Business Insight Zone

For all I know, he even thought of it himself, without reading my series of posts on sports metaphors.

(That’s a joke, folks.)

Actually, in his current New York Times column, “The Sporting Mind,” Brooks gives an interesting overview of how some academics view American sports — and especially how the American sporting ethos partakes of older Greek, Roman, and Victorian ideals of athleticism. A tidbit:

[Prof. Michael Allen] Gillespie argues that the American sports ethos is a fusion of these three traditions. American sport teaches that effort leads to victory, a useful lesson in a work-oriented society. Sport also helps Americans navigate the tension between team loyalty and individual glory. We behave like the British [in our emphasis upon team play], but think like the Greeks [in terms of courageous individual effort], A. Bartlett Giamatti, a former baseball commissioner, once observed.

Brooks’s own sociological observation — about the solidarity of Wisconsin fans attending a Badger football game — feels a bit tacked-on, though I think the underlying point is sound: for all of its problematic aspects, American sport still does serve some purpose as a force that brings people together across social divisions of race and class.

The Business Application

It’s worth pondering how each of the three sporting ideals that Brooks discusses play out in American business:

• Greek: Many companies and business thinkers emphasize the importance of personal contributions to business success. The courage and endurance prized by the Greeks are (a) called upon again and again as companies ask employees to give their all, and (b) lauded by successful businesspeople as the bases of their own success. One problem with this ideal is that some individuals place themselves far above the organization, insisting upon disproprotionate rewards for themselves even when group effort was the real source of success.
• Roman: There is a distinct element of spectacle in American business, both in how stories play out in the business press (Lehman crashes! What will the Fed do next?!), and in how some companies actually behave, internally and externally.
• Victorian: Any manager who has ever said, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’ ” was appealing to this tradition. (Anyone who ever muttered “But there is a ‘me’ in there” was exposing the weakness of that old chestnut.) And many business books have been written about what it takes to get an entire work team / department / company pulling in the same direction toward collective goals.

What do you think? Does this three-part sporting model fit with your understanding of American business — and of your own company?

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(Thanks to C. V. Harquail for tipping me off to Brooks’s column.)

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Photo of Camp Randall Stadium at the Univ. of Wisconsin by Royal Broil.

(I’m warming up for my March 16 South by Southwest Interactive session by trying out various metaphors that bridge sports and business — and especially the use of social media in business. Feel free to chime in with your own metaphors in the comments!)

Lou Gehrig, Glenn Hall, Cal Ripken, Brett Favre: all of them gained fame not just for the skill with which they played their sports, but for their durability. Game after game, year after year, they put up with all kinds of punishment, yet still kept coming back for more.

(Since I was reared in Texas and my parents grew up in the South, I didn’t grow up understanding hockey. But a friend of mine who grew up in New England and played every available sport in his youth said that the hardest athletic thing he had ever done, by far, was to tend goal. It’s hard to imagine the toughness of Glenn Hall to play goalie for 502 consecutive NHL games.)

Some people do the same thing at work: show up every day, no matter what, and work hard. But is that enough of an analogy? In social media, the closest thing might be to blog every single day. But the most diligent blogger, like the dedicated sales rep or A/R clerk, doesn’t face onrushing linemen or a puck/baseball traveling faceward at a million miles an hour.

So, you tell me: What’s the business equivalent of Lou Gehrig’s streak?

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See also:

• Sports metaphors: the All-Star lineup.

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Gehrig photo via Wikipedia.

As the date of our SXSW Interactive session on sports metaphors for business approaches, I’ll be posting more here on that topic. I thought it would be useful to have a single omnibus post that collects all the other posts in one place, and that points to sports-metaphor articles from other sources.

