Business Insight Zone

It’s time for the business world at large to steal an idea from ESPN columnist Bill Simmons: the EVP of Common Sense.

Simmons has argued that pro sports franchises need such a person to review potential trades and draft choices. Ideally, it would be someone who knows the sport and commands total respect from the team owners and front-office personnel . . . but who is not beholden to the inbreeding or groupthink that often infects organizations.

This guy — let’s say he was the college roommate/teammate of Mr. Team Owner and is now a retired CEO from an unrelated industry — would take a look at big decisions, like which college player to draft in the first round, and apply common sense to them. He’d be in a position to say, “Okay, walk me through this one, because I don’t see why Player X is a great idea when it seems like everybody else thinks Player Y projects better as an NFL starter.”

In the corporate world, this person’s job would be to say something like, oh, I dunno, “Why wouldn’t we take IBM’s offer? Do we really think we can go it alone? Or force them to give us a better offer? What’s our leverage?”

Or, pursuant to what I said about Bob Sutton’s thoughts about the U.S. auto industry from last week, “Shouldn’t we simplify our product lines and make sure we’re making vehicles that more Americans want to drive?”

To put it another way, the EVP of Common Sense would be charged with asking naive questions about where the company and the industry is heading, and he or she would have a mandate from the board of directors to insist on straight answers to these questions from everyone, including — especially — the CEO.

Or would that make too much sense?

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Related:

• Steve Tobak at BNET’s Corner Office blog: We’re Still Making Excuses for Weak Leadership

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Image via the Library of Congress.

According to veteran Texas Monthly writer S. C. Gwynne, my beloved alma mater boasts “the most profitable — and most successful” athletics program “of any school in history.” Gwynne explores the ramifications of this success in a detailed 8,000-word feature on the empire that UT men’s athletic director DeLoss Dodds has built during his 27 years at the University. The feature is here . . .

Come Early. Be Loud. Cash In.

. . . but you have to be a subscriber to read more than the opening paragraphs online. So, setting aside my fan’s pride in the Longhorns’ athletic exploits (perhaps you’re aware they have the #1 football team in all the land?), I’ll offer a few business-minded thoughts prompted by the article.

Focus

Texas has finished among the top ten for the Directors’ Cup, “which measures the overall success of a college’s athletics program,” for seven years running — even though it fields only 20 teams across its men’s and women’s programs, instead of the 30 or more at comparable institutions like Ohio State or Stanford. (For instance, UT does not have a men’s volleyball team or a women’s field hockey team.)

Dodds and his colleague, women’s athletic director Chris Plonsky, have set a very high standard to go along with these limits: every single team is fully funded, meaning that they have ample travel budgets and that they can spend top dollar on the best coachs and facilities. All of this is in service of a breathtaking goal — in Gwynne’s words, “to allow every one of UT’s teams to compete for a national championship every year.”

This is reminiscent of Peter Drucker’s advice, famously implemented by Jack Welch in the early days of his tenure as CEO of General Electric, to be #1 or #2 in every business you’re in — or else get out of that business.

Working within constraints

Besides this self-imposed focus, UT operates under very different conditions than it did back when Darrell Royal was leading the Longhorns to national football titles. Here’s a key passage from Gwynne’s article:

Today’s sleek, dazzlingly efficient program is really only a decade old. And ironically, it is the product of a sweeping financial crisis in American college sports that has gutted many of the country’s most hallowed universities.

The crisis started with a law known as Title IX, which has turned the world of scholastic sports upside down. Passed by Congress in 1972, it ultimately required that women be given equal opportunities to participate in school sports, a change that happened only gradually over the following three decades. No institution was more deeply involved in this process than the University of Texas. But in 1992 a group of female students sued the university under Title IX. They wanted more teams for women to roughly equalize the number of male and female athletes on campus. The key word was “equalize.”

The lawsuit was immediately seen as a groundbreaking case. That was because no school had done more for women’s athletics than UT. . . . In spite of that, the university had remained out of compliance with Title IX, as had most schools across the country. The large number of football players — 130 or more at UT — created an imbalance with the numbers of players on the smaller women’s teams. Instead of fighting the lawsuit, the university settled it, in 1993, by agreeing to start three new women’s teams: soccer, softball, and rowing. That sent shock waves across the nation: If UT could be forced to change, then everyone could.

