Management by Baseball

You can never step on
the same home plate twice - Heraclitus

The last skill a manager can master, and only if the manager has mastered all the others, is managing change. That's Home Plate in the Management by Baseball model, and one of the widely-acknowledged masters of it is Oakland A's GM Billy Beane.

Beane's front office team have done it again -- found new ways to apply change management and planning to push organizational achievement. It doesn't look as revolutionary as Moneyball did, but it requires the application of new techniques.

If your tank is already full on Moneyball and competitive change management, skip down to the next header, otherwise, the next bit of background will be useful.

Beane's front office techniques, and those of his innovative staff, were publicized through Michael Lewis' engaging, and influential beyond baseball, book Moneyball. It became influential because the Athletics and Beane gave Lewis an uncommon level of access (teams sometimes give full access to a writer, for example the Cardinals' kimono-flashing to gee-whiz-meister Buzz Bissinger for his book Three Nights  in August, but Bissinger doesn't bring the weight of knowledge and insight to a subject Michael Lewis does) and Beane and his workgroup were willing to reveal to the world all their "tricks". Those "tricks" weren't really tricks at all; they were proven techniques imported from other several endeavors and then given a baseball context.

Beane & his workgroup were fearless about sharing that with the world because...

• It's really hard for management, even very good management, to import techniques from other lines of work,
• It's uncommon that managers are able to synthesize theirs own industry-specific methods into imported techniques in a context-sensitive way (it's more common that practices, when imported, are taken virtually whole-hog), so they tend to miss opportunities to yield more, or sometimes they fail entirely, and,
• Lewis didn't reveal (or perhaps didn't know) the key technique that made the change methods so powerful.

That undocumented technique was one that was close to explicit to Moneyball readers who "do" innovation for a living (like Joe Ely or Dave Pollard) or who work for Toyota, or those who know the work of Deming, or just about anyone reasonably experienced who has a management position in baseball.

That undocumented approach is that you change the changes on an on-going basis. Mutation, adaptation, testing tweaks and big jumps, are all constant. So Change is not a moment you can bring about with a plan and schedule (though you'll need plenty of both of those), change is an ongoing process. You Observe, Measure, Analyse and Adapt. 

And it's not one of those tidy-but-egregiously-insightless Powerpoint slides illustrating a cycle that everyone uses because it's de rigeur to include it in the "deck"; you have to do all of those actions simultaneously, every day.

So the Athletics front office were glad to reveal their methods because they knew by the time Moneyball hit readers' eyes, they would already be doing their details differently. It's not just that Beane, et.al. didn't have to lose a competitive edge by laying it all out, they might actually gain a competitive edge by having slow boats chasing methods they had already discarded for more evolved ones...a double whammy.

SINCE MONEYBALL
So while the Alderson-Beane-DePodesta-and-others front office brought surprisingly competitive baseball to a small-market franchise owned by bottom-line humping real-estate guys, the string of success appeared to snap in 2007. Last year was the first sub-.500 season since the one Moneyball was being written:

Oakland Athletics Team History & Encyclopedia - Baseball-Reference.com

Note, please,  neither won/lost record for 2006 and 2007 are fully indicative of the team's ability. In 2006, the A's had a supernatural power over the Seattle Mariners. The M's, otherwise an above .500 team, went cherry-pie time against the A's, and Oakland's pride went 17-2 against Seattle. Had they gone 10-9 instead, they wouldn't have won the division - they would have been in 3rd place behind the M's. In 2007, Seattle worked on countering the specific tactics the A's had used to beat them down in 2006 and turned the tables, beating Oakland 14 out of 19 games. Had the split been a more even 9-10 in favor of Seattle, Oakland's record would have been 80-82. Not a flustercluck, just a disappointment.

The real (not popularly assumed) idea of the Moneyball approach was that the A's front office could analyze the market every year and take advantage of an evolving set of overlays and underlays to be one step ahead of competitors that were bound to exist within the areas the resource-constrained franchise could afford to invest in.

Like all comparative advantages, the Alderson/Beane/DePodesta design for ongoing analysis/action worked. Until it didn't. Their approach started under-performing relative to recent past performance because:

• The feedback loop in Baseball is tough: you have to keep change rolling every day or take a chance of losing difference-making edges, and at the same time,

• The resource-thin model allows for fewer mistakes, and at the same time the lack of resources allows less time for staff to tend to Big Picture stuff.

I'll get back to the results of that die-namic duo in a few paragraphs.

It didn't put a (functionally) ~.500 team on their field last year because it "failed". It underachieved last year relative to previous years because the panoply of techniques the A's had resources to pursue had been largely neutralized by like-minded analysts working in other front offices.

According to several articles (one from a San Francisco newspaper I can find no on-line link to), the Oakland front office realized they had fallen behind in scouting Latin America, an activity that had been a chosen casualty in previous tight times. So, an act of changing change to changing back. And, articles claimed, the A's are investing in proprietary medical research into preventing player injuries or shortening recovery time (the Colorado Rockies started investing in medical research a few years ago. That research appears to have played a part in the team's ability to balance its home-road performance, and enhance its late-season endurance, precursors, I think, to greater success). So, an act of changing by launching resources at the non-standard.

John Donovan of Sports Illustrated put together the best summary I can find on-line (found thanks to BTF):

The new course of action was charted last October, shortly after the A's had concluded their worst season since 1998. Beane sat down with Forst and others and conducted a top-to-bottom organizational review, Oakland's first in years. A new strength coach was brought in to examine why players were having such a huge problem with injuries. The A's also hired five new area scouts, adding to a staff that had become one of the smallest in the league, and re-sectioned the country to get better coverage. They increased their scouting budget in Latin America and elsewhere internationally, and have earmarked more money for signing bonuses.

The change in scouting has been especially noteworthy, considering the criticism the team has faced for its mediocre drafts over the past several years. Haren was traded to the Diamondbacks for six prospects last month; Baseball Prospectus immediately ranked four of them among the top seven players in Oakland's organization.

LACK OF SLACK MAKES FOR SNACK ATTACK
The cold, inescapable fact is that if resources are limited enough, gravity will pull even the most determinedly innovative organisation down towards the mean average.

The Athletics' approach mutated every year, but always within the same paradigm. Competitors adapted not slowly, but surely, to the A's paradigm (if not the twists the A's were introducing each year) to the point where in a zero-sum system, the yield for the A's diminished.

What should they have done to avoid that?

Hold top-to-bottom organizational reviews annually or more frequently.

Why didn't they?

Because on an extreme resource diet, managers have to make a lot of decisions about what to leave in & what to leave out, and the seduction of current success (exhibit 1: that team standings chart, previously) is to think that strategic, big-picture stuff might be less inexpendible than their more (apparently) urgent needs are.

Even the Yankees & Red Sox can't do everything their bright staffs can think up. Managers make choices, balancing present and future, importance and urgency.

So when the basic A's paradigm was being neutralized, the A's front office was squeezing out the resources they had to other needs. You can function with fewer scouts in the field than competitors if you can make their methods more effective/efficient. If your resources are tight enough, you squeeze out slack (getting leaner by eventually cutting muscle when you run out of fat). In a changing environment, you don't always know what will turn out to be muscle. In addition, the top of the organization has been passionately engaged in a set of real estate negotiations and designs around the franchise's new ballpark, and those non-baseball concerns are sucking up attention and (already limited) resources.

