means give the extended discussion a read. If you’re not, just understand that following this approach would potentially make the Pirates a laughingstock in the Major Leagues, since it goes against the fundamental principle of finding young pitchers who can throw hard — or even better, who can throw HARD.

But it might just work. Here’s Posnanski:

But my feeling is that if you have decided to just stop looking at the 95 mph guys and focused ALL YOUR ENERGIES on these slow-throwing guys, well, I think the chances are pretty good that you would get some, most or even all of those [pitchers you want]. Why? Because, generally speaking, other teams are not investing much effort in scouting people who top out at 83. They are not scouting those players, they are not making much effort sign those players, they’re not spending draft picks on those players. They simply do not VALUE those players. if you focus all of your effort on it — and you believe in what you’re doing — you will probably figure out which of those slow-throwers has the command, quirkiness, control or movement necessary to get big leaguers out. And if you choose to value command and quirkiness and control and utterly devalue the radar gun, you should be able to corner that market.

That’s business differentiation in a nutshell. Southwest Airlines did it many years ago when it decided, once and for all, that it would not:

• Serve meals.
• Run ANY unprofitable routes.

It’s served them well because they’ve had the discipline to stick with it, and we could think of other examples (please lob them into the comments) of companies that have taken stands on similarly counterintuitive / risky / non-conventional-wisdom / “crazy” approaches.

Maybe you could use an hour or two of this long weekend to think about what YOUR business could do radically differently to corner a market of its own. Figuratively, somewhere the next Hall of Fame-caliber 83-m.p.h. pitcher is waiting for you to discover him.

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Photo by Chris Acuna.

This summer I’ve been on a fitness kick — walking, jogging, weightlifting, pushups, et cetera. As with past exercise binges, I’ve found myself getting more and more meticulous about my regime, not just going to the gym when the mood strikes me, but planning my schedule around it, and not just jotting down what sets and reps I do, but planning out each workout in advance. It reminds me of the father of a childhood friend, who could consult his handwritten logs to tell you how far and how fast he ran on any day of the previous 20 years.

And then there’s work.

I take my work seriously, and I’m trying hard to get better at is as I tackle new, bigger, and unfamiliar projects. I keep spreadsheets and meeting notes and topical files, and simple force of habit has made me more systematic about this than I used to be. But step-by-step planning and recording of work progressions? Meticulous after-action notes? Uh, no.

So, two things:

1. I take it for granted that my work will keep improving as I make it more methodical. (Writing this post is one way for me to stick a flag in the ground about being more methodical.) But what do you think — is that a safe assumption?
2. Why do so many people not approach their work as an area that’s ripe for systematic improvement? Laziness? Boredom? Fatigue? Fear? Institutional inertia? What?

Oh, and if you detect a connection to my many discussions of deliberate practice . . . you’re right.

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Photo by Richard Giles, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

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. . . and bunkers and anywhere else that will give him a bad lie. Then he sees if he can save par from those lies. This is part of why — even in a “disappointing” year — he’s the best in the world. Some vignettes of Tiger from 60 Minutes:

Watch CBS Videos Online

Thanks to Dave Livingston — who shares my interest in “deliberate practice” – for the tip on this.

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Related links:

• Are you willing to re-tool your swing?
• Deliberate practice in the working world.

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