As Gwynne goes on to relate, many universities have crumpled under the weight of Title IX — but UT has worked within the parameters of aggressive Title IX compliance to thrive more than ever before. Along with its powerhouse men’s teams in football, baseball, and basketball, it is perennially among the best schools in the country for women’s basketball, softball, and volleyball.

You have to spend money to make money.

The view in the photo above is from the north end of Royal-Memorial Stadium, which has recently been expanded, at massive cost, to accommodate even more of the Longhorn faithful for home football games. Like previous renovations to the once-rickety stadium, the North End Zone (NEZ) project has added not just regular seats, but thousands of ultra-high-dollar seats in club levels and luxury boxes. This means much more money flows into the coffers of UT athletics, and not just for the football program — which may be the best-funded in the country — but for all the “non-revenue” sports like swimming and tennis.

It will take years to pay off the load of debt that the athletics program took on to finance the NEZ. This implies a calculated risk that the Longhorns won’t undergo a football drought like they did in the 1990s; losing seasons drive away too many of the high rollers who populate those luxury boxes on game day. But as long as the formula keeps working, UT should remain a force not only in football, but also in all the other sports in which it competes.

The whole and the parts

According to head football coach Mack Brown, the factors discussed above have erased jealousy between the various sports. No team has to wonder why they don’t get any goodies . . . because they all get the goodies.

But the success of UT athletics, especially when paired with its financial autonomy from the rest of the University, means that resentment or distrust does arise among some professors and administrators. As Gwynne relates in the closing section of his article, Dodds, Brown, and other members of the athletics staff have tried to bridge this gap lately by going out of their way to court the favor of faculty members.

At one level, this would be savvy dealing even if it were insincere (which I doubt it is). Beyond that, though, it highlights a similar challenge faced by organizations of all types: how do you get along with ALL your constituencies? Every organization operates in various “worlds” simultaneously, because it has to meet the needs of customers, employees, donors, vendors, audience members, alumni, voters, or whatever other interested parties.

For the last decade-plus, UT’s athletics program has done a historically good job of balancing the demands of its many constituencies — and, having once worked for the University’s alumni association, I can tell you that the demands of devoted Orangebloods are demanding indeed.

Kudos to Gwynne for doing his typically smart job in handling the complexities of this topic. If you can lay hands on a copy of the magazine or get access to the subscriber side of the Texas Monthly site, his article is certainly worth your time.

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Related links:

• The Longhorns’ bowl game: the cost of high expectations.
• The Tampa Rays invest for the long haul — and win.
• Why the business of sports is so worthy of coverage.
• The Red Sox: smarter and richer.
  

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Image by JoshS1, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

What we mean when we say “the world.”

Reading the Freakonomics blog this morning, I had to shake my head at the dyspeptic comment of a British reader who took offense at Stephen Dubner’s hyperbolic use of “shocked the world” in the phrase “After the Dolphins shocked the world by beating the Patriots . . .” Here’s the key bit:

We weren’t shocked, here in the UK by this result. In fact we didn’t care. Neither do we care about the results of the “World Series” which we note with interest that only US teams are invited to compete in.

Set aside the sneering tone and focus on the wrong-headed reference to the World Series. With due apologies to the excellent professional league in Japan, in the world of baseball, the greatest concentration of the greatest players — from all countries — plays in the Major Leagues.

In fact, a momentary glance at the rosters of the Rays (which we discussed recently) and the Phillies reveals players from Australia, Canada, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Japan, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, as well as all parts of the United States. While we’re at it, the sports of cricket and rugby hold quadrennial “World Cups” with nowhere near the global participation of (soccer) football’s World Cup.

And so what?

The rugby event’s claim to “world” status, to pick one example, ought to pass without objection because, by any fair-minded standard, it brings together the best national teams from the rugby-playing world — Australia, Britain, France, New Zealand, etc. — and its winner can legitimately claim to be the best national rugby team in the world

Maybe this point is obvious, but I think it applies bears repeating:

We all live in many separate “worlds.”