So, to have a top-to-bottom review in a slack-stripped system is a significant cost that you pull from each of the system contributors' time buckets. More scouts would have meant more slack would have made such a thing easier. Fewer scouts mean less slack, less tolerance for normal error, less time for not-here-and-now activities. And as long as the team was winning playoff spots, this seemed tolerable

The reality of limited resources is that, yes, it is, more often than not, the mother of invention, but it equally may be the Uncle Ernie of change management, cascading what is a tough situation into a tougher one.

There's no guarantee that pulling a piece from the pre-Moneyball paradigm will revolutionize the outcome. There's no guarantee that the non-standard medical research will make for a newer paradigm to replace Moneyball -- and, in fact, I suspect that would be very unlikely. But until the staff comes up with something new to break both the A's current and competitors' models, more change was necessary, and these both seem like reasonable additions (and the medical research has to be great brain candy

When you give a genius, especially one with accountable measures to define the magnitude of his or her accomplishments, a chance to manage or mentor others, it usually fails. When it does fail, it's usually a function of what I call "The Frank Robinson Rule".

The factors that make genius what it is are not just the factors that make someone very good in much greater quantity -- it's different factors. Geniuses that don't internalize that fact & act on it are doomed to expect their charges, even their most already-successful achievers, to conform to the genius' own pattern of accomplishments, and using the same paths to get there.

Frank Robinson, one of the top 20 players of the 20th century, is my poster dude for this problem. I've written before in detail about how his seemingly-effortless journey to being one of the great players of all time made his growth as a manager such a steep learning curve to ascend. The essence of the deal, quoting from the article at that link, is this:

Early in his managerial career, Robbie's Achilles Heel was that he was so much better than any player who ever played for him. Robbie seemed to have a hard time dealing with the mere mortals who were just very good. Like many managers beyond baseball who have come up through the ranks based on their extraordinary skills and not just on being the boss' son or knack for smooth inner-circle politics, being naturally brilliant is not a free pass to being a good manager. In fact, it's more often a wind-drag.

The early managerial Robinson couldn't imagine what it was like to struggle like heck to achieve at half the Robbie level. Lots of managers outside of baseball have this challenge. Sometimes it's because they were promoted specifically because they were so good at their position. Sometimes, it's because the new manager is just a super-smart person.

THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS: A GENIUS' SELF-AWARENESS
So it was with pleasure I read David Lennon's article at Newsday about Sandy Koufax responding to a request by New York Mets' reliever Billy Wagner to come to the team's spring training facility. While Koufax, perhaps the highest-impact left-handed starter in 20th century baseball, explained he was glad to go and work with the pitchers who wanted it, he also said explicitly he knew it might or might not have any value for each of the individuals he worked with.

Wagner specifically was looking for help with developing a curveball, and Koufax -- who threw one of the most spectacular overhand curveballs in major-league history -- said he mostly talked the "philosophy" of the pitch with the Mets' closer.

"If somebody wants to get better and I think I can help them, then it's a pleasure," said Koufax, 72. "I don't do it unless somebody asks me to do it, and if I help them, great. If I don't, I tell them it's an experiment. If it doesn't work for you, forget it. For it to work, you have to be comfortable. I don't have all the answers to anything."

Not according to Wagner and Martinez, who -- like just about everyone else -- listen to Koufax as if he invented the game. "I've known Sandy off and on for 12 years," Wagner said. "He's really about the only lefty I can talk to and go, 'Hey, what am I doing?' and kind of have somebody who kind of connects with me. When I pitch, he knows what I'm about. And he has a lot of good ideas. A lot of things I'm able to do, and a lot of things I'm not able to do. He has a wealth of experience. If you can tap in just a little bit, it's something you treasure."

Unlike the early Mensa-jero Robinson, Mensa-jero Koufax knows how to package a genius' message: I don't have the answers to everything. He's not going to teach Wagner to use the Koufax mechanics that were so successful for him. He's going to step back from that to the big picture that was so effective for him when he pitched in the 1960s and hope (not promise) that an analogous approach will work for Wagner.

One of the most seductive things a mentor or teach has to face in any field, Baseball or beyond, is escaping the trap of people listening to uncritically to what one says. When it happens often enough, the mentor listens to herself less well, losing some ability to be self-critical. For the genius (even the genius who is smart enough to realize just about everyone on the planet knows something valuable the genius doesn't), the most valuable criticism he can receive is self-criticism. and that requires self-awareness, the Third Base on the Management by Baseball diamond. Self-awareness for the very highest individual achievers is a very difficult thing to come by -- like a pitcher, a high achiever is generally the centre of attention, and it's easy for that genius to accept the adulation without an ongoing examination.

Koufax is as effective at self-awareness as he was at pitch selection, that is, a champ.

AFTERWORD
If you dig down into the Newsday piece, you'll see hints that Pedro Martínez, another extraordinary all-time impact pitcher, shares this trait with Koufax.

Martinez, who grew up in the Dodgers' organization, remembers meeting Koufax and Don Drysdale as a 17-year-old prospect. Koufax's affection for Martinez was obvious as he talked about him, and Martinez, despite his own Hall of Fame resume, continues to be in awe of Koufax.

"Sandy's words were the first words I heard in Dodgertown," Martinez said. "The things he talked about stuck in my mind about perseverance and following your dreams and don't let it go -- ever. Those things have stuck with me. I like to spend time with him still.

"I never realized I was being compared to him. He's such a big name, such a dominant pitcher. I never thought I could ever be a flash of what he is. Now after a few years, people try to make comparisons. To me, there isn't ... My admiration doesn't even let me stand beside him any more than as a student to a teacher, and that's what he is to me, a teacher who you respect a lot and get along really well with."

On the surface, it sounds like humility (as Koufax' own statements do), but really it's much deeper than that. It's observation of and empathy with the world outside one's self.

It appears Roger Clemens, a pitcher with roughly the resume of Sandy & Pedro (longer achievement, a lower peak), doesn't have this ingredient. It doesn't affect his ability to pitch very successfully - it just makes him a very self-referential, perhaps self-reverential, person. For many, this came as a revelation last week when he took this inability to examine his own behavior from outside himself and conducted himself in ways that made many people recoil and about as many believe he was lying in his testimony to Congress.

The Mensa types, whether in physics, literary criticism, making money or in Baseball almost always face challenges when they try to share their techniques or insights with those who are, like successful major league players, in the 97th percentile. And for those below that, it's harder still.

So when a Koufax surfaces as having self-awareness to go along with the professional credentials, it's almost a miracle, and certainly something to treasure.

Just Do It - Phil Knight.
Just Say 'No' - Nancy Reagan.
No Fear - No Fear Inc.
Do it Afraid - Jimmy Rollins.

Doug Glanville was probably the most educated player in the majors during his time there, a borderline starter who made the most of what talent he brought to the table, and a player who added value to most of the teams he played for by being what Malcolm Gladwell calls a "connector". He's extraordinarily emotionally intelligent, a fact I hadn't though of in a while until this morning.

This morning, The New York Times ran an Op-Ed piece by Glanville (so Glanville & I now have four things in common: we both have degrees in Planning, we both are the fastest player on any team we play on, we both fall seriously short in the hitting department, and we've both had Op-Ed pieces in the NYT).

The piece is on (oh so predictably that the Times would get a writer of Glanville's caliber and print it because it's related, though only somewhat, to) supplements/steroids. And rather than a condescending piece or a self-righteous piece or a clinical piece, it's a thoughtful piece. No accusations, no defenses. Just a thoughtful piece that attempts to show what's going on in the mind of the kind of major leaguer who is most likely to have been mentioned in the "news" coverage of supplements in Baseball: an aging, now-marginal player looking for something that will extend his career a little.

