Bobby Valentine Bulldozes Corporate America's Sacred (Mad) Cow

When a subject becomes

totally obsolete we make it a required course. -- Peter Drucker

Boston Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine is often a horse's axe.

OTOH, he never would have created as much success for his employers if he had

been content to get-along-go-along. His type of self-serving, near-narcissistic

ego-centricity combined with high-energy and high-intelligence is visible in

many managers in many industries, but is more common and less punished in

Baseball, because unlike the accountability-sloughing corporate world, the

elected-officeholder government world and the non-profit & academic &

military worlds, performance accountability in Baseball is completely

inescapable.

EXCEPT...

...for the risible entrenched commitment the Commissioner's office has to

opposing the use of established technology that's been around since the last

century for the purpose of getting important umpire calls right. Major league

umpires are pretty fantastic, super-human even, in their ability to execute

fiftieth-of-a-second difference calls and get them correct a surprisingly high

percentage of the time. But established technology as an enabling tool could

improve umps' lives; instead of getting 90% of the close calls correct, they

could probably get to 96-98% of the close ones nailed.

In spite of polls indicating very high support for expanded "instant

replay" (the use of existing cameras and angles and slow-motion

playback) to get close calls in games correct more often, Commissioner Zelig claims

he sees no support for it. While his words have been a little more

conciliatory about it lately, his last official position on it was

breathtakingly toxic...when a pitcher lost a perfect game in the 9th inning to

an umpire's very blown call he expressed joy about the process, not the

blown (and totally avoidable) outcome -- he was thrilled the pitcher and his

manager were so civil.

It's one of those revelatory moments that tells you more about

humans who manage an endeavor than it tells you about the endeavor itself. It's

a management teaching moment, identifying the low-hanging fruit of consulting,

the "Survival".

SURVIVALS & SURVIVALISTS

"Survivals" are a concept forwarded by one of the fathers of American anthropology, Alfred Kroeber. 

A survival in this context is a behavior, a custom, a belief or another cultural artifact that has survived from a past usefulness even though it no longer has a current functional reason for being. My favorite Kroeber example of a survival was the buttons on the end of sleeves of men's suits. They don't button. The majority of suit coats'

sleeves did button before 1905. Slowly, for some functional reasons, coats evolved to not have sleeves that buttoned. But in the buyer's eye, blazers and coats without buttons "looked funny" and tailors put them on even when not needed to feed the customers' need. And because suits have non-functioning sleeve buttons when the next generation grows up, the presumption becomes tacit, invisible, usually unquestioned. 

It's not just material culture that's affected. When you sneeze in a public place with people who know you, what percentage of the time does someone say "God bless you" or "Gez-und-heit". I strongly suspect most people who say this to you don't really believe evil spirits (or

the batting stance of Craig

Counsell) will occupy your body if they don't say it (the original reason European people said this). They say it because...er, because...that's what polite people do. Again, unquestioned, tacit behaviors that have no essential function.

Some people mistakenly think Baseball is a hot-bed of

reactionary anti-change-to-tradition ideology. 

It's not. Baseball is super-adaptive, especially since Michael

Lewis popularized in Moneyball the lessons Paul DePodesta brought to life

in the Oakland A's front office. (If you haven't read the book, the chief

DePodesta lesson is seek out the unquestioned, tacit beliefs and behaviors that

no one questions, and figure out which of those have no essential function any

more; then you can act with little competition, at least for a while, on the

alternatives that are being ignored as a result of the survival). One of the

best managers in baseball, the Texas Rangers' Ron Washington, spent his first

couple of years at the helm intentionally walking batters at a much higher rate

than any other AL skipper. It failed too often, so after

the 2008 season, he became far more selective in the application of the

tactic, and with great success. He didn't stop doing it completely; he saw the

results (on his own or with the help of the very very savvy people in the Ranger

front office), and brought the frequency down by doing it in optimal situations

and less so in less-optimal ones.

But the resistance to using more instant replay, like the

determination to keep Interleague Play, is not just the indication of a

Survival...it's the indication of a Survival-ist, a level of commitment to

dysfunction that transcends habit or blazer-sleeve buttons. Commissioner Selig

actively embraces the wrongness as a faux virtue, as though it's an essential

part of the game that would be lost.

He certainly has his advocates and followers in this. The

Seattle Mariners' announcing teams seem to "feel" that getting it

wrong when one could easily have gotten it right is a great occasional event and

part of the game's charm. I recently heard XM/Sirius game broadcasts from both

L.A. and N.Y. that endorse that basic position.

IT TAKES A PILLAGER

So given Bobby Valentine's nature and the persistence-of-resistance to closing

the gap on wrong calls that could easily be made correct calls with the

investment of 90 seconds, giving back some of the shortening of game lengths

trimmed in the last decade, it's not surprising that Valentine is the guy taking

point on this for the field personnel (players, managers, coaches).

In mid-June his Red Sox suffered a loss as a result of missed

calls, and he went ballistic. In the light of the following day, he did not, as

would be the normal "god bless you" response, recant. In fact, he

twisted the ice pick with a little left-back English in an interview with ESPN.

Valentine was asked before Monday's game with the Miami Marlins if he had received a call from the commissioner’s office regarding his comments about the umpiring in Sunday’s loss to the Nationals. He said he hadn’t, but added, “I probably will, right? Isn’t that great when that happens? Then they fine you, take your money, reprimand you, as though I did something wrong. It’s great. It’s a great system. I love it.”



Valentine spent the next 10 minutes talking about umpiring. His basic argument: If hitters constantly swing and miss at balls they believe to be strikes, umpires can’t be expected to get

all the calls right.



"My thought on that whole thing is this: From the time now that people pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars to teach their kids to play this great game of ours, the No. 1 thing they try to do is teach their pitchers to throw the ball over the plate. They teach their hitter to swing at strikes and take balls," Valentine told reporters.



"When I did the Little League World Series, I thought it was the most criminal thing I ever saw. I wanted to cry when a kid in the sixth inning with the bases loaded and his team down by one run was called out on a strike three on a pitch that was six inches outside. He couldn’t reach it with his bat. I cried for him. And that kid is scarred for life playing our game by an injustice.