This may apply especially to business. Consider just the worlds of technology, entertainment, big business, philanthropy, and politics — and then consider examples of heavy hitters in each sphere:

• Technology: Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds.
• Entertainment: Christina Aguilera, Will Smith.
• Big business: Jamie Dimon, Steve Schwarzman.
• Philanthropy: Paul Farmer, Melinda Gates.
• Politics: John McCain, Barack Obama. (Maybe you’ve heard of them?)

Now consider examples of those who wield influence in more than one of these spheres:

• Technology + Entertainment: John Lasseter.
• Technology + Big business: Mark Hurd.
• Entertainment + Big business: David Geffen.
• Big business + Philanthropy: Eli Broad.
• Philanthropy + Politics: Bill Clinton.
• Technology + Entertainment + Big business: Steve Jobs.
• Big business + Philanthropy + Politics: George Soros.

We could go on, but you get the idea: there are worlds within worlds, and some people who loom large in one have no standing in another. Others move between worlds easily.

Niche-worlds abound.

Don’t think that you’re ever going to get your head all the way around all the worlds you’re in, much less all the worlds you could be in, and very much less all the worlds that exist. Consider my own work as a blogger and some of the worlds it touches.

There’s a tech-and-media world in which Michael Arrington is very powerful — so much so that people go out of their way to curry his favor or to elicit a mention on his blog Techcrunch. But my mom, for instance, (a) doesn’t know who Arrington is, (b) doesn’t care, and (c) doesn’t need to. I’m sure her lack of interest does not keep Mr. Arrington up nights — nor should it.

In the blogosphere, Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki stride the land like giants. Same for the authors of BoingBoing. If these folks include a link to your blog, you’d better hope your server can handle the strain. Yet recently, I got a puzzled look from a Hoover’s colleague — who’s in the online business, mind you, and the author of a blog himself — when I referred to BoingBoing. He’d never heard of it. And you know what? It doesn’t matter.

In the past I’ve traded blog posts with Floyd Norris, one of the deans of financial journalism. I bet he doesn’t subscribe to BoingBoing, and I’ll bet that at least some of BoingBoing’s writers couldn’t pick Norris’s name out of a lineup. C’est la vie.

So what do we DO with these thoughts?

First, we can try not to get dyspeptic when someone refers to the “world” in a way that we might perceive as a slight. Up to a point, I’m sympathetic to that Freakonomics commenter, since I know that Americans sometimes are guilty of thinking that all the earth’s activity revolves around the United States. But please — leave room for other people to have their own worlds that have nothing to do with you.

Second, take a few minutes to think about what your own worlds are. Some obvious candidates:

• Your family.
• Your company, department, or team.
• Your professional organization.
• Your clubs, whether that means Rotary or the garden club or the PTA or your group of jogging buddies.
• Your circle(s) of friends.
• Your church.
• Your physical neighborhood.

Another way of thinking about these is to frame these in terms of which audiences you touch.

Third, think about how you can have the most impact within each of these worlds. Probably you’re not going to end up reshaping big worlds like Steve Jobs has with technology, entertainment, and business. That’s okay; you can still reshape some of the worlds you inhabit.

Here’s what I recommend:

Within the “worlds” you care about, make your NAME synonymous with your ROLE.

Steve Jobs is formally the CEO of Apple and a board member of Disney. But forget that: he’s STEVE JOBS. Madonna could list her occupation as “singer” or “entertainer,” but more to the point she’s MADONNA. In the open-source world, Linus Torvalds is just LINUS.

You and I probably won’t have that kind of reach in the grand scheme of things, but we can try to mimic it within our own little niche-worlds. There’s value, not to mention job security, in having enough standing in your niche that people say, “Oh, I always defer to Sharon on questions like that” or “There’s no point speculating — Dave will know what to do about this.” You’re not just you . . . you’re YOU.

But enough of my philosophizing:

What worlds do YOU inhabit?
How might you inhabit them better?