HE will always be a rookie to me, but Jimmy Rollins, the reigning National League most valuable player, once gave me a poignant piece of wisdom that typically would flow from mentor to mentee, not the other way around. “Do it afraid,” was his advice — and it’s a lesson Major League Baseball had best learn if it is to put the age of steroids behind it.

A healthy amount of fear can lead to great results, to people pushing themselves to the brink of their capabilities. I can recall an opening day when I was a Chicago Cub getting set to face the Florida Marlins and hearing Mark Grace explain to the young players how he still got butterflies even after all his years in the majors.

Yes, baseball players are afraid. Not just on opening day and not just because of the 400-page Mitchell report and not just because of a Congressional hearing on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball — like the one that took place Tuesday — but because they always have been afraid. A player’s career is always a blink in a stare.

 A player's career is always blink in a stare. And in contemporary business sector organizations, ours are, too. Why?

{SNIP}
There is a tipping point in a player’s career where he goes from chasing the dream to running from a nightmare. At that point, ambition is replaced with anxiety, passion is replaced with survival. It is a downhill run and it spares no one. {SNIP} 

We’re scared of failure, aging, vulnerability, leaving too soon, being passed up — and in the quest to conquer these fears, we are inspired by those who do whatever it takes to rise above and beat these odds. We call it “drive” or “ambition,” but when doing “whatever it takes” leads us down the wrong road, it can erode our humanity. The game ends up playing us.

So let the rookie teach us all something important. Just do it, but do it ... afraid.

Read the whole piece if you want the full Baseball details and insight. But for Beyond Baseball, that is the core. In the struggle to be the highest-performing <insert title here> we can be, we too often forget that overall performance requires the full panoply of skills we get from our humanity as well as our professional chops. Bosses don't always appreciate that balance, and it can mess with your career. 

In the end, I think, someone who leads a Doug Glanville life by his code of conduct will not likely perform at the Roger Clemens or Ty Cobb level...it's unlikely that anyone who keeps one eye on one's own real life beyond work could succeed as a relentless hyperfocused career machine. And whether that career is Baseball or Finance or Sales or Music or or or, the likelihood is the same.

But Doug Glanville can look back on a life led by that code with a clear conscience. And he uses that Jimmy Rollins epigram to remind himself, to fuel his self-awareness.

"Why do people sing Take Me Out to The Ballgame
 when they're already there?" -- Alex Rodriguez

We are chatting about A-Rod this entry because he's the poster boy for a lesson in The Cult of Branding, one of the more silly, and sometimes actually destructive, cults around.

I'm not one of those folk who revels in every Alex Rodríguez gaffe, error, strikeout. I don't boo him any more than any other Yankee. But dude is just so Eddie Haskell, so smarmy, so inauthentic, that even though he's probably the most significantly productive player in the game right now, I can't overcome his Haskellosity.

And just when I think he's reached the logical smarm barrier that can no longer be exceeded without causing a tear in the space-time continuum that will cause a singularity to swallow up the home planet and make The Tar That Ate Yar a celebrity spokes-thing for American Express, he goes and smashes through it.

Selena Roberts of the New York Times wrote an investigative article that A-Rod was the subject of that appeared this week, the essence of which is:

• Rodríguez is likely to make around $300,000,000 on his next contract (his last having grossed him around $252,000,000).
• Rodríguez invests a lot of his massive take in apartment buildings that cater mostly to low-income people, though a company called Newport Property Ventures.
• Rodríguez is the Chief Executive of Newport, but delegates the operational responsibility to an in-law.
• That Newport owns six apartment complexes in A-Rod's home-town area, Tampa.
• That many inhabitants of one complain of terrible, sometimes dangerous, maintenance laxity, though there are lighter complaints about another complex.
• That management practices are financially brutal -- for example, the complexes share a contractual gotcha that if a renter is one day late with the rent payment, there's a $100 fine, the standard rent being around $600/month.

Further, the article lays out details around his charitable foundation, a type of operation that while many ballplayers set them up out of the goodness of their hearts or commitment to specific causes or to their communities, has become a pro-forma act of branding that's almost mandatory for athletes with long-term contracts. Roberts explained:

The homey surface of the AROD Family Foundation’s Web site, which promotes a slogan of helping “families in distress,” belies its cap on generosity.

Rodriguez has earned nearly $200 million over the past decade, but, according to 990 tax records dating to 1998, he is a cheap tipper to his foundation.

In eight years of available documents, donations averaged $30,000 a year and gifts distributed to the community averaged $13,000 a year. In 2002, A-Rod did not contribute more than $5,500. In 2006, the foundation did not give away more than $5,090 despite a fund-raiser that collected $368,000.

So while he does donate to the foundation that bears his brand, relative to his baseball paycheck (not including any income he might have from endorsements or business investments), his charity is the equivalent of an average U.S. family giving $70/year. Not peanuts, but well below $2,125, the average charitablegiving for the average taxpaying family that itemizes deductions.

And of course there's the kicker if Roberts' numbers tell the full story, that while the AROD Family Foundation collects money from the Haskellator hisself and through fund-raising efforts, at least in one year, it gave away under 2% of what it raised.

THE CULT OF BRANDING
Like all thrusts that degenerate into cults, branding has some solid, authentic, rational core that was initiated in response to a crisis. The apparent root of the Branding concept, at least as far as branding of people is concerned, is a thought-provoking essay thought-provoking Tom Peters wrote for thought-provoking Fast Company in 1997. In the face of a vaporizing corporate equilibrium between the talent and the organization, the longer-term mutuality ("We'll keep you here for a while and invest in you and you, in turn, will invest in us"), already dumped in the blue-collar job world, caught up to the white-collar world. Employers, lured by at-will employment silliness and offshore sweatshop labor had started to purge white-collar employees. Peters was inviting them to, as an alternative to sitting and moaning their lost mutual investment model, become free agents who evolved and trained themselves and, to replace the previous rough symmetry of commitment,  maintain a symmetry of at-will non-commitment.

It was a respectable response. In the absence of a healthy, symmetrical mutuality, the least offensive counter-move was an unhealthy, symmetrical lack of commitment. But hiring organizations were set up to acquire talent in different ways, and a decade later they still haven't adapted. At all. In the slightest.

Because in an age of personal branding based on talent or work results, people who are good at the branding part but not the substance of work results are able to acquire opportunities for success more than people good at the work results part but not at the personal branding. Instead of being a key part of the talent's tactics, it's become the key part of the hiring organization's filter. Those effective Lake Wobegon Norwegian Gentleman Farmers (think Fred McGriff or Jake Peavy), soft-spoken but dull and effective are continuing to be overlooked relative to flashy extroverts with less work effectiveness (think Curt Schilling or Steve Garvey).

It's not that personal branding is not an effective tactic for those of us extroverted and shameless enough to be decent at it; it's that it tends to reward extroversion more than work ability (which frankly, in some cases, are somewhat linked). Like Personal Enron, it's now about the gas you deliver, it's about the gas you blow about yourself.

But as implemented in today's social world, branding is not about content, it's about the packaging of content. A faulty product can sometimes affect the brand, but for a lot of manufacturers and service providers and professionals, the brand is the product, and the actual deliverable a mere piece of overhead that potentially gets in the way. It doesn't make people and companies and government un-accountable, it merely creates a system that undermines accountability, which over time provides incremental rewards to those who don't deliver without consequence.

A-FRAUD, PERHAPS
I don't know if all of the details in Roberts' article are true as generally as the specifics she cites. I've been a renter and a landlord in my life, and I know there are usually two sides to any of these kinds of relationships. And he may not know just how funky the operations of his apartments are because he' delegated it to "experts". But I have to think, because the $252 Million Eddie Haskell is so frelling Haskellicious, that it nails the core truth.