"And then someone says the most ridiculous words that I ever heard: 'But we like the human factor.' It's criminal that we allow our game to scar a young person like that, and then it continues on. I think in 2012 it should not be part of the process.

Huzzah. Wrong, especially easily-avoided wrong, isn't virtue.

BEYOND BASEBALL

Of course, in our work world, especially in business and the military, we see

the Survival-ists striving to block improvement or defect repair all the time.

The two most-frequent reasons are executive insecurity (if

you change that it means we were wrong) and rice-bowl defense (that is, the

dysfunction serves someone's power or financial interest even if it undercuts

the organization's interests.

I once led a software and hardware test facility that was

created by a publication to compete with the test facilities of another

established pub that had captured the position of "authority" in the

field, even though their test methods were limited and very flawed. I worked

with the Marketing department to build a set of tests very different from the

other pub's and which our pub had slavishly imitated.

WB, the editor who had crafted that previous attempt ,had really

tried to do his best to fulfill the assigned (flawed) mission, which was to try

to match or exceed the volume of the established competitor using the same test

plans but with one-quarter or one-third the resources. He was an extremely

accomplished Computer Science guy w/a degree from one of the elite engineering

colleges of the world & he'd never spent much time mingling with mortal

end-users. So when he crafted test plans by talking with his elite buds and

getting critique from the vendors who created the products, he got predictable

tests that delivered (mostly) predictable results.

So the Test Center staff and I tried to create something

entirely different: user-centered testing, with the plans' developed in 

collaboration with the readers, people who deployed and supported the products

in the field with real users.

And WB was unalterably opposed, even though it was not his job

any more. He campaigned relentlessly to have it overturned, and finally, when I

wouldn't budge without him telling me why he was so opposed, he said

"but if we change, that would mean we were wrong".

This is one of the primary reasons it took from the second

petroleum price shock until about 2009, roughly 30 years, for American auto

manufacturers to boost fuel efficiency, losing significant market share in the

delay. And one of the survivals of the failure, the legislated lack of universal

MPG reporting on all new auto ads, persists to this moment.

Will Valentine be cowed, or will his words free others to point

out the unforgivable failure of preventing a cheap defect repair? The

truth-tellers here usually suffer some, but in Baseball, at least, adaptive

change usually happens. ¿In your own shop, would you speak up or remain silent?

40: Meditation

Through meditation we can start to understand the process and through understanding the process we can begin to understand the principle. This is the way things happen so we begin to understand what is happening on the project.

The Tao

Chapter 40 of the Tao is very short,

Lao Tsu tells us:

Returning is the motion of the Tao.

Yielding is the way of the Tao.

The ten thousand things are born of being.

Being is born of not being.

Inventors Gone Wild: Krispy Kreme Donut Burger Trumps Texas-Size Cholesterol Catharsis

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought. - Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi

The Texas Rangers are playing great baseball, as of today, projected out to an 103-win season. That's an Alaska-sized pile 'o wins, but amazingly, the meme that munching Texas types this season is The Boomstick, a  24-inch hot dog with chili, cheese and jalapeños with an underlying slab of wood to carry the frelling thing. Unlike the team's front office & manager (relentlessly intelligent, elegantly designed to do the job), the Boomstick is the Anna Nicole Smith of comestibles, replacing pointless size and encapsulated self-destuctiveness in the name of "a good time". Still, it's actually not the scariest concession chatcka of the 21st century. That title belongs to...well, read this reprise and you'll know.

   Most inventions in baseball, in natural evolution, in life, in business, are failures. And that's okay, because inventors who fear failure fear invention, and that limits their effectiveness. To zero. Great inventions tend to be bold -- an essential element shared with the greatest belly-flops.

   Baseball though, as the U.S.' most evolved and highly sophisticated innovation-processing engine, has some good illustrations of the exxxtreme innovation as the managerial equivalent of spontaneous human combustion. This week's Invention Gone Wild: the fat bomb known as the Gateway Grizzlies' "Best Ball Park Hamburger". Hawkeyed Sean McNally at Baseball Think Factory pointed to an article on ESPN describing the concession offering for the East St. Louis Frontier League team. It's a concoction that blows away the scary 30 year reign of the Baltimore Memorial Stadium incumbent Baseball Concession Lord 'o Lard.

   I am going to tell you about the Grizzlies' extraordinary kulinary kookiness, but first a little about the de-throned incumbent. Memorial Stadium proffered the truly scary comestible...deep fried "burritos" A teammate of mine, Burly Betts, used to go the games with me and then would orddr & then actually eat one. A by-product was I couldn't go to the bathroom and give him my scorecard because it would get an Exxon Valdez-autograph-model grease slick on it that would render it write-proof, immune to both pencil and any kind of pen I had access to. Deep fried burritos were not just scary, but Edgar Allan Poe-scary, and something that would not be dislodged for the Chamber of Concession Horrors for decades to come.

   But now it has been usurped by the Grizzlies' Krakatoa O' Adiposity. According to the ESPN story:

Homer Simpson would love the newest taste sensation in minor league baseball: the donut burger.

   The Gateway Grizzlies of the Frontier League promised to create "Baseball's Best Burger" in time for the team's opener in late May. And they appear to have succeeded. The ballpark sandwich will include a hamburger topped with sharp cheddar cheese and two slices of bacon -- all between a "bun" made of a sliced Krispy Kreme Original Glazed donut. {SNIP}

   Calorie counters predict the monster will set you back about 1,000 calories and 45 grams of fat. {SNIP} (Grizzlies general manager Tony) Funderberg, who has said he has eaten at least 10 of the Grizzlies' new creations as part of a "sampling process," said the team hopes to sell 100 to 200 of them a night at $4.50 each. He calls it a bargain, considering it is a meal and a dessert in one.

   I'm not, as Dave Barry would say, making this up. For those of strong constitution, here's a pic.

