InformationWeek

November 13, 2000

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Businesses Could Learn A Lot From The Yankees

By Lou Bertin

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s a New Yorker by birth, a baseball fan since about age 5, and one whose chronological meter will kick over to 45 by the time this week is out, I watched with admiration bordering on awe as the "old-guy" New York Yankees continued a five-year run of sustained excellence last month.

They've managed to prevail despite astonishing change in the competition they faced, the internal resources at their disposal, the prevailing mores in terms of how the game is played, and, most importantly for them, the ever-increasing expectations from their vocal and demanding stakeholders--notably the mellowing-with-age guy from Cleveland wearing a turtleneck and the "Bleacher Creatures" in residence in right field.

From my perspective, the Yanks play the toughest of all sports. But how different is the sport they play from the competition all of you take part in every day? The differences are negligible.

The competitive question alone is loaded with parallels between big-league baseball and the commercial arena. In both competitions, what happened yesterday has absolutely no bearing on what will happen today or tomorrow. Competitors can attack even entrenched leaders through a combination of ingenuity, nimbleness, and unwavering focus on capitalizing on internal strengths and attacking rivals’ weaknesses.

With ballplayers, age can creep up and injury can strike without warning, turning a strength into a liability. So it can be when organizations take customers for granted, fail to innovate, and allow themselves more than a breath or two of relief before revisiting their strategies for attacking a market and the tactics--invariably tactics that are technology-enabled--they intend to use to fulfill their strategic goals. The assumption must be that tomorrow's competition will be tougher than today's.

As for internal resources, the process of sifting, testing, and evaluating must also be constant. Change is always necessary, but never for its own sake. Through their five-year run, the Yanks have undergone tremendous change at key positions and have managed to do so without sacrificing anything in the way of performance. Longtime superb performers have been dispatched in favor of new members in sometimes painful--but absolutely required--revisitations of what the organization will require to succeed.

The same holds true for people--much less technologies and methodologies--in the commercial realm. What worked well yesterday--and may be working perfectly well today--must be viewed as advancing one step closer to obsolescence every day. It may be a long road before obsolescence is reached (may golden child Derek Jeter play another 15 excellent seasons before his number is retired in left-center), but all people and things eventually outlive their usefulness.

Most fascinating to me, anyway, is the subtle question of how the games are played. The superb baseball statistician/observer Bill James not long ago ran numbers covering the tenures of baseball managers dating back to 1900. His conclusions are eerie in their parallels between the "games" under discussion here. For one, he observed that the job of a baseball manager is, ultimately, to render himself obsolete. That stands to reason; a manager gifted in nurturing young players likely will not be the best leader for a team made up of veterans, even if those veterans are the same bunch who grew up professionally under the manager's own wing. So it is with corporate IT staffs.

The James observation that had me scratching my head, but is ultimately his wisest, is that the game changes more quickly than anybody realizes. How is it possible, I asked myself, that a game that has been played by essentially the same rules for more than a century can be described as changing quickly? After a moment's thought, I realized that the changes--all within the framework of the rules--could fill a book, much less a column.

Bigger, faster, more conditioned athletes; lively ball vs. dead ball; high strike zone vs. low strike zone; bigger ballparks; smaller ballparks; better scouting; better equipment; and more money at stake, even though the rules remain three strikes, three outs, and 90 feet between bases. In the other game, E-business vs. electronic data interchange, Web sites vs. catalogs, and instant access to customer/partner data vs. human intervention, even though the game remains decided by seeing which team can attract and retain the greatest number of customers and produce the greatest number of goods or provide the most services at the greatest possible profit. Le plus ca change, and all that.

As for stakeholders and their demands, baseball and the corporate world have never been most closely, more excruciatingly scrutinized than they are today. Miss the playoffs by a half game and heads are likely to roll. Miss the whisper price for a quarter and watch the stock tank. Neither result may be in proportion with the shortfall, but neither result raises eyebrows any longer.

Speaking only for myself, there remain a couple of parallels between Major League Baseball and the corporate world that I'd like to see take hold during the course of 2001. Median salary for big leaguers last season was just north of $3 million and there's the matter of that 3-1/2-month off-season. We can always hope, can't we?

Lou Bertin is an industry consultant. He can be reached at Lou.Bertin@gte.net


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