Like too many C-level execs I observe and have worked with, he wants to be a Chief Executive in title and deference (Brand), but he delegates the actual work of management and at the same time makes no effort to master the details of the business she or he is Executizin' (deliverable).

In most cases, a player would probably get away with this without reportage or repercussions. A-Rod, because he's so Haskellistic and gives so many of us the Willies, gets no free pass. It doesn't matter that he's the best all-around non-pitcher in the majors (deliverable). He has lashed himself to Branding, Branding, that like most, doesn't match the actual deliverable (his play) and instead is meant to act as a surrogate that will survive his playing career's inevitable decline (someday), and allow him to maintain his celebrity after, like his idol Cal Ripken Jr. (who, coming along before Branding became a Cult, is abso-tively, poso-lutely The Real Deal, and probably would have been even in the face of advisors who wanted to package him like Enron or toxic Mattel toys made in Red China, or Coby home electronics) because Ripken has close to 0% Haskell in him.

And lashed to his Brand, like Ahab to the whale, instead of to his work product, he may go on to plow through Barry Bonds' all-time home run record, risk his life to pull children away from onrushing city buses, get his own celebrity chef show on cable-tv's Haskell Planet. But he will always be generally perceived as his brand, the $252 Million Eddie Haskell, A-Fraud, Leona Helmsley, with his low-income apartments and his stingy charity.

Is it fair? Perhaps not. Branding isn't about fairness or accountability. It's all about the wrapper.

I'M PRO-TORTURE, AND I VOTE!
--bumper sticker seen by a college bud
on an H2 in suburban D.C.

One of the foundation principles of negotiation is that many of the the rules change if you're unlikely to engage the other party in a collaboration or negotiation again. If you're not, then the ultimate win-win outcome, the fuel for face-saving and positive feelings that make starting and finishing the back-and-forth rasslin' closer to frictionless, isn't as necessary. Win as much as you can now, diminish or totally devalue the long-term returns you might get by giving away something you don't have to because you can get returns on it later.

In general, the exxxtreme opposite of the win-win negotiation, I'll call it The Beinfest, happens when:

1. The pool of buyers and sellers is so vast that you can afford to kiss off any individual collaborator, 
   
   AND
   
2. The natural likelihood of repeating a transaction is low.

So if you go to buy a car from a store on a strip of used car dealers, you're likely to go lot-to-lot, like a bee checking out a row of bottlebrush blossoms. The salesfolk know this, but they use it to their own advantage -- not only are you not likely to repeat a transaction with them if you're that kind of shopper, staff turnover tends to be pretty high in that field, so even if you want to go back to that lot, you may not find the negotiator who might have won your custom. So because of Angus' First Law of Organizational Behavior (All human systems tend to be self-amplifying), customers expect to be strip-mined and either resign themselves to it (amplifying the rewards, ergo the seller behavior) or riposte by playing strip-miner themselves. Even though the used car buyer is likely to buy another used car, the system is set up to prevent repeats by design.

Other purchases are close to once in a lifetime, like aluminum siding or a new roof for your home. The natural replacement cycle for those kinds of jobs makes it very unlikely a repeat collaboration/transaction is in the cards, so the sales behavior tends to be cheesier than normal. Regardless, if you like or don't like your siding job, it's not likely (not impossible, but probabilistically...) to affect another personal buying decision. Word of mouth might have some effect, but the seller puts that on the scale and it doesn't weigh enough to tip him to different behavior.

The assumption in the negotiation field that smaller systems and likely-to-repeat collaborations create gravitational fields that make strip-mining (I win, you lose) negotiation is widely-held, especially among followers of the cult of Economics.

Big systems, and socially-magnetic fields that make repeat collaboration unlikely is the standard environment for ugly negotiations that leave one party with a bad aftertaste evocative of Baltimore Memorial Stadium deep-fried burritos.

THE MARLINS IMPALE THE MODEL
But a story in this week's Miami Herald (via Baseball Think Factory) is showing that an innovative negotiator can reverse the magnetic field in the opposite environment, one conventional negotiating wisdom would say would never lend itself to win-lose.

The innovator is Florida Marlin front-office honcho-maximo Larry Beinfest, and the report of the innovation by Herald reporter Clark Spencer came out thusly:

The Los Angeles Angels nearly reeled in Marlins third baseman Miguel Cabrera not once, but twice recently. But both times, the Angels said Wednesday, the Marlins raised their trade demands and the deals fell through.

''We felt we had a deal with them twice,'' Angels owner Arte Moreno said at a news conference to introduce outfielder Torii Hunter and pitcher Jon Garland. ``They came back and asked for more. They're doing it to everybody.''

And Moreno said the Angels aren't the only team the Marlins are using that negotiating strategy with to trade Cabrera. He said it is his understanding the Los Angeles Dodgers also nearly had a deal in place for Cabrera, only for it to unravel at the last minute because of the Marlins' increased demands.

A standard foundation of Western negotiation methods is the narrowing-difference, where the back-and-forth works something like this:

I'll give you 20. 

I can take nothing less than 35. 

Twenty-five.

If you'll pay cash, I'll give it to you for 30.

Throw in a volume buyer discount on my next purchase, and I'll give you 28.

Deal.

Each party declares an opening offer, then works towards the other's point, sometimes offering something besides price to allow each side to compromise without losing face. ¿But what happens when one party simply enjoys seeing the other lose face, or doesn't have to fear serious consequences, or simply doesn't buy into the Western standards?

Nothing is as irritating as to come to a point in a negotiation that is a rough agreement and have the opposite party make a counter that ignores previous components of the agreement, something like: I'll give you 20. I can take nothing less than 35. Twenty-five. Forty-five... 

If you feel your opposite is desperate, or you don't have to make the deal, or if there are other buyers, you might try The Beinfestival of Torture. If the person across the table is desperate or merely impatient enough, she might let you get away with it. Baseball is a closed enough system that conventional wisdom would argue it's a losing proposition to try a Beinfestival of Torture, but the extreme closed-system nature of Baseball (limited-supply of excellent talent, limited number of possible needs patterns) means a negotiator might be willing to burn others, calculating that if he has something valuable a few years later, the burned party would be more likely to overlook the prior tort and do business again.

BEYOND BASEBALL
I saw the Beinfestival approach unfold up close about seven years ago and I'm still getting even with the opposing party. I was helping a family member negotiate the sale of her condo. She lived in one of those near-suburb apartment complexes that has a bunch of identical, adjacent big buildings, and the market was a bit soft. The agent she signed up with to represent her lived in her building, a super-nice old guy I'll call Beauregard, and he basically only worked on properties in the complex. I was concerned he was "too nice", but I thought I could counterbalance that with some unemotional involvement.

They got a very quick offer for the apartment for the selling price. My relative was thrilled, which, it turns out, was the plan of the buyer's agent (let's call him Walter Briggs). In Briggs' mind, that's when the negotiation opened, not closed. He stalled for time, coming back with a lower offer combined with a demand for repairs, some useful, some just random, all aggressively delivered in a way designed to be intimidating, and every time he did this, the agent on our side, Beauregard, encouraged us to comply in full to get the deal done, knowing that his dollars-made per time allocated to the deal was as likely to stabilize by acceding as it would trying to get a better price (plus, as it turned out, Beaureagrd thought if Briggs "liked" him enough, Beauregard would make it up for this bloodbath on with further sales) . This cycle happened either three or four times, my relative getting more and more desperate not to start from scratch, feeling her time/energy investment in the deal slipping away (In for a dime, in for a dollar). And, of course, Walter Briggs recognized that smell. Against my counsel, she met the increasing demands 100% of the way 100% of the time, and while she didn't actually lose money on the deal, she had a serious life need to make some on it, and she didn't.