LONG PERSONAL & ETHNOGRAPHIC ASIDE: I've never "gotten" the Krispy Kreme thing. I have always loved doughnuts, but the name of that brand alone scared the hell out of me -- the idea of eating anything called Kreme, something that seems assured to use as ingredients no actual food products but was probably intended for use as something like this, seems pretty sci-fi to me. ¿Worse, who wants their cream to be Krispy? What kow delivers krispy kreme? OTOH, back when I drove a Yellow Cab in the D.C. metro area, about the only Peacemaker a group of cabbies I worked with had was the local Krispy Kreme outlet. They were from all over (Biafra, Nigeria, Palestine, New Mexico, Pakistan, to name a few points of origin) and basically worked as zero-sum competitors even if they worked for the same company. Arguments would explode over lines and fares, politics, religion, the best way to get to the corner of N. Vermont St and N. Vermont St. -- yes a real corner guaranteed to fry the skulls of the poor sots who tried to ease the stress of the job by smoking reefer -- and whether the dispatchers were on the take. But one one unifying passion was the consumption of hot, fried fat, a comfort that soothed, and expanded, the savage breast of almost all hacks. The inescapable conclusion of 20th century cultural anthropology was that healthy societies survived by gathering and distributing protein; I guess there must now be a 21st century corollary: that other-than-healthy societies thrive by gathering and distributing fried fats.

   The Gateway Grizzlies play home games a mere 3½ miles from the Midwest's most pungent olfactory landmark, East St. Louis' Monsanto plant, normally a bad thing, but I'm thinking that in this context a positive -- they make (or used to, at least) make most of the aspirin used in the U.S. in that factory, and the grease-hangover headaches demand a gargantuan supply of analgesics.

BEYOND BASEBALL:   But the Grizzlies "Best Ballpark Burger" is as innovative as it is distasteful. It's originality factor is very high. It's a risky invention in that they aren't simply adding something you'd normally add, or tweaking one of the ingredients (remove catsup, add mustard, for example). It's bold, it's original...it's repulsive.

   In part, what makes it seem so repulsive is that it's a specific form of invention called an "intensification". Intensification is a primitive idea, an it can work. It's one of the simplest forms of invention, and it's easy to implement because it doesn't require creativity. Because of that non-requirement, it is the most common form of innovation. It just says "whatever we're doing that seems successful, let's just do more of it." So if customers think a two-blade razor shaves closer than a single blade, ¿why not three blades? And if you think your competitor will re-tool to make three-bladed shavers, preempt her by going to four blades. Automobiles' rear fins grew and got more ornate from 1957 (like this) to about 1962 (more complex like this) and even bigger through about 1964 and then stopped. Designers intensified what buyers wanted until the model failed and they were forced to invent a new look.

   This has worked both in the prepared and processed food industries over the last quarter century. Taken as a market, Americans love eating fat, and more is generally more popular. The percentage of American adult who are merely "overweight" by federal standards has been pretty consistent over the last 25 years, but every 12 years, an additional 9% of the adult population are building their bodies into a configuration defined as "obese" (that is, very overweight). If you are skeptical, take a look at this CDC chart that indicates two-thirds of American adults are overweight and three out of ten are obese.

   In general practice, intensification may make the product of invention more effective or not, but frequently consumers will feel like it did because it seems logical. If a ballpark cheeseburger satisfies because of its very high fat content, amplify the appeal point...throw on bacon (two slices please). And if the bacon cheeseburger maxes out the design possibilities for fat transmission, go straight for what ounce for ounce, is the third most potently concentrated source of fat I can think of: the glazed doughnut (a little under two ounces and roughly 12 grams of fat), not as scary as this one I ate this year.

   Inventors will go wild at times. The bolder the initiative, the greater risks they take and the greater likelihood of remarkable success they have. But when the kreme is krispy, the kuisine is kreepy and it can be either a kickstart to karmatic konsummation or a komplete klunker.

Avoiding Change Manglement, Ichiro-Style

Observer
effect: The act of observation changes

the object being observed

Like most normal people and baseball players, Ichiro Suzuki prefers to do
things his own way. Like almost all successful baseball players, and like many
(though not most) normal people, he is committed to his employer's success. And
it looks like there's a big change coming in both how he will do things and in
his employer's success.

It's the result of a many-year Change Management initiative that has been
barely committed to over the years, sometimes desultorily, sometimes not at all,
the luke-warmness of it created by or merely encouraged by executive ownership.
That lack of commitment eroded the commitment of the Seattle Mariners' all-time
most successful manager and ate the career of one other proven manager. That
chronic lack of commitment, though, resulted in what I call Change Manglement...the
act of changing only when the status quo has declined so severely that only a
functional idiot committed to failure (or with
an incentive that transcends what everyone else considers "success")
would continue on the same path.

Ichiro Suzuki is a relentless seeker of excellence, and through an intense
commitment to doing things his own way (even if that meant training 50% more
than any other franchise player in the big leagues, and even if that meant
politicking to get rid of anyone who wanted him to do things differently), he
has had a long and successful career making continual small adjustments to a
basic foundation to which he's committed. 

He hasn't changed because he's been a success in his own measures of what
that means. For Suzuki, like most people, it's hard to balance a decision to
change when the contributor has been a success in their own currency, but that
currency is different from what makes the employer successful, either in its own
currency, or that of customers. Measuring the same events using different
currencies is one of the most significant blockages in getting contributors,
employers and customers to achieve Change (because if one measures
"accomplishment" using different currencies, the status quo may look
"better" than the proposed change. 

HISTORY FOR THOSE WHO WANT IT (otherwise skip down to next
section)

In his seven years as a regular in Japan, he led the league in batting
average seven times, that is, every single season. In his first
(adjustment) year in the Majors, he won the batting title. In his 4th year of
play, as a 30 year old, he broke the all-time record for hits in a season (in
162 games, not the 154 games George Sisler had done it in) and most singles in a
season (again, in more games than Wee Willie Keeler). He has been great at what
he does, overrated in the outfield but still more than adequate there.

As a previous Mariner GM noted, it's great that Suzuki hits .340, but because his
hits are so singles-centric, and because he doesn't walk much, his batting
average alone overstates his true value as a lead-off batter. Again, when he can
hit .330 and get on base at about a .375 clip and steal 40 bases a season while
not getting caught stealing much, he's very useful, but not a super-star.

¿WHY DID CHANGE BECOME SO NECESSARY?