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(Image from NASA.)

The slugger doing what he does best.

On Wednesday night, Manny Ramirez hit yet another postseason home run. Unfortunately for him, it was all the scoring the Dodgers could muster, and his exploits for this season have come to an end.

And some exploits they were. As though the future Hall-of-Famer needed any more luster on his hitting resume, he batted above .500 (!) and slugged more than 1.000 (!!) across the Dodgers’ series against the Cubs and the Phillies. Those numbers, along with Manny’s career marks of 527 homers, 1,725 runs batted in, and a .314 batting average, are sure to figure prominently in the sales pitch that super-agent Scott Boras will be making to interested teams this off-season, now that Ramirez is a free agent.

What price greatness?

In the economics of today’s game, a hitter of Ramirez’s rare skill should command more than $20 million per year. Heck, even I could negotiate with the Dodgers or the Yankees and get him a two-year, $40 million deal. Boras’s challenge, though, will be to get the 36-year-old Ramirez a multi-year agreement that will take the slugger through the end of his career in style. That means the agent will be gunning for a four- or five-year deal — but still at those sky-high annual rates.

Set aside Boras’s reputation for employing tactics that go beyond hardball, as well as Ramirez’s reputation for decreasing his level of effort when he’s unhappy. (On the eve of the playoffs, ESPN uber-columnist Bill Simmons published a lengthy, highly informed opus centered on the connection between these two themes.) The question remains whether it’s reasonable to guarantee that much money for that many years to a hitter who’s that old.

Disturbing precedents

Sure, a few of Ramirez’s historical peers — he doesn’t have many — have hit that well at 40. But plenty of other high-dollar stars have signed long-term deals when they were already long in the tooth . . . and then declined right on cue, while their teams were still forking out major sums for their services.

• Exhibit A — the once-otherworldly Pedro Martinez, who has made just 48 pitching starts for the New York Mets over the past three years, about half of a normal workload. During that time, he’s mostly been an average pitcher, not the juggernaut who won three Cy Young awards between 1997 and 2000.
• Exhibit B — the Over-the-Hill Gang employed by the New York Yankees in recent years: formerly-great players signed as free agents who helped the team with the largest payroll in the sport to miss the playoffs this year.

If I were Scott Boras (wait . . . I need a minute to stop shuddering), I’d certainly try to land my client a $100 million contract, for my own sake and his. If I were Frank McCourt (who own the Dodgers) or Hank Steinbrenner (whose family owns the Yankees), I’d think long and hard about the winner’s curse before deciding that the Manny Ramirez Sweepstakes was a contest I wanted to win.

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(Photo by Mr. Littlehand, used by permission.)

All-Star left fielder Carl Crawford suffered through
six dismal seasons for the Rays before this year.

327 games below .500

In the ten seasons that they played before this one, the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays lost 327 more games than they won. Year after year, they struggled to touch 70 wins, much less contend for anything. And plenty of baseball-watchers, myself included, wrote them off forever since they played in the same division with the two richest teams in baseball (the Red Sox and the Yankees) along with two more of baseball’s “haves” (Baltimore and Toronto).

Yet here the Rays are, division winners for the regular season and about to play Boston for the American League pennant — and all on the lowest payroll ($44 million) in their league. They’re still 295 games below .500 across the history of the franchise, but that sting could be washed away by four more wins and a trip to the World Series.

Over and over on this blog, I try to stress the importance of building an enterprise for the long haul. Anne Mulcahy does it, Warren Buffett does it, Jamie Dimon does it, you should do it. This Alan Schwarz article from the New York Times talks about how the Rays have done the same thing since new ownership took over the team late in 2005.

The Rays Had a Plan, and Stuck to It

[Rays manager Joe Maddon in 2006:] “Because of the negativity that’s been attached to this group for such a long period of time, eradicating that just doesn’t happen overnight. What we’re doing right now is to stop the madness, and do what we think is the right thing to do from this moment on.”

. . .

Baseball always hears about rebuilding plans, but usually when they’re just beginning (during apologetic trade-deadline fire sales) or when they’re ending (with handshakes all around). What distinguishes the Rays’ rebuilding plan is the unwavering confidence with which it was continuously executed.