And Beauregard has sold a few more condos to Briggs clients (with no better results for his own clients), but, like GMs negotiating with Beinfest, he knows what to expect and how to limit the pain of the torture (to himself, anyway). He can go back and collaborate on a deal with Briggs again; the market for condos in that complex is constrained enough -- limited supply, limited number of potential buyers' needs patterns -- that he's willing to jump through flaming hoops he knows will be there.

As Joe Sarno said: "Karma's nothing but justice without the satisfaction. And justice doesn't exist."

• The long nature of my essays make them easier to listen to than to read on-line, or
• Wanting to take advantage of commute time, or
• People just love to hear my Jim Dandy Mangrum-evoking voice.

Those of us who do change management or kaizen or Lean as part of their practice know the greatest barrier to positive change is comfort. The status quo allows the players within the system to repeat past behaviors and have a higher (not perfect) expectation of how the interaction will work and what the range of results will be. Baseball is better at change, and better at balancing the benefits of change against the benefits of tradition than most endeavors in business, government and the non-profit sector, and the best recent example of that superiority emerged last week.

At the General Managers' annual meetings last week in Orlando, GMs voted 25-5 to start in motion the process towards getting instant replay in Baseball. According to a story on MLB.com, 

Instant replay may now become a factor on a limited basis in Major League Baseball games.

The collective general managers voted 25-5 during their Tuesday morning session to at least explore the possibility of using the video technology to help decide disputed home run calls: fair or foul, in or out of the ballpark.

"We've talked about replay for borderline calls -- safe and out, home runs or non-home runs -- for a number of years," said Bob DuPuy, MLB's president and chief operating officer, about a proposal handed down by the technology committee headed by Colorado GM Dan O'Dowd. "The umpires, particularly in a four-man crew, in many instances are 150 feet from the outfield fence where the ball crosses the line.

{SNIP}Calling movement in MLB "glacial," Jimmie Lee Solomon, MLB's vice president of baseball operations, said he didn't expect the proposal to be cast into a rule and implemented in time for the 2008 season.

Solomon, by the way, doesn't know glacial. If dude had worked at DoD or Boeing or a University or even Dell Computer, he'd feel the frelling wind whipping past his face with Baseball's "glacial". 

It's not that Baseball is lightning-fast. The beginning of the argument about whether or not to have some forms of instant replay happened ten seasons ago, when Mark McGwire was chasing Babe Ruth's home run record; late in the season when it was clear he was in contention for it, he hit a shot with home run distance the umps couldn't determine clearly as fair or foul. The crew chief went to the television camera nearest 3rd base (best view of the shot) and watched in slow-motion several times to watch the ball move past the pole and determined it was fair. He wanted to get the call right and he used available technology to get it right.

This violates Baseball tradition (using technology, not "getting it right"). There were ripples in the force...if my memory serves me right here, this was the game, the crew chief was Frank Pulli, a very senior and respected ump, and that he was reprimanded, although that may have been for a call in this game, one Pulli was definitely reprimanded for. When the umps union had a job action the following year, Pulli was one of the 22 whose careers vaporized faster than Joe Lieberman 's short-lived appearance on Dancing with the Stars (¿why did he choose Kara Wolters as a partner, anyway?), and a couple of insiders have told me they believed his termination, certainly not about the quality of his abilities, was more about one or both of those tools-using episodes than it was about how deeply embedded in the union he might have been.

So it's taken a while to internalise the idea that "getting it right" trumps the comfort of tradition. That weighting is not universal; the last couple of years, I've attended the General Managers' November meets, and I heard plenty of Bitgod (Back In The Good Old Days) rants from babseball people and reporters opposed to changing the tradition. The arguments were typical of comments on proposed changes beyond baseball (most frequent = Well, you'll still get some wrong; most pointless = It'll take too much time which is a tactical implementation issue, not an argument against it's value in {correctness-delivered divided by time+resources applied}.

Baseball is also going to have some serious advantages in the tactical implementation, because they have eight years of NFL experience to take advantage of. And the NFL had some great advantages because the U.S. Football League wrote the the blueprints 14 years before that, and the USFL was taking advantage of technology that had been completely internalized for fans and coaches because it had been invented 30 years before that.

Tactical implementation will not be a significant barrier, only the comfort of the existing standard operating procedures. And baseball's approach is going to be very informative for managers in all fields. I only wish Sandy Alderson was still at MLB-HQ to implement it -- he is, as I've mentioned before, North America's superstar management-from-any-field practitioner. But they'll get it right sooner or later regardless.

BEYOND BASEBALL
The comfort of not-changing is endemic, even in the best, kaizen-drenched organizations.

I'm doing a consult right now with a logistics and transportation company in Seattle, one of my oldest clients, and certainly my cleverest about change. Four of their companies use independent contractors as couriers to pick up and deliver all kinds of objects around the state. Their processes have evolved over time, but mutate in response to how heavy demand is at a given time, how much time each of the jobs has left on it, how many drivers are on the road and where, and a half-dozen other factors. Procedures have tended to build up over time, many of them to advance fairness between the couriers and to make sure none hogs opportunities while always making sure the customer gets their jobs delivered safely and on-time. The most complex, compound set of rules are wrapped around the harvesting of jobs that originate in Downtown (the plurality of jobs).

To document procedures and recommend tweaks to the workflow, I immersed myself the daily flow of work. I can tell you the courier work is the second most-complicated and demanding job I've ever seen outside of Baseball, requiring project management skills, spatial memory, some physical abilities, excellent clerical skills, air-traffic controller caliber twitch decision-making capabilities, driving skills, and the magic thing I call "judgment".

Their official procedures can change on any day (I won't explain the mechanics here), and they have to adapt. But even for these cleverest of non-baseball professionals, it's easier to add rules than remove them. To claim a job for downtown you need to know not only where you are in a virtual queue that changes at least every 10 minutes, but you need to know which of 28 permutations your current situation put you. The people who live in this can simultaneously see how difficult it is for new talent to internalize, feel the pain of having to do real-time technical support even for some experienced drivers who haven't/can't master the drill, and resist simplification. I'd like to cut the permutations at least by a third as an experiment, but I have little support from front-line supervisors.

I have empathy for them. They want to "get it right", and in this case, I'm trying to cut learning time by half, and they would yield some fairness (I suspect about 4% of fairness in that in about 1-in-25 cases someone would do something that would benefit themselves at the cost of the team' overall welfare, to a significant enough degree to cause discomfort).

If even the most capable kaizen outfit I've worked with struggle with change, then anyone will. You have to be willing to listen to legit (and not-legit) concerns with respect, test, tweak, follow-up and tweak again.

It'll be exciting for managers to observe how Solomon and his team at MLB implement these changes in the most tradition-drenched AND most changing (by the season, by the game, by the inning, by the play) endeavor in North America. Significantly more exciting than a Joe Lieberman Dancing with the Stars pratfall.

My buddy Dave Kurlan, a leading mind who uses science and hard data to help organizations hire and train successful sales staff, posted an entry to his weblog about using the World Series-headed Boston Red Sox as a template to remake your own talent management.

Here's one essential point from his entry we both lead with in our methods:

The Red Sox were more prepared. They didn't get rattled. They didn't feel the pressure. They did what they have practiced, did it consistently and did it well. Before every game, each player has balls hit to him at his position, makes practice throws and takes batting practice. Isn't he already one of the best 700 players in the world? Why is he practicing? To be prepared for whatever might take place in the game. {SNIP}

Based on what I've seen from evaluating 8000 sales organizations and 300,000 salespeople, your salespeople are probably no better or worse than those at the 8000 other companies. However, what would happen if they were more prepared? What would happen if they prepared for every possible scenario? What would happen if they practiced every day, like the Red Sox?