Over the previous few years, he had made small adjustments, getting just-enough
better at dealing with the inside pitches that it encouraged pitchers to work
the whole plate more he been surprisingly resistant to both radically altering
his approach and the expected ravages of age.

But last year, his approach just tanked. Look at this comparison of 2011
against his previous output as measured in percentage of plate appearances.

Suzuki	1b	2b	3b	HR	BB+HBP	K
2001-9	25.1%	3.4%	1.1%	1.2%	6.9%	9.0%
2011	21.4%	3.1%	0.4%	0.7%	5.4%	9.6%

Every single aspect of his game, from his sky-high production of singles, to his already lightweight production of
walks, sagged markedly. It's not as though it left him one single tweak to focus
on. While he has been resistant to changing his approach (going for more power
as former manager Lou Piniella had requested, or for more walks and steals as
former manager Mike Hargrove had hoped for), this was a collapse by any measure.
And his relatively hollow .370 on-base percentage declining to 2011's .310
really made his desire to be a lead-off batter a hollow hope.

SO WHAT IS THE CHANGE?

As I've written about a
few times, Ichiro has shown an extraordinary mastery of change in his
career, adjusting to age, to changing continents, to the never-ending
adaptations of pitchers and infielders to his game. But last week, he finally
relented to the bigger changes he has been avoiding. According to this
piece by the usually insightful Larry Stone:

Ichiro's style change is bigger news than his
lineup change

At age 38 and moved to third in the batting order,
Ichiro plans to evolve into more of a traditional gap hitter.

PEORIA, Ariz. — A quiet Mariners camp was
riled up on Tuesday.

In his post-workout media session, Eric
Wedge matter-of-factly dropped the blockbuster news he had been hinting at
since the end of last season, with a couple of new twists. Turns out it was a
three-parter:

Part one: Ichiro is no longer the leadoff
hitter. Gasp.

Part two: Chone Figgins is. Whaaa?

Part three: Ichiro will hit third. Wow.
{snip}

Ichiro, meanwhile, turned 38 last October,
and now he will be asked to re-invent himself. And do so in the spot in the
batting order many consider to be the most crucial — the one traditionally
reserved for the team's best hitter. That has clearly been Ichiro in the
past, but it was not Ichiro last year, when his "slap and run"
style stopped being effective.

We are already seeing signs of what for him
is a radical new approach. For one thing, in batting practice Ichiro has
unveiled a much wider, and more balanced, stance. For another, he's not
lifting his front leg, not perceptibly. His hands are lower. And, putting it
all into action, he seems much more intent on scalding line drives than the
slashing style of old.

"You can already see he's obviously
made some adjustments this winter if you watch him take BP," Wedge said.
"Ultimately, what I want him to do, I want him to make it his own. He's
as smart a baseball player as we have in there. He understands the game very
well. He understands what the responsibilities and priorities are with
someone hitting third. I'm trusting in that. What he wants to do is what's
best for the ballclub. That's what he's doing here.

"Any adjustment he's making is because
there's good reason for it in his mind. I don't think he made any changes
coming in here from a batting-stance standpoint with regards to just hitting
third. I do know one thing: He's stronger. He knew this was an option, and I
think he prepared for it."

Turns out that's exactly the case. Ichiro
said he had been preparing himself mentally all winter for the possibility of
hitting third. And he confirmed that he had also been working on changing his
hitting style.

"I've been working on that stance the
whole offseason, so that's not temporary," he said.

Asked why, he said, "To perform
better. We all make changes, adjustments to perform better. That's the only
reason."

Ichiro, to his credit, is saying all the
right things about leaving leadoff, and Wedge stated emphatically: "He's
on board. I was very clear with him, he was very clear with me. He's ready to
go."

It is true that Ichiro actually played more
games hitting third than first during his seven years in Japan, and won a
batting title in all seven of those years. It is true that he dabbled in the
three-hole during both of Japan's World Baseball Classic title runs. And it
is true that every Mariners manager preceding Wedge — starting with Lou
Piniella — toyed with the idea of hitting Ichiro third.

It is also true that Ichiro's identity as a
major-league player outside of Japan — as a Mariner, in other words — has
been inextricably linked to being a leadoff hitter.

In fact, in spring of 2001, when Piniella
was contemplating Ichiro hitting third, Ichiro told the Seattle P-I, "I
guess you could say I have the experience in the middle of the lineup. But I
don't like it. When you look at major-league hitters, the picture of Ichiro
isn't what comes to mind when you think of No. 3 hitters. I'm not a home-run
hitter ... But if the manager says to do it, I will do it to the best of my
ability."

Piniella eventually backed off on the idea
(except for three games in 2002, during which Ichiro went 8 for 14 as the No.
3 hitter) as did all his other managers. But that was when Ichiro was
cranking out 200 hits a year and hitting .300 annually, a trend that stopped
at 184 and .272 last year.

To me, the change in Ichiro's approach is
more interesting, and potentially more impactful, than the change in the
Mariners' batting order. I think it's absolutely the right thing for him to
do, regardless of where he hits in the lineup — the best way to regain his
stature as a premier hitter. At his
age, Ichiro is not going to get any faster, so an approach that has been so
predicated on infield hits — more than 50 a season in his prime years, and
up to a peak of 63 in 2001, when he took the league by storm — is not going
to continue to be effective.

The first reaction, of course, is to say,
"So why put a guy like that in three hole?" It's a legitimate
question. But everyone has seen what Ichiro can do in batting practice when
he swings from his heels. Drive after drive into the seats. His career
numbers hitting in the clutch are excellent (.333 batting average/.436
on-base percentage/.411 slugging percentage with runners in scoring position
in over 1,300 at-bats). And there has always been a sense that Ichiro can do
what he wants with a bat, if he puts his mind to it.

Now, it seems, he is ready and willing to
put his mind to being a more conventional hitter, one aiming for the gaps and
not the hole at shortstop.

CHANGE IS PERSONAL, CHANGE IS ORGANISATIONAL

In baseball (where's it's obvious) and beyond (where most managers just don't
get it), to create positive change, you need both to design organisational
change (reassign job responsibilities, prune technological and workflow plaque,
tweak or remake messages given internally and to customers and suppliers, to
name a few key aspects), and re-shape individuals' behaviors.