Read the article — it’s not too baseball-geeky for non-fans — and ponder what lessons your company might derive from it. If you ever wanted an example of a hapless organization, you need look no further than the pre-2005 Rays. And if they can improve, so can you.

By the way, the success of the Rays this year, like the playoff runs of the Oakland Athletics and Minnesota Twins earlier in this decade, ought to shine a harsh spotlight on the complacent, ill-run franchises (Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Kansas City, and Washington leap to mind) that have wallowed in incompetence for too many years. The baseball fans in those cities deserve better — and the Rays offer one example of how to achieve it.

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Related post:

• Meaningful? Or Just measurable?

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(Photo by John-Morgan.)

A better question for many of us is “Who CARES who won the medal count?” That, at least, was a frequent refrain when I was talking this over with some friends last night.

This is totally anecdotal, but I thought the “story” about the different methods of ranking medal-winning countries — by gold medals, by gold medals, etc. — was one of the most overworked journalistic angles of the Beijing Games.

It was clear that many Chinese wanted to privilege the winning of gold medals . . . and just coincidentally their whole Olympic program is geared toward winning the maximum number of gold medals. It was clear that many Americans wanted to rank by total medals . . . and just coincidentally the U.S. routinely comes out on top when counting total medals won.

My number is bigger than yours

There’s a business parallel here: think of all the companies — banks, car makers, telecoms, et cetera — that go to great lengths to be #1 in their industries. Ambition can be a great thing, and there can be great advantages to scale in certain businesses.

But often the simplistic focus on the top line of revenue masks problems underneath. There have been many years in which GM was the largest car maker in the world in terms of revenue, but far from the best in terms of profitability. And many mergers — such as the ill-starred combinations of Alcatel and Lucent, or Time Warner and AOL — are made with a hard focus on the top line . . . but a lot of wish-casting about the bottom line.

Per-unit measures

Getting back to the Olympic medals, this suggests a couple of obvious alternatives for how to look at the medal count. The U.S. is the richest country in the world, and China is the most populous, so at some level you expect them to perform well in medal counts.

If you look at the top several countries in the final official standings, you’ll note Australia — sixth in gold medals with 14, fifth in total medals with 46. But Australia has just 20 million people, which is one-third as many as Britain (19 golds, 47 medals), one-fifteenth as many as the U.S. (36, 110), and 1.5 percent as many as China (51, 100).

This site goes one better, sorting all of the medal-winning countries by population and GIP, resulting in these “winners” of the medal count:

• Population per gold medal: Jamaica.
• Population per total medals: Bahamas.
• GDP per gold medal: Zimbabwe.
• GDP per total medals: Zimbabwe.
• GDP/population per gold medal: Zimbabwe.
• GDP/population per total medals: Zimbabwe.

Hmm . . . I can’t recall lots of stories about how Zimbabwe was the big winner of these games. It might be worth noting that the country won four medals in total — and that they were all won by one swimmer, Kirsty Coventry.

I suggested to one of my friends that a even a rudimentary improvement on the “official” system would be to weight the medals using points, for instance gold = 3, silver = 2, bronze = 1. Using back-of-the-envelope math, this still put China ahead of the U.S., but by just three points.

The winner is?

After we had talked about this, my friend came across this site, which uses a weighted score along these lines (gold = 4, silver = 2, bronze = 1) and then divides by population. Using this system, the easy winner is . . . Jamaica.

Which, given Usain Bolt’s jaw-dropping performances in the sprints — not to mention the classical running of Veronica Campbell-Brown and the astonishing world record in the men’s 4 x 100 — seems about right.

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Also of interest:

• Yahoo: 36 facts about the Olympic medal count

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(Image of Paavo Nurmi — he of the nine gold medals — from Wikipedia.)

The Brett Favre deal offers a lesson in innovative pricing.

Stick with me, because you don’t have to be a football fan to appreciate this one. The deal struck to move the future Hall of Famer from Green Bay to the Jets has lots of angles — bad blood between Favre and Packers management, on-the-field implications — that need not detain us here.