When it comes to processes that involve the potential for unpredictable variation or human choices (but I repeat myself), just because your staff is already good at it doesn't mean simulation and other forms of practice won't make them better. Quicker to respond. Surer in their experience. Sounder in their actions.

Coaching should be active. Not merely built around off-site training. One good idea: Whenever there is non-vital time you can harvest, practice scenarios, simulate situations, cross-pollinate salesfolks' skills by letting them play out alternatives to efforts that failed -- with the individual who missed a successful effort playing the prospect. I'm sure Dave has a half-dozen better ideas.

Whatever doesn't make you stronger
kills you 

Sometimes even good management can ignore the elephant on the table. 

Sometimes it's understandable...foolish but not critical -- when those problematic pachyderms are not the difference between success and failure under about any circumstance. For example, I had a client about a decade ago in the Oakland, California area. They spent a noticeable, though not vast amount of money, renting parking spaces to give them to employees for free. The landlord raised the rates over 100%, well over the price of public transit (fairly convenient) alternatives. The firm had never subsidized transit or van pools, only parking, and I thought this was a great opportunity to both save money and redress a fairness issue (subsidizing employees who use a car to get to work; no subsidy for those who use other methods). I couldn't get them to change their view, as obvious as the stink on the Burnt Weeny Sandwich was, as much as I waved my arms, they could only see clear to debate two options -- absorb the increase or kill the benefit, vitiate a small piece of the bottom line or undercut morale. The client's management had, like we all do, an inability to see something they can't conceive of, even something drop-dead obvious.

Sometimes, though, it's dad-gummed suicidal -- and that's when you just have to scratch your head. Sometimes it costs you a pennant you could easily have won.

Case in point: the 1950 Detroit Tigers.

NOTE: This is very detailed...but it's a total Howler...such an egregious example of ignoring methods of self-preservation to keep a dysfunctional status quo that I want you to know most of the key self-imposed limits the Tigers bound themselves with. There were more I left out; these alone are an indictment of crappy front-office preference for comfort over the chance to win. But it's pretty long, even for my norm.

THE VIEW FROM THE DUGOUT
I've been reading this extremely engaging book, "The View From the Dugout -- The Journals of Red Rolfe" I got at the 2006 SABR National Convention, and that I recommend whole-heartedly. One of the small handful of "scientific" managers in the 1940s and 1950s, Red Rolfe was a Dartmouth College graduate (English major). According to editor William M. Anderson's intro:

Following a squandered victory at St. Louis on April 28, 1949, rookie Tiger manager Red Rolfe recorded: "Poor pitching cost us a game in which we were leading 5 to 1. Once again we failed to do things as they should be done in he big leagues". {SNIP}

A Dartmouth College graduate and a naturally studious person, Rolfe kept a private journal recording a description of nearly every inning of every game he managed, analyzing "our weaknesses and the opposition's strength." While his wife kept score at home, he typed summaries of games in his office and hauled a portable typewriter to games on the road. {SNIP}

Rolfe explained in detail his method of recording observations in his personal journal and how he used the information. "The homework on my book takes about two hours a morning," wrote Rolfe. "I purposely wait until the day after the game, so I can review it objectively, read the newspapers -- sportswriters often mention subtle points I've overlooked -- and have my wife's score card in front of me. When the team is away from home, Isabel air-mails me her score card or, after a night game, sends it special delivery to get it to me in time for my skull practice. {SNIP} I summarize every inning each side got men on the bases, and wind up with a series of general observations, or memos to myself. Then I digest the whole thing, with special attention to the memos to correct or confirm certain impressions. I've frequently gone through the entire book to check up on some obscure but important angle."

Jeez, you couldn't ask much more diligence from a manager. Rolfe is paying attention, recording, waiting to try to make sure emotions haven't colored his impressions, analysing every single day, even delegating scut work (the score cards, which requires craft skill but would spread him too thin if he was doing those, too). 

On the surface, you'd have to think Rolfe would have been an unrivalled analyst.

But Red Rolfe was able to overlook the elephant on the table throughout 1950, his second year as Tiger manager, and that elephant likely cost his team an underdog pennant that all his other management skills had put Detroit into a position to snare. It was his one and only managerial shot at a flag, ever, and he missed out on it because even though the problem was obvious to him, and solutions available, the team did nothing about it.

1949 - WHAT IS PROLOGUE IS PESTILENT
For his 1949 rookie campaign, Rolfe inherited a 78-76 team. He had learned from the managers he'd played for and as a Yankee player, he'd come to appreciate that franchise's great strengths that had lead to their success: Pitching & Power. The 1948 Bengals had had league average pitching and were out-homered in a homer-amping home park, 78-92. The team went 37-51 against teams with over .500 records and all three of them had significantly better home run capabilities than the roster he'd inherited. So this rigorous analyst knew where the team needed attention: the two attributes he was looking for, pitching and power, and his own passion, crisp fundamental execution -- the little things.

Ownership didn't provide him with a ton of new material to attack the obvious power ceiling imposed by zero offense out of the 1st base position (there was 23-year-old George Vico-- OPS+ of 88, and 30-year old Paul Campbell -- OPS+ of 60 to share the duties). In 1949, they decided to start the season with those two, not exactly attacking the limiting factor. That factor was exacerbated because the team's second-best slugger, outfielder Dick Wakefield, was fundamentally-weak and seen as a lazy dilettante, exactly the kind of player a manager like Rolfe disliked. So any attempt to see if benching would inspire Wakefield would further enervate already underwhelming team power.

Rolfe reports in his journals disappointment that ownership couldn't find anyone, but stoically accepted their explanation that there wasn't a lot of 1st base power available out there to acquire, and Rolfe knew from Spring Training there wasn't a ton in their minor league system, either. In 20-20 hindsight, by the way, one could have suggested that Vic Wertz, a 23 year old outfielder who would grow to have remarkable power and be moved at age 29 to first base, could have been shifted, but that would have been really prescient...Wertz' 1948 power numbers were more sluggish than slugging with a slugging percentage below the league average. One can forgive them the inability to see into the future and make that move.

But one can't overlook what would have been an easy, almost unavoidable experiment (not a guarantee, but a guarantee to be no worse than George Vico and Paul Campbell).

Grab a slugging first-baseman from the Negro Leagues or Cuba. There's not a hint of a mention of a thought in Rolfe's journals that such a move was considered...even with the clear and critical need.

The American League had been integrated for two seasons already when the Tigers faced the off-season preceding the 1949 season. The two most noteworthy slugging 1st basemen in the Negro Leagues were Luke Easter & Hall of Fame legend Buck Leonard. Easter might have been available, but the Cleveland Indians signed him over that off-season, so perhaps Easter's 1949 was already spoken for before the Tigers could have gotten into the mix.. While Easter was probably a slam-dunk choice (prime of his career and would go on to average 301 homers/154 games in the majors), Leonard, at 42 years old, was not remotely a slam dunk, though he would play two more seasons for the Homestead Grays, in Cuba and after that in Mexico; his skills were promising enough even three years later that Bill Veeck tried to enlist Leonard, known as the "Black Lou Gehrig", for the Indians' 1952 campaign.

So there are arguments to be made against both those candidates, though the mere presence of an argument-against in baseball shouldn't bring the thought to an end (and it shouldn't in non-baseball endeavors either -- you can't just reject every chance to improve that might not work out -- a classic management blunder in any field).