Here’s what I’ve written on the topic so far:

• Jan. 7 — Enter the arena . . . of sports metaphors.
• Jan. 12 — Sports metaphor: “a captain’s innings.”
• Jan. 13 — Making lemonade in the bottom of the 9th.
• Jan. 14 — A little sports retrospective.
• Jan. 15 — An intemperate analogy: Wall Street and steroids.
• Jan. 19 — Sports metaphor: “a nose for the basket.”
• Feb. 1 — Sports metaphor: “consecutive games played.”
• Feb. 5 — Sports metaphors: David Brooks gets in on the act.
• . . .

By all means, if you have your own sports metaphors you’d like to share, feel free to enter them in the comments here. And if you know of other posts and articles that could be listed, please leave a comment or drop me a line to let me know.

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Photo by Joel Dinda.

(I’m warming up for my March 16 South by Southwest Interactive session by trying out various metaphors that bridge sports and business — and especially the use of social media in business. Feel free to chime in with your own metaphors in the comments!)

The sports concept: Julius Erving didn’t have the world’s best jump-shot, and he didn’t have great range as a shooter. Yes, he was a dunk artist, but there’s only so many chances to dunk in a game — even for Dr. J — and a lot of dunks aren’t enough to generate 30,026 points in a pro career.

The Doctor had, more than anything, “a nose for the basket.” He would take a jump shot, drive for a dunk, or do any of a thousand things in-between . . . but somehow the ball found the net more for him than it did for almost everybody else.

The business analogy: Surely you’ve known someone like this — call her Linda — in your career? Linda got a solid education, but not from the fanciest schools. Maybe she doesn’t have an MBA. Linda would never claim to be the smartest person on the team, much less in the company. She’s not necessarily the first to arrive in the morning or the last to leave at night. She’s not the fastest at completing individual tasks.

And yet Linda gets the most done. She has that sense (is it innate? learned? honed from years of practice?) for getting things DONE. You put the ball in her hands, she puts the ball in the basket. Period.

What separates Linda from the rest of us? What makes her a Dr. J. of business? Or, to put it another way, . . .

What attributes do you think give some people
“a nose for the basket” in business?

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Related posts:

• A little sports retrospective.
• Sports metaphor: “a captain’s innings.”
• Enter the arena . . . of sports metaphors.

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Image source.

If you’re a baseball fan, you’ll know that retired slugger Mark McGwire admitted this week that he used steroids through much of his epic big-league career. Sports columnists and the blogosphere have been awash with analyses and psychoanalyses of his public statements, especially his long interview with Bob Costas. (For my money, Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated has written the best takes on McGwire this week.)

If you’re a political economy fan, you’ll know that Congress grilled banking titans like Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan this week. (The best account I read was “Panel Rips Wall Street Titans” in the Wall Street Journal.) Rep. Phil Angelides compared the bigwigs to shady car dealers.

Set aside the inevitable partisan and populist politicking for a minute. Suspend your verdicts on the probity or shame of Baseball Slugger X or Bank Chief Y. And consider this:

Many of us liked it just fine at the time.

Many investors liked it just fine when Goldman and JPMorgan and BofA and the rest posted blockbuster earnings year after year. We liked it when our housing prices rose 15% every single year, even though historical precedents should have warned us that it couldn’t last. And then we (or some of us) wailed when the bill came due.

Sports fans loved it when McGwire broke Roger Maris’s single-season home run record. They — we — loved it when a fleet of hitters sailed past the once-sacred 500-homer career mark. And then we scolded and cursed those same men when we all woke up from the fever dream and realized how many of them had “tarnished the game” by injecting themselves.

Mind you, it is not true to say that “we have no one to blame but ourselves.” McGwire deserves his own full measure of blame for his own misdeeds, just as some bankers deserve their own blame for their financial legerdemain.

But we, many of us, saw that syringe full of risk and accepted it. Or, if we didn’t see it, we should have assumed its existence, at least if we had our eyes open to reality even part of the time.

Without question, the deepest guilt belongs with the central actors. But it is worth considering how many of us in the bleachers abetted them with our cheers.