What is worth noting is a key provision of the deal, explained in this NFL.com story, that governs the compensation Green Bay will get for cutting Favre loose:

The [fourth-round] draft pick traded for Favre turns into a third-round selection if he plays in 50 percent of the plays this season, a second-rounder if he plays in 70 percent of the plays and the Jets qualify for the playoffs, and a first-round pick if he plays in 80 percent of the plays and Jets make it to the Super Bowl.

In other words, the closer Favre brings the Jets to the NFL’s promised land, the more the Packers get. There are even more complex provisions in the deal that would tend to interest only diehard football fans. My point is that both teams went out of their way to make sure that they won’t feel burned if Favre overperforms or underperforms expectations.

Sweeten the deal to prevent “transaction remorse.”

Such complicated give-and-take is appropriate in this case because it’s so hard to know what to expect from a 38-year-old quarterback — even one who holds most of the NFL’s passing records.

Something in this vein may be appropriate for your business if you offer a product or service whose value is unclear. You know the value of what you offer, but how can you reassure your customers and vendors that they’ll be getting good value?

It’s an old idea, one embedded in the 90-day warranty, the subscriber loyalty program, the money-back guarantee. But why stop there? Why not come up with your own version of the Favre deal that alleviates the risk of buyer’s remorse — or seller’s remorse?

What are your ideas for helping your customers or vendors avoid transaction remorse?

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(Packers and Jets logos via Wikipedia.)

Michael Lewis’s terrific book Moneyball is as much about management and innovation as it is about baseball. So whether you’re a baseball fan or not, please stick with me for a second as I talk about one of Moneyball’s lessons.

In the book, Lewis describes how Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, identified on-base percentage (OBP) as the key underpriced asset for major-league hitters. If you wanted a hitter with a high batting average or lots of home runs or lots of runs batted in (RBIs), you paid a premium for that hitter. But you could get players who lacked those things — yet who had high OBPs — on the cheap.

(For the non-baseball fans in the crowd, the crudest definition of OBP is this: it’s the percentage of the time that a batter doesn’t make an out, regardless of whether he walks, gets hit by a pitch, drives a ball into the centerfield seats, or whatever.)

Why OBP?

What made OBP so special, back in the late 1990s when Beane isolated it as a key metric? Two things — one positive and one negative:

1. The positive: OBP is the hitting statistic that maps most linearly to runs scored. Higher OBPs translate directly to more runs scored — in all settings, and regardless of the types of hitters involved.
2. The negative: For a variety of reasons, OBP is hardly as glamorous as the “triple crown” statistics of batting average, home runs, and RBIs. Therefore it was routinely overlooked as a differentiating factor for hitters . . . even though the list of the top 50 all-time OBP leaders includes a high number of the top 50 all-time hitters.

A little more on that second point: The home-run binge that ran from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s demonstrates the abiding fascination of baseball fans for the home-run hitter — a point made initially, and most forcefully, by one George Herman Ruth. And over the course of many years, MVP voters have disproportionately rewarded the hitters considered “run creators” for their high numbers of RBIs.

The old love affair with batting average.

Across the game’s history, compiling an average of .300 — that is, getting a hit in three of every 10 at-bats — has been seen as an unquestioned mark of a good hitter, regardless of whether the hits were singles or doubles or triples or homers. And in the early days of the game, that made sense: extra-base hits were hard to come by and walks were regarded as an aberration rather than a beneficial outcome in themselves, so batting average really did express a lot about a hitter’s worth.

In Honus Wagner’s heyday, runs were hard to come by,
and extra-base hits were much rarer than today.

Thing is, the math changed in the 1920s, when Babe Ruth and other power hitters started showing a more modern approach at the plate: more patience, more power. The thinking should have changed, too, so that the emphasis fell to OBP and slugging average (essentially, what fraction of a base a batter averaged per time at-bat). But the old triple-crown stats — batting average, homers, RBIs — were already firmly engrained, they were easy to grasp, they were easy to compute, and they seemed to capture enough information for evaluating a hitter.