While either of those choices might have arguments against them, there were other first basement in the Negro Leagues who could hit. Bob "The Rope" Boyd was good enough to make that League's West all-star team, though while he hit up a storm, he wasn't a wallbanger. He was good enough though to go on to a major league career. The best fit for the Tigers was Lennie Pearson, the East's all-star first baseman, a heavy hitter, and at 31 years old, in the prime for power. Pearson wasn't a slam-dunk, either -- when he made to the minors two years later, her was good enough to play, but not exceptional, though that doesn't speak to his skills for '49. That year he led the Cuban league in doubles and slugged 11 homers in a little under half a season's worth of at bats (280), batted .332 for the Negro Leagues' champion Baltimore Elite Giants. That doesn't guarantee he'd have been a star for the Tigers, but it makes it inexcusable that they didn't give him a tryout -- by no measure  could anyone have considered they could get less production out of 1st base with Pearson than the Tigers ultimately got with Campbell, Vico and the utility infielder they acquired in May and used largely at first .

The reason the Tigers didn't give Easter an offer, or Leonard or Pearson a tryout was not about potential talent - it was a complete blindness to the possibility that these players could have have made a positive difference. And that regardless of how big that elephant on the table was. It didn't matter that the A.L. was already integrated -- the Tigers' front office couldn't even discuss the possibility of recruiting talent from the Negro Leagues or Cuba...and acquiring talent to become better is the core need and the core function of the front office. 

In baseball, whatever doesn't make you stronger kills you. The lack of power combined with a thinness in pitching after the starters "condemned" the 1949 Tigers to 4th place with a perfectly-fine 8 game improvement over the previous year's effort.

The good news, a little more so in baseball than beyond it, is that a lesson so clearly learned gets internalized. Weaknesses unaddressed that come back to haunt a team are just about never ignored the following year

1950 - NECESSITY IGNORED = BURNT WEENY SANDWICH
Never ignored, that is, unless you're the 1950 Tigers.

You read Rolfe's journals, and his sharp observations, his passion for winning, his revulsion for limited talent all come through. He's honest in his words -- at the time, his journals were private, so he wasn't sanitizing his thoughts for the public. 

Rolfe fretted consistently about three things: the need to reinforce his pitching staff, lack of power and poor execution. He was close to desperate for a first baseman who could slug, and some pitcher who could close out games for the younger Tiger hurlers. The Tigers tried one long-shot experiment for improving 1st base production by sending their star batter Dick Wakefield to the Yankees for a second-tier Yankee 1st base prospect, Dick Kryhoski. Kryhoski had had a bit of a shot in 1949 for the Yanks, and was okay; while he hadn't been a success, it wasn't unreasonable for the Tigers to play Management By Wishful Thinking and it certainly beat the heck out of the previous off-season's stand-pat pose. Not a battle-tested vet like Pearson, but at least something new to try out. The sole off-season acquisition Rolfe mentions is the waiver acquisition of totally-proven dreadful Paul Leo Emile Calvert, who at age 32 had spent the previous year going 6-17 with an ERA of 5.43 for the Washington Senators (that is, he had been given up on by a team that finished next to last in the league in pitching...hardly a glimmer of hope there). Rolfe was realistic in his comments; he didn't expect jack cheese out of Calvert. So one of two problems sort-of addressed, neither given a kick-axe chance of successful remediation.

But here's the odd thing. Never, in Rolfe's journals, did he ever bring up the idea of recruiting a one of the many successful players who labored in all-back baseball or in Cuba. This relentlessly analytical individual who was striving for excellence and a pennant never once mentioned the possibility of reaching outside the standard channels to grab for the talent he believed he so desperately needed, even though others had already reached for and succeeded with the new pool. 

It doesn't get completely surreal until the Tigers break out of the gate fast, and stay in first through 19 games. At this point, they are a serious contender. Experimentation is easiest when you either are getting waxed and you have nothing to lose, or you are holding onto a surmountable lead and need a boost; it's hard when you're so far ahead you are afraid to tinker, but the Tigers, at least Rolfe, always knew that if they were going to hold on, it would be by the thinnest of margins, that they needed reinforcements. His journal is filled with disappointments it appears he knows are human limits of his existing roster, especially on the pitching side. Calvert stunk, and Rolfe wasn't getting a great deal of help from the non-starter arms on the roster -- no one was reasonably consistent in finishing off games. Here was that part of the team...an injured veteran starter who got a little 'pen work, four established mediocrities Rolfe squeezed some above-their-norm work out of, and three kids (one of whom went on to have a respectable career):

 Player          Ag  G    ERA   W   L  SV  GS  GF   IP     H    R   ER   HR  BB   SO   BFP B ERA+
 ------------------+---+------+---+---+--+---+---+------+----+----+----+---+----+----+----+-+---+
 Virgil Trucks   33   7   3.54   3   1  0   7   0   48.3   45   20   19   6   21   25  209   132
 Hal White       31  42   4.54   9   6  1   8  18  111.0   96   59   56   7   65   53  482   103
 Paul Calvert    32  32   6.31   2   2  4   0  19   51.3   71   42   36   7   25   14  250    74
 Marlin Stuart   31  19   5.56   3   1  2   1   7   43.7   59   32   27   6   22   19  205    84
 Hank Borowy     34  13   3.31   1   1  0   2   3   32.7   23   15   12   3   16   12  134   141
 Saul Rogovin    26  11   4.50   2   1  0   5   4   40.0   39   21   20   5   26   11  182   104
 Ray Herbert     20   8   3.63   1   2  1   3   3   22.3   20   11    9   1   12    5   96   129

I asked editor William Anderson who had read all the materials if there'd been any discussion he'd omitted and he explained, no, there hadn't been a single mention. What does it mean when a driven manager doesn't even grasp at the chance to improve by adding a serious player?

The Detroit Tigers were the next to last team in all the majors to "integrate", ten seasons after Jackie Robinson started playing for the Dodgers. Perhaps the institution's barrier was so strong, Rolfe knew it was unmentionable. Perhaps as a rookie (not already established) manager, he got lazy and didn't want to get into a fight with his employers. Perhaps he shared their views on race, though my instinct is Rolfe was more concerned about winning than holding on to any particular opinion, so it seems unlikely to me. 

Whatever the reason, the elephant on the table goes unmentioned.

After a July doubleheader sweep of the Philadelphia A's, Detroit took a 4.5 game lead in the league, but a 2-6 run following left them a half game up.

AL      W   L    GB      WP      RS      RA
DET    56  33     -     .629    505     437
NYY    56  34   0.5     .622    545     434
CLE    56  36   1.5     .609    514     406
BOS    53  39   4.5     .576    656     512
WSH    41  46  14.0     .471    398     451
CHW    37  55  20.5     .402    391     455
PHA    32  60  25.5     .348    421     555
SLB    31  59  25.5     .344    407     587

This is the critical management moment...when it's clear the team can win, the project can succeed, the product can be a viable contributor, and at the same time, there are three other serious contenders and the team has just gone 2-6 against two of them (New York & Boston). This is the moment to act.

Close to nothing.

On August 3rd, the team bought Hank Borowy from the Pirates, a fellow who'd been a successful starter during the War when talent was somewhat thinned out, but had had four years of mediocrity or less since. He ended up being almost adequate to the task, but it was clearly a shot in the dark; there was little solid reasoning to support the idea that he could be an answer or a significant part of one.