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Syringe photo by Ben Matthews, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Given the thinking I’ve been doing lately about sports metaphors for business, I wondered how many of these metaphors I’ve used in the two-plus years I’ve been writing this blog.

You’ll see in the sidebar that there’s a whole category called “The Business of Sports,” but many of those posts relate directly, rather than metaphorically, to the financial, managerial, and media aspects of sports. (E.g., “The big business of Longhorn athletics.”)

Here, though, are several posts that use sports metaphors to make their points about personal or organizational performance issues:

• Think like a general manager.
• Favre’s trade is a lesson in how to price a deal.
• Grinding it out.
• Meaningful? Or Just measurable?
• Are you willing to re-tool your swing?
• Routine disciplines, in sports and life.
• “Running up the score” in sports and business.

I’d love to know what you think about any of these — and what you think about the back-and-forth in the comment thread the other day about the potential alienating effect of sports metaphors on those who don’t follow sports.

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Photo by mre1965.

We just found out today that our SXSW Interactive session on sports metaphors is scheduled for the VERY LAST POSSIBLE slot on the conference calendar — the bottom of the 9th, if you will.

Sure, this sounds bad. Won’t everybody be heading to the airport to fly home? Or at least heading out to the bars on 6th Street?

Maybe. But since we don’t have any choice about it, I decided instead to come up with a list of benefits from having the last available slot:

• It’s the easiest slot of the whole conference to remember — 5 p.m. on the last day.
• When we’re telling people about it, we can joke about “saving the best for last” and how we’re “the grand finale.”
• The audience should be loose — even a little punchy — after four hard days of conferencing (and, ahem, carousing after hours), so they should be prepared to play along with the kind of fun, totally un-stuffy session we have planned.
• The sports metaphors abound: “bottom off the ninth,” “the 18th hole at Augusta,” “sudden-death overtime,” . . .

I’m sure there are more, and that’s where I’d like your help:

How should we capitalize on having the very last slot on the SXSW Interactive schedule?

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Related posts:

• Enter the arena . . . of sports metaphors.
• SXSW victory!

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Photo by Jill Clardy, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

(I’m warming up for my March 16 South by Southwest Interactive session by trying out various metaphors that bridge sports and business — and especially the use of social media in business. Feel free to chime in with your own metaphors in the comments!)

In cricket, one batsman can salvage an innings or turn the course of a whole match by a stubborn or inspired display of batting. When the captain of a side does it, this kind of effort is called “a captain’s innings.” Basically, it means that the leader let actions do the talking.

(Fellow Yanks, take note: in cricket usage, “innings” is like “trousers” — never singular.)

The parallel with business will be obvious: a manager or executive who leads from the front, who works harder than anyone, who uses brilliant skill or mulish effort — or both — to carry the day.

In social media, the best parallel might be to a CEO who uses Twitter avidly (e.g. Tony Hsieh of Zappos, once upon a time) or who makes the rain fall for the company by blogging or the like. Among my social-media friends, the example who comes to mind is Gini Dietrich, CEO of Chicago P.R. firm Arment Dietrich. (She blogs here.)

Now, over to you . . . What are your best business examples of “a captain’s innings”?

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Related posts:

• Enter the arena . . . of sports metaphors.
• Are you willing to re-tool your swing?

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Photo of Australia’s captain, Ricky Ponting, by nellistc.

It’s just a couple of months until my “Core Conversation” session at South by Southwest Interactive, where I’ll be joining my friend Kyle Flaherty (along with a merry band of accomplices) in . . .

Hitting Bombs: Better Social Business Through Sports Metaphors

We’re already cooking up good analogies of our own, but I want to open the floor to you, in two ways:

1. If you’re game, please share your best/favorite analogies between sports and business (or between sports and social media in particular) in the comment thread here.
2. If you’re still on the sidelines, be aware that we’ll be calling for heavy audience participation once our session rolls around on March 16th. Now’s the time to start warming up.

Looking forward to what you have to say. So start sharing!

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Photo by Pittaya Sroilong.

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.