In my own management practice, the first knowledge I try to document is how
the organization defines "success" (that is, its currency or
currencies). If the organization is not already successful on its own terms, a
frequent major contributor is that either contributors don't share the same
currency or internal incentive systems don't reinforce that currency -- or
outright undermine it. For example, I was working with a publishing concern four
years ago that had as a mission delivering online the most important and
interesting informational details the readers wanted. Okay, but contributors
were evaluated primarily on how closely they hewed to deadlines and the
conformance of their grammar and punctuation to a style guide...all very
worthwhile objectives, but very different from the mission. It's not surprising
that the shop was pointlessly tense and the product a failure at its mission. No
one was particularly happy with the results, but change (outside of contributor
churn, something that would not affect the organization's success) was not on
the menu. This doesn't exactly guarantee failure (contributors may choose to
pursue the organization's mission if it's stated clearly, even if contributors
get no praise or bonus for it -- but to succeed in this environment requires a
great deal of luck or extraordinary hiring). (One of the smartest clients I've
ever worked with wrote a
how-to book on part of the currency issue and it's a very worthwhile first
step if you need to get actionable ideas on turning a currency problem around,

So getting contributors' and the organization's currencies running at least
parallel is an important first step. When Ichiro first came to the team, they
were determined to get to the playoffs to justify the most expensive publicly-subsidized
stadium ever built, and he was the catalyst achieving that. His currency was:
being a batting average champion, being respected as a defender, notching 200
hits per season, helping the team achieve its mission.

Over time, the team mutated. As documented in Jon Wells' forthcoming book, Shipwrecked: A Peoples' History of the Seattle Mariners,
executive management committed to an overriding single mission: achieving
positive cash flow every year. While not all fans/customers share Wells'
currency (winning titles), and while most MLB customers will settle for an
adequate team that is entertaining and has entertaining, family-friendly
diversions, close to zero customers share executive management's overriding
single mission. After a few years of cash-flow success with lagging on-field
performance, contributors, especially hyper-competitive ones like professional
baseball players, tend to lose some sharpness. Not Suzuki: he just pursued his
own currencies more doggedly, and because the team's fortunes were so lukewarm
and winning titles became more apparently a back-burner objective, the front
office and field management had less incentive to go toe-to-toe with the
outfielder to get him to do what they wanted even if it wasn't exactly what he
wanted...it wasn't close to making a difference between winning a World Series
and having a mediocre record, so ¿why sweat it?

The Seattle Mariners team approaching the 2012 season is a different animal,
though. The front office has apparently got executive management to consider a
long-term plan for extended winning records, giving playing time to young
players and hot prospects who, if they succeed, become very cost-effective,
success-hungry contributors. 

It's a strategy that tends to produce interesting but losing teams in the
present with a chance to contend in the future. Given that strategy, Ichiro's
pre-eminent currencies are worth less to the team. Instead of "setting the
table", he needs to "set the tone" of a team ethic. When the
young players see even the self-centered star is willing to make major changes
to help the team succeed, they are likely to pattern their own behavior after
that trajectory, one that helps organizations succeed.

It helps, of course, that Suzuki had an historically awful season last year
and that, competitive dude he is, that allows him to relax his jaws a little bit
and release the radial long enough to give the field manager's Change initiative
a try.

But a key part of this Change initiative is getting the contributors to buy
in. It's not enough to have a clear stated mission, and to rework incentives. To
achieve organisational change, the team has to get the individuals that make up
the systems to change, too. Change is organisational, but change in personal,
too, and without both, the odds of success are close to zero.

The M's new experiment will be fun to watch through its predictable downs and
ups. And if you have enough courage and persistence to try this in your own
organization (through reassigning job responsibilities, pruning technological and workflow plaque,
tuning your incentive systems -- both explicit and tacit, tweaking or remaking messages given internally and to customers and suppliers, to
name a few key aspects) you have a potent tool for revolutionizing your
outcomes.

Baseball does this all the time. ¿Will you?

Art Imitates Life, but The NFL Imitates Baseball

Back in late 2009, I wrote about (then new) Detroit Lions Head coach Jim Schwartz & his Tampa Bay Devil Rays'-style project to remake the sad sack of the NFL, a team which had gone 0-16 before his tenure. This last weekend, that team not only made its way into the NFL playoffs (somewhat of an accomplishment) but acquitted itself most-genuinely in the game against a superior opponent, losing only in the last quarter. The Management by Baseball description of how Schwartz proposed to turn the team around is worth attending to, especially for managers trying to turn around failed companies or departments.

While pro football has some interesting life lessons, there tend to be few management insights you can apply generally to non-sport management. I don't write about football here, but there's a great reason to introduce my first entry in over five years that will have the NFL as a centrepiece, although as a beneficiary of baseball wisdom, not an originator thereof-like. Specifically, it's about managing Change, the ultimate destination, home plate, in the Management by Baseball model.

Last Sunday, the New York Times sports section had a Judy Battista feature on Detroit Lions coach Jim Schwartz' culture change project with the perennially struggling Detroit Lions whose long parade to the graveyard (seven consecutive losing seasons culminating in last season's 0-16 no-mulligan mulligan) he inherited. Schwartz, faced with reviewing the efforts and failures of so many predecessors, lifted a page out of recent Baseball management achievement and closely recreated (with a few environmentally-appropriate tweaks...back to that later) the ever-struggling Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays' last-to-first-to-Championship experiment that succeeded so well last year.

BASEBALL'S WINNING MODEL

The Devil Rays got new ownership and they were committed to changing not just the game on the field, but the entire organization, not by the contemporary More-With-Less Cult's nostrum of laying off people, having a loud, showy re-org, spraying around a few motivational posters and declaring the war won, only to collapse under the imbecility of their Hank Paulson-y all-posture-no-redesign sham.

As I wrote a few years ago here, Instead of cloning the failed American business model, the Devil Rays owners set out to methodically ask the staff who had been implementing the old management's failures what those staffers had suggested that'd been ignored and what ideas they had been swallowing rather than promoting. Combined with the solid business methods they'd brought in from other fields, they synthesized a "culture" that started winning on every off-the-field level. Then they hired the most fearlessly innovative pedal-to-the-metal field manager candidate anywhere, Joe Maddon, and let him loose to do the same things in the clubhouse and on the field.