In the Negro Leagues, there were no can't miss choices -- no Satchel Paige in his prime or young Josh Beckett. But there were probably a dozen options for whom there would be solid reasoning to support the idea that he could be an answer.

Joe Black was one. Black, 26, was having a great season, started in the Leagues' annual all-star game (not his first appearance, either). The Dodgers signed him in late 1950 and eventually used him as a very successful reliever. 

Another, perhaps more logical choice would have been Pat Scantlebury, a 33 year old who'd also pitched in the all-star game, and had in previous years. He got to the majors at age 39 and at age 43, was good enough to be a league-killer at AAA. And there was 27-year old Connie Johnson, also having a great year, and other pitchers who would go on the have minor league careers.

The Tigers didn't try to grab any of them. On August 29th, they fell into a tie for first, still did nothing, had a half-game lead as late as game 141, but finished the season with a 7-9 run, four of those losses being blowouts the pitching couldn't hold on to, and lost the flag by 3 games with a beautiful 95-59 mark. Rolfe was named Manager of the Year, a bitter substitute for winning.

A Cinderella season euthanized by self-inflicted limitations. A tragedy of Sophoclean proportions, because it was completely avoidable if the front office behaves like a normal front office -- going the distance to acquire available talent to fill a glaring, obvious hole. A tragedy because Rolfe would never get a chance to show his stuff again, never get to manage a contender or for a different franchise that didn't have such brain-dead ownership.

Again, I'm not asserting any one of these pitchers would have made the difference. No one knows that. But several of these options were successful major league players for other franchises; several of them would have worked out, although the Tigers couldn't have known exactly which ones. But by not trying, they guaranteed a ceiling on their performance, a self-inflicted wound no competitive organization can afford.

BEYOND BASEBALL
Beyond Baseball, this happens way too often; organizations insist on sticking to tried-and-true mediocrity instead of taking a reasonable chance on improvement. Sometimes it doesn't make the difference, as it did for the 1950 Detroit Tigers, between eternal fame and 17 years of suffering until their next flag.

But it always makes some difference. In a competitive endeavor, whatever doesn't make you stronger kills you, and when the knowledge is right in front of your eyes, and the solution is readily available, not acting leads, too often, to tragedy.

In response to a couple of reader questions about how the Colorado Rockies got into a position to be a World Series contender, I ran the first part of a two-part essay based on an interview I got with the team's GM Dan O'Dowd before the 2006 season.

O'Dowd is an exceptionally interesting practitioner of intentional innovation. This is the second of the two essays that describe what the Rox front office basic approach is, and some of the specifics about how they put their theories into action. It's pretty clear that a few of these are critical constituents of their current position.

This is the second installment of a conversation Colorado Rockies G.M. Dan O'Dowd was kind enough to have with me. The first part is here.

In the last section, we finished with O'Dowd describing the experiments that underpin the front office team's ongoing efforts to understand the differences in Colorado's playing environment that make it more difficult for the team to succeed. In established management practice, you can usually answer with a decent degree of accuracy the questions, "within my span of control, what can I manage?" and "what's outside my management control?". O'Dowd's front office team have internalized the idea that the answers that are givens outside Colorado are different from the truth in their situation.

It's not an easy lesson to internalize. Beyond baseball, and especially in business arenas, managers facing very alien environments are most likely to practice a form of denial -- choosing to use old methods that come from a different context (in and of itself, not a bad first approach) and then not relentlessly monitoring the results of those old practices in the new environment. The absence of observation, monitoring and analysis in the face of radically changed circumstances is where the weakness starts undermining management performance.

So learning what you can manage and what you can't, where your decisions can change opportunities for the better, is a key prerequisite for success.

A: We feel really good about where we’re at. It’s never going to be perfect, it’s always going to have to be managed but we feel we have a much better approach than we’ve ever had before.

Q: Yes, though the one thing you can’t manage is the fact that there’s this significant difference in home-road environments. Short of selective home-road platooning…

A: I think the big thing you can do is manage the mindset. And I think that the most important responsibility in this organization…I’m only one of a group of people trying to focus on the right things. Instead of focusing on things that are more of a negative we have chosen to focus on a positive approach.

One thing I learned early on and painfully is character is a very important part of management, period. Character in our environment is crucial…I’ll explain that to you in more detail.

Offensive ballparks throughout the history of the game have leant themselves more to an “I, I, Me, Me” approach to playing the game of baseball. Runner on 3rd base less than two out, you’re playing in Seattle infield’s back you put the ball in play and you try to put that run across. You play in Colorado, you might expand your strike zone swing at more pitches, if you can get the ball in the air you have a chance to knock it out (of the park). It creates within you a (personal) numbers driven approach.

I think by focusing on character as much as we have…you know character players really understand the team concept and they understand that the biggest joy in this game…the only joy in this game is working together with your teammates and focusing on winning. I think from a management standpoint, I think we have totally changed what we look for. We have developed a 15-step criteria for how we measure character & we try to really focus on those attributes underneath character that are completely defined for us as the type of player that we want wearing a Rockie uniform. We take that into our amateur draft.

Q: Are you open to sharing that list of character traits on or off the record?

A: I’d prefer not to share it. Not that it’s proprietary; I just don’t want it to be the focus of what our plans are. It’s is based around things like ability to handle adversity, perseverance, mental toughness as defined by several things, is it a durable individual, the ability to relate to teammates, what kind of attitude they have towards life, upbringing. It has a lot of measures and each of our scouts have to answer about, whether we’re looking to acquire a player or when we draft a player or when we promote player.

It’s not the end-all be-all, it’s just that it’s given us a definite direction for our decision-making process.

Q; So you use it as a tie-breaker.

A: It’s part of the evaluation; it’s not the equation. It’s what I call one of our "separators”.

Q: Let’s get back to you. You’re in a unique position among the 30 teams’ GMs. Your whole work life is an experiment based on little or no precedent. It’s parallel to being a GM where there has never been one before, or actually more like it’s 1895. You don’t have “The Book” and what there is of it doesn’t work cleanly.

A: A lot of people just don’t understand that, even my peers in the game. When I try to explain it to them they just don’t get it. I think they would have to work in this environment and go through it to begin to really understand what it means.

I had to, too. I had my perceptions and presumptions, and I had my theories when I was on the outside looking in and when I started this job.

Q: You came straight from Cleveland, right?

A: Yes. And I think once I got into this it took me a good three years to get my hands around it. The mistakes I made were mistakes based on aggressiveness & on not taking my time. My perceptions didn’t turn out the match the reality of the particular environment.

There were certain constants that I knew of. The home-road difference…I knew it was there because they’re clear from the stats, but I didn’t know the core of the reasons. And the whole offensive-minded ballpark…how it creates mindset in the players…I really had no idea how that would play out. Finding out was really a valuable learning experience.

So every year I’ve learned more things that relate to this particular (GM) job. I feel like we’re on the right path now; whether that turns out to be the case or not, we’ll find out.

BEYOND BASEBALL
So O'Dowd and his group came in with preconceived notions but started experimenting right away and, as importantly, observed and measured and analyzed their results. They haven't stopped.

Note that you can have the best data in the world but that full data alone, while it certainly helps an analyst define problems, doesn't help in defining questions to ask or the answers to address known challenges.

Note, too, a Third Base skill O'Dowd has -- self-awareness. He knows his management actions tend towards aggressive approaches. He knows his tendencies meant he made mistakes. He doesn't pretend it's anyone else's fault (if anything, I believe, he may be grabbing blame for shortfalls that are outside a manager's control), and this accountability makes it possible to more easily dump past approaches and embrace new ones. Energy spent elaborating CYA strategies is energy that's not going into analysis or forward-looking decisions.