What helps us WIN?

Fast-forward seven decades to Billy Beane. He and his mentor, Sandy Alderson, understood that they would never have the budget to hire proven home run champions, RBI champions, batting champions. Yet they could find out-of-the-way hitters who didn’t do anything flashy in the triple-crown categories, but who quietly racked up the OBP, and therefore quietly — and cheaply — helped a team win.

The formula worked. Although the Athletics never made it to the World Series in the 2000s, for several years running, they made the playoffs alongside teams with payrolls two and three and four times as large. They did this in large part because they abandoned the old, easy-to-measure, not-very-meaningful ways of evaluating hitters, and replaced them with smarter, more-meaningful, out-of-the-ordinary ways.

Now, here comes the business application: What do you measure in your organization? How do you evaluate your people, especially in roles outside of sales that often lack clear yardsticks?

Do your measures have real meaning?
Or are you just continuing to measure what you’ve always measured?

Many companies, in my experience, have their own version of “batting average” that they like to point to, even though there’s some more-meaningful “OBP” metric that they should be using.

What about you?

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(Moneyball cover via Wikipedia; Honus Wagner image via Wikimedia Commons.)

Woods on the eve of his epic 2008 U.S. Open win.

I try to keep my use of sports metaphors to a minimum, both because (a) these metaphors tend to be overused in American business, which can be alienating to non-sports fans and to those who grew up following sports outside the U.S. mainstream, and (b) once you get me started . . . sheesh, next thing you know, I’ll be constructing some overblown metaphor about how today’s worldwide credit crunch is like the Knicks‘ salary-cap problems.

That way lies madness, I think you’ll agree.

All that said, I share the awe expressed by Tom Peters over Tiger Woods’s dramatic win in the U.S. Open playoff a week ago. Because of my travel schedule, I was able to watch a lot of that Monday playoff round, and it was amazing to see Woods play and win despite obvious pain from his badly injured left knee.

Here’s what Peters had to say:

I was reading a David Brooks column (New York Times) on Mr Woods yesterday, and was reminded of what, to me, is the most astonishing part of the Woods story. Namely, that on two occasions Woods no less than “risked his career,” per Brooks, re-tooling his (already amazing!!) swing — and then survived months and months of inconsistent performance to get into his new groove. [. . .]

How do you get the nerve to do such a thing — or even admit that it needs to be done when you are sitting atop the personal or professional or corporate skyscraper?

Good question — we’ll come back to that in just a minute. Meanwhile, the David Brooks column that Peters points to is also well worth reading. Here’s the context for the bit that Peters cites.

And here we’re getting to the nub of what’s so remarkable about the “Be A Tiger” phenomenon: He’s become the beau ideal for golf-loving corporate America, the personification of mental fortitude.

The ancients were familiar with physical courage and the priests with moral courage, but in this over-communicated age when mortals feel perpetually addled, Woods is the symbol of mental willpower. He is, in addition, competitive, ruthless, unsatisfied by success and honest about his own failings. (Twice, he risked his career to retool his swing.)

In the business world, we all know plenty of people who have some of these traits but not all of them. For example, a CEO might have a strong will and be as self-assured, competitive, and ruthless as Woods, yet without the ability to be honest about his or her own failings. And we all know businesspeople who are honest about their own failings and extraordinarily hard-working, yet lack the sort of ruthless drive that characterizes Woods or, say, Steve Jobs.

In his classic book Good to Great, Jim Collins studied more than a dozen companies that “retooled their swings,” transforming themselves from run-of-the-pack competitors to perennial top performers. One of the commonalities Collins identified for this group of companies was the willingness of their CEOs to submerge their own egos as they made the hard choices to “retool their swings.” One example that springs to mind was Darwin Smith, the great leader who sold Kimberly-Clark’s paper mills along the way to making that company a titan in consumer paper goods.

Smith was hardly lacking in self-confidence, and he had a strong will interwoven with a competitive streak. But he was so committed to making himself and his company better that he wasn’t afraid to slaughter any sacred cows. Extracting Kimberly-Clark from the business of running paper mills was definitely one of those, since many insiders regarded the mills as the company’s touchstone to its past.