Baseball is change incarnate -- and no other line of work on our continent combines such relentless accountability and "transparency" -- but this Rays effort was simply the most magnificent publicly visible and closely measurable change management success of the 21st century. It's no surprise a long-struggling organization (though with smart, committed ownership) in another endeavor would choose to learn from it.

¿WHY CAN'T FOOTBALL BE MORE LIKE BASEBALL? OH, IT CAN.

As Battista wrote (abridged here):

ALLEN PARK, Mich. — When Jim Schwartz, the new coach of the Detroit Lions, quoted Shakespeare on the day he made the rookie Matthew Stafford his starting quarterback, his choice of source material was painfully appropriate.

“Hamlet.” A tragedy. {SNIP}

Schwartz swears that nobody in his vast network of football friends told him he was crazy to take the Lions job; they said it was a great opportunity. Now that he is here, he feels a responsibility to field a team in which the economy-battered city can take pride. During minicamp, he even took top rookies to sign autographs at a truck assembly plant in Dearborn.

But Schwartz also knows there is nothing he can say, no billboard slogan persuasive enough, to change minds like edited-out fan} Mizgalski’s until the Lions win. Instead, Schwartz has changed just about everything else he could.

A new coaching staff was hired. Uniforms were redesigned. Weight machines were replaced by free weights. The locker room seating chart was rearranged. Parking spaces were assigned. The practice schedule was upended.

Schwartz is a student of the disciplined, methodical approach to coaching and personnel management. The objective is not to turn the Lions around, he said, but to improve every day, to lay the foundation for the long-term success he knew with Belichick and Fisher. The difference, Schwartz said, is like losing 10 pounds in two weeks with body wraps and Master Cleanse or by changing eating habits and running on the treadmill. {SNIP}

“From the time they walked in, they could never say this: ‘Same old stuff around here,’ ” Schwartz said after a recent practice. {SNIP}

The Lions have many qualities of successful franchises: a state-of-the-art practice facility and stadium; generous, hands-off ownership; passionate fans. But Millen’s misguided drafts left the team without the traditional building blocks of offensive and defensive linemen.

“Isn’t there a show on Food Network where they give you six ingredients and say, ‘Make something out of this?’ ” Schwartz said. “That is a little of what this is. In Tennessee, our system changed a little bit each year. But it was incremental. One or two new players would come in, and we’d say, ‘This fits us better this year.’ This is a huge melting pot here. That’s probably the most difficult thing — nobody was familiar with the terminology or the system because the system was developed here.”

NOTE: Schwartz didn't quite have the management luxury the buyers of the wretched Devil Rays did in that ownership wasn't turned over from disastrous failures who were so obvious, getting buy-in for change is made a little easier. But the Lions' 0-16 record last campaign was a statement no baseball team could even come close to, even the 1899 Cleveland Spiders.

BEYOND BASEBALL

A lot of suggestions between the Devil Rays' and the Lions' change initiatives. But what Schwartz got from Maddon and his Tampa co-implementors, was, if you have the opportunity, CHANGE AT LEAST EVERYTHING THAT IS VISIBLE & NOT UNSURPASSABLE. Make a clear splash that all the unquestioned behaviors of the past are now going to get questioned...maybe kept, but at least examined. Have no fear about trying something risky that might not work because you can't drop below where you started if you started in last place.

As I was writing this, the Lions, who had been 0-2 for the 2009 season, won their first game in 19 tries.

As I like to say about change management efforts committed to and that yield some results, There is Maddon to Their Methods.

Jon Daniels - Part IV: Rangers' GM Attacks a Diseconomy of Scale

This is the final installment of the March, 2007 interview Jon Daniels did with me. He'd gotten his first G.M. job as the nexus of a team that had never gone to a World Series, and now with him in place, they've achieved enough excellence to get to two Series in a row.

This part deals with an issue more and more managers have to deal with in a globalized business world -- communicating effectively and keeping people on course and pulling together in a system where the work is distributed over more remote workplaces -- a Diseconomy of Scale that is both common and usually fatal.

And, btw, my arrogance knows few bounds...I suggested in this 2007 piece that it would be interesting to see how much difference his extremely bright approach would help achieve five years hence (that is, this season). I think I was pretty prescient, though DANIELS was he one with the focus, execution and relentlessness to bring the achievement home. He is to be congratulated again for both his leadership and his being such a great team-mate to his team-mates.

In Part III, Daniels explained how his first big initiative on getting the
Texas Rangers' GM job was to push for better organizational cohesion through a
couple of methods -- organization-wide meetings to integrate people who, while
dependent on each other for success, didn't have opportunities to meet face to
face, and personal notes to people on noteworthy occasions to reinforce their
view of how the organization valued them.

NOTE: The first issue he addressed, face-to-face meetings, is a critical
ingredient in large organizations and one, in a globalized world, is
decreasingly present. From cohesion to clear communication to sharing of
common mission/values, face-to-face interaction is close to indispensable for
success, an issue I dependency on what I call "proximity". I won't
elaborate on this here: I've written a lot about the failure to achieve
Proximity and its costs here
and here;
I wrote an
article recently for Redmond Magazine about the counter-example...how a
creative software company, eProject, skillfully balances its choice to
offshore some of its development against the need for Proximity.

He let me read one of the letters he was about to send out as an example.

{he let me take a minute to read the letter}

Jeff (MBB): I especially like the part where it says “Be creative, don’t hesitate to experiment”. You’ve worked outside of baseball, so you know how much more experimental baseball is than most lines of work. Business should be that way.

Jon Daniels (JD) : There’s no doubt about that. And even in Baseball, unless it’s really well-defined, explicit expectations, then people are hesitant.

A hypothetical example… you have a hitting coach in A ball. He’s got a top prospect there and you’ve been handed a program to use…these are our hitting drills and these are the things we do, and you have a prospect wh’s not responding. The coach knows he’s a top prospect, maybe he represents some top money, he’s in the Carolina or Midwest or the California League…kind of out on an island, and not connected to the big club. He’s thinking like “Yeah, yeah, these are the drills I’ve been given. I’m not going to mess with it. I’ve seen something, I’d like to try it, but I’m not going to be the one to stray from the program.