I’m hardly the first to make the connection between the mindset shared by Woods and Darwin Smith. Right now I’m reading Carol Dweck’s terrific book Mindset. The book’s fundamental theme is that high perfomers across many areas share a “growth mindset,” one that focuses on endless improvement, instead of the “fixed mindset” that leads people to believe that they’re either great or mediocre or terrible — but in any case not subject to improvement. Dweck, who wrote the book based on decades of research as a psychology professor at Columbia, Stanford, and elsewhere, talks specifically about the CEOs from Good to Great, and about sporting legends like Woods and Michael Jordan.

The commonality between all of these people, regardless of field, was that all of them maintained a supple mind and a staunch commitment to ongoing growth. All of them, therefore, were ready to venture in a new direction — to “retool their swings” — when conditions warranted.

This, I think, answers Peters’s question:

How do you get the nerve to do such a thing — or even admit that it needs to be done when you are sitting atop the personal or professional or corporate skyscraper?

You get it by having a mindset that isn’t satisfied with what you already have — a mindset that is committed to the fundamental concept that you can be better tomorrow than you are today by dint of hard work and a focused program of improvement.

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Related items of interest:

• Ron Sirak of Golf World writes on Tiger Woods’s force of will.
• Guy Kawasaki on Carol Dweck and Mindset: Part 1 and Part 2.
• “Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind” - a New York Times article about methods to increase willpower via practice.

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(Photo by Jim Epler.)

One of the side effects of spending so much time thinking about (a) the media and (b) business management is that I can’t even read the recap of a baseball game in peace. I come across something like this . . .

Tigers score most runs this season, hand Rangers sixth straight loss

DETROIT (AP) — The Detroit Tigers’ biggest inning in four years could mean a lot more to the foundering Texas Rangers. Manager Ron Washington’s job might be in jeopardy.

. . . and the rant just boils up inside me.

Please bear with me here, because this isn’t so much about baseball as it is about management decisions and how the media covers them.

There are several things wrong with those two opening sentences:

1. The Tigers didn’t need their biggest inning in four years to beat the Rangers. They were already beating them. Sure, the score would have been 7-6 instead of 19-6, but a loss is a loss — and the psychological weight is still heavy when it extends a losing streak. Sure, when a team puts up an 11-run inning, that ought to be in the story’s lead, but the way it’s used here is not apt.

2. Washington’s job might be in jeopardy? According to whom? The writer? “Anonymous sources close to the Rangers’ front office”? No sources besides Washington are cited. The manager, for his part, said the right things: “Any time a team is in a losing streak, the manager’s job is on the line . . . It falls on me when the team isn’t playing well. I’m the manager . . . that’s the way it goes.” But this is a still just a unsubstantiated notion on the beat writer’s part — and not a helpful one, since the lead conveys a hunch or rumor as though it’s an established fact.

3. From the perspective of how the Rangers club is managed, the real story is the mediocre-to-low quality of the pitchers that Washington has been given to work with. It’s bad enough that the Rangers were facing the Tigers, who have one of the most dangerous lineups in the Major Leagues. Fact is, though, that the Rangers have been getting shelled frequently throughout this season — because their pitching isn’t strong. And whose job is it to acquire good pitching for the team? (Hint: not Ron Washington’s.)

It’s that last point I want to harp on, because we see this all too often in the “real” business world, too: a middle manager is handcuffed in terms of resources, personnel, decision latitude, or whatever — and then blamed when things go wrong.

The real fault here lies with the Rangers front office for assembling a thin pitching staff. Knowledgeable analysts were saying before the season ever started that the Rangers weren’t very good. Now those predictions are coming true on the field.

Here’s the thing: part of the blame for the team’s poor showing could fall to Washington. But if it does, he should be fired because of his overall qualities as a manager — not because of what happens in one game . . . against a heavy-hitting opponent . . . on a day when Ranger pitchers melt down one after another.

And an AP beat writer should help readers to understand that, not confuse the issue.

Here endeth the rant . . . for now.

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(Photo by Dave Hogg.)