I’ve been encouraging these guys to try. I say, “you know our general belief system, you know what we’re about…don’t stray from that. But within the parameters defined, innovate. I say “You played this game a long time. You had a coach somewhere along the line who got through to you. What did that coach do? Are you trying those things? We hired you because you’re an intelligent guy – you’re not a robot. You want to try some new drills? Do it. You want to try something drastic? Call the farm director, call the coordinator. Let them know – let’s not get crazy, but at the same time, I’m going to hold you accountable if he doesn’t get better so if you’re seeing this isn’t working, he’s not responding…well, everybody responds to things differently.

One of the things I’ve really tried to drive home is don’t be afraid to try something different. I expect you to put your stamp on the organization.

MBB: “Everybody responds to something differently”. That’s another piece of consciousness that seems intrinsic to baseball but not so much beyond it – so much so in baseball, a lot of people take it for granted. But for someone managing a doughnut shop, for example, it should be the same principle. A manager of a customer service department, for example, might luck into a whole group of people who respond to the same practices and drills, but baseball knows a lot more about your principle than most lines of work.

I loved you making it explicit, too, in your letter. What kind of people do you send them to?

JD: This letter is going to everybody in the organization. The works.

It’s just a little thing to recognize we’re about to kick off this season. I try to personalize each one with a little note at the bottom, rather than just having copies.

And the message I’m stating is: everything we are facing is a competition – how are you going to help us win today. I want to empower them.

I haven’t been an area scout. When I talk with those guys, they think I’m joking, but I think I’d want to be an area scout one of these days… to me it’s one of the more exciting jobs in the game. Say you’re out in Idaho looking for players every day…you couldn’t be more removed from this thing. You might feel like “what am I really doing to help us win every day.” It’s the Fall, there’s no baseball going on…are you going to that basketball game, that football game, meeting that two-sport star. You can sit in the stands, hear what his friends are saying about him. That gives you and advantage…especially if you’re the only team there and there’s no Angels or Oakland scout there, you just beat them. So we’re really trying to empower these guys.

And we haven’t done it, but we’ve talked about a financial reward if a guy (you scouted) gets to the big leagues should that scout get something. During the draft a scout is going to fight for his guy over someone else, they all are; would it make sense to have the whole scouting department get something if you get a guy up to the Big Leagues. And how about development? We haven’t done anything there yet but we’re trying.

MBB: Have you heard of any organization trying to re-design traditional incentive systems around scouting and development?

JD: I think some have. I don’t have any
details for you.

Anyway, That’s the biggest non-player/personnel impact I’ve tried to have. Stability, family, we’re in this together, Ranger Pride, and you’re part
of something special. And it’s critical for me to spend time with people like our minor league coaches. Touch base with or amateur scouts have a phone call with them every once in a while.. This Winter I had Barbara, my assistant, put the name and cell phone number of somebody different in front of me every day, both Thad & I. One day it was an A-ball trainer, the next a Dominican scout, the next day a major league coach, a AA pitching coach. Whatever it was…somebody every day was getting a call. I’m just trying to connect the organization.

MBB: Management by calling around.

JD: I know I play a little harder when I have a personal relationship with the guy I’m working for. It’s “we care. How are you doing? How are the kids?”

MBB: That is a fantastic method.

His idea, not fully explored yet, that scouting and development should get an
incentive bonus for the success of the individuals who went through their
personal workflows, is one I've advocated for organizations beyond baseball for
a long time. It's a little easier to implement in Baseball than beyond because
Baseball takes measurement seriously and executes.  Most non-baseball
organizations have little idea of the output of their staffers, and wouldn't do
it if they knew how. But if H.R., in part as a department and in part as
individuals, saw a significant part of their compensation depend more the on
high performance of the people they recruit and get into the organization and a
little less on avoiding error (what Daniels here put in his letter as "Be
creative. Don't hesitate to experiment") and a lot less on just feeling
like they're feeding a boiler -- they shovel it into the system and never see it
again, I believe H.R. would perform better through immediate behavioral shifts
and over time by attracting more entrepreneurially ambitious folk to the
discipline. The mechanics of the system would be imperfect, as all compensation
programs are, but I've built a few context-specific proposals, and it's not hard
to come up with one that's significantly better than the status quo with less
risk than the status quo has.

And the personal involvement he talks about is a vital advantage small
organizations have over large ones which suffer the Diseconomy of Scale that
comes when the executives at the top of the organization don't run into every
staffer every day. Daniels is doing what's doable to address it.

He's top-flight to have noticed it makes a difference and even better in that
he sets aside time to attack the limits scale imposes. It'll be fascinating to
see what the Texas Rangers will doing in the 5th year of his regime, because it
takes a while to turn around diseconomies of scale.

¿Why are you waiting on it?

Jon Daniels - Part III: Lessons in Changing Direction (A Reprise from 2007)

In the last entry, I continued the conversation Texas Rangers' general
manager Jon Daniels had with me in March, 2007. In this segment (one more to follow), Daniels talks about his initial moves on first inheriting management of a organization that has plenty of room for improvement. First moves are, as I try to hammer home, critical and usually set the limits of what a manager can achieve in the organization. His approach worked well enough that three years later (the planning/change horizon in major league baseball is usually six seasons, sometimes five) his front office team participated-in/led a very unusual accomplishment -- having a franchise get to the World Series in back-to-back years.

In the previous two entries that resulted from the interview Jon Daniels
worked with me in Spring Training this year, we covered a couple of lessons from
him. This part of the interview covered his approach to his early moves.

I asked him how he looked at his personnel and what kinds of moves he thought
might need to occur. The reason I asked was partially too try to reveal how his
management mind operated.

Jeff (MBB): Last year in Spring Training, the Rangers had one of those Hollywood disaster movies. You guys had an extraordinary string of injuries. This year, it seems more in the normal range. Given that, is there any spot on your roster that’s at the top of your list as a place to be looking for reinforcements? Or is it too early (March 20)?

Jon Daniels (JD): We don’t have a ton of depth in position players. And long-term, we don’t necessarily have a slam-dunk heir apparent center fielder. Those are things I’ll be looking out for.

I think in the past, we’ve always erred on the side of bats. As an organization, we’ve redefined ourselves, what we’ll be about. We going to clearly err on the side of pitching. It’s why I think we’re fine this Spring anyway. We’ve got some depth there – we have more guys who deserve to make the club than we have spots. 

But I’d much rather be in that position than I was last year.

I counsel managers to make a big (but thought-out) splash early on in
starting a new management gig because one never again has as much chance to act
unimpeded, ever. Daniels had a factor that might have been either a severe
constraint, or perhaps liberating: his relative chronological youth. If he had
chosen to let it be a constraint, it could have made him err on the side of
caution ,- but as you can see, it didn't. BTW: there's a long aside here that's
not classic MBB material -- Jon's relating to me how that first press conference
he did came about. I left it in because I thought it was interesting to me
personally, and I thought it might be to some readers, too..

MBB: {SNIP} On the subject of starting a new job...I always say when a manager starts a new job, it’s critical to have some serious achievements right away. There are some GMs, Doug Melvin and Bill Bavasi for a couple of examples, who view themselves more as stewards, less inclined to tear things up than I usually advocate for my (non-baseball) clients. When you took the GM promotion with the Rangers, you were quoted as saying something like “we’re going to do many different things”. I don’t know if the reporter munged the quote…if perhaps you had said “we are going to do some things differently”. When you took the promotion, had you already developed ideas on which you had wanted to execute?

JD: I did have a few things…but first, I want to say, I’d take that first press conference with a grain of salt.

A quick chronology for you.

Season ends on a Sunday. We have a staff meeting with ownership on Monday. John (Hart), Buck (Showalter), me, one or two guys from the staff, Tom Hicks and his son Tommy, who’s involved in the business. We go over a lot of things – I’d prepared a good amount of information for the meeting. And John throughout the meeting is constantly deferring to me. A couple weeks back John had told me he was going to come back for another year. We get up and we go to leave and John take my hand and says, “hell of a job today”. A little differently than usual. So I leave, fight through traffic, get back to the office about 6 o’clock. And I have a 7 a.m. flight to the Dominican Tuesday morning, and I have an e-mail message from Tom Hicks saying please call me when you get back to the office. He doesn’t usually do that, but he has contacted me directly before.

So I call Tom, and he says, “Jon, what do you have planned for tomorrow,” and I told him about my trip to the Dominican…we were working on opening a new academy there and I’m overseeing the project. He said, “I’d like for you to cancel your flight and come to the office tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock.” When the owner tells you to cancel, you cancel. I said, “No problem. Is there anything I can prepare?” and he said, “Just be prepared to talk about the future direction of the franchise”.

So I called John, and I asked him what was going on, and John said, “When you left, I went in to tell him I was going to step down and I recommended to him that you get the job.” It’s now 8 p.m., I call my wife and tell her I’m not going to be home, that I’ve got some preparing to do. Including thinking “am I ready?” You may get one shot at this…do you want to blow it? Or, you may never get another shot at it.

Prepare. Don’t sleep much that night. Walk the dog at about 4 in the morning. Go into Tom’s office at 10. And at 11:30, he’s extending his hand to me and offering me the job. About 45 minutes into the meeting the questions stop being “If you were to get the job what would you do,” and the tense changes to What are we going to do? How are we going to handle this situation?” Offers me the job. At 12:30, we have lunch. At 1:30 we call a press conference, and at 5 o’clock, we’re in front of the cameras. 

There wasn’t a lot of time for me to prepare my thoughts.

MBB: So the things you had in your toolbox you thought you might introduce, what have you done, what have you put off that you may or may not do, and what were the ideas you had planned on acting on that you decided not to?

JD: I think that there are two global or philosophical changes things that I have really tried to introduce. The first is I’ve tried to gear the organization more towards pitching – that’s more a result-oriented, tangible difference.

The other one is something I did in response to the fact that the organization had become too fragmented. I think in the previous six years, I’m the 3rd GM since Doug (Melvin), Ron
(Washington) is the 4th manager, we’ve had four scouting directors and four farm directors. That’s way too much change. And we talk all the time about success being the result of stability and ability. We didn’t have the first, and the other was lacking because of it.

So we had our first organizational meetings this past
off-season…the first, I think, since Doug left…seven years. 

MBB: Wow. That long?

JD: Yes…as a whole organization. We’d had met as departments.

MBB: So the organization-wide meeting…that was your initiative?

JD: Yes.

One of the things I want to do is create more of a family atmosphere. Yes, accountability, and goals and deadlines. But…we’ve done a lot of little things. The front office, we write little cards to everybody on their birthday on their kids and wives birthdays, their anniversaries, Mother’s Day. Here…here’s an example of the kind of letter we’re sending out….we’re looking to build that khnd of ethic.

{he let me take a minute to read the letter}

BEYOND BASEBALL - BATTLING CREEPING QUAQUAVERSALITY

On the field, the Rangers had tried, and failed to get back into the playoffs,
as an offensively-driven team in an offensively-lush home ballpark. (Though it's
important to note, Don
Malcolm realized the offensive-boosting park has at times actually --
pre-Daniels -- fooled the team into thinking its offense was better than it
actually was and undervalued its current pitching.) Daniels has made a
commitment to try the other side of the equation. 

Off the major league team's field, the Texas Rangers had become a
quaquaversal organization, radiating out in all directions simultaneously:
geographically, departmentally, and as a result, socially, too. 

This Diseconomy of Scale is near-universal in large organizations beyond
baseball. As the size increases, the likelihood of quaquaversality increases,
the Scylla and Charybdis of Us-Them-ism and lack of coordination increases. How
can you maintain the mission, support goals, keep generating objectives in
harmony as this happens?

Conscious effort applied to connecting people and methods across the
organization, showing each individual how they matter and how other individuals
they don't yet know matter. Every organization is going to need its own plan for
the creating a centripetal force to hold counteract the Diseconomy of Scale as
best they can. Daniels' initiatives here make excellent sense, and we'll pick up
more of them in the next part of this interview, in a subsequent entry.