Management by Baseball

In general, North American businesses are incapable of taking advantage of North America's #1 ever native management consultant. W. Edwards Deming revolutionized a variety of industries, primarily manufacturing, around the world by promoting kaizen, continuous improvement through mostly small changes.

Kaizen doesn't fit well into the structure of the large publicly-owned corporation as practiced most places, especially in the U.S., in Russia or in Red China. That's for two main reasons.

One, the approach generally puts workers into a leading position in change design, and that doesn't fit well in the normally very top-down corporate designs of corporations in those three countries...allowing that to happen would disrupt management to line staff compensation ratios.

Two, continuous improvement relies mostly on small, quickly deployed changes and there's little career-building credit to accumulate to ambitious executives for any single one. So mega-projects and grandiose programs garner more attention and enthusiasm, and eventually compensation rewards.

Because of those dysfunctional barriers, Deming can be hard to implement in North American corporations, but he's even harder to read -- his materials are a barrier to success.

One of Deming's most successful U.S. disciples is the Kaizen-pushing Rick Peterson, the Milwaukee Brewers' new pitching coach. And one of the reasons he's so successful, even managing process and people in an industry where the average education is much lower than average, is because he knows how to use accessible ideas to describe the very lofty things he's achieving.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Peterson recently conducted an organization-wide pitching symposium in Arizona, and the reporter wrote about the core changes the team was making. Not a mega-project, not a self-aggrandizing grandiose Shlock 'n Awe publicity-fest. Kaizen.

Non-extreme makeover

Many residents of Brewer Nation are fighting panic attacks regarding the team's starting rotation.

After the Brewers finished last in that department in the National League with a 5.37 earned run average in 2009, general manager Doug Melvin replaced just one starter, punting Braden Looper and signing free agent Randy Wolf.

There is still time to add another starter, and Melvin stays in touch with the agents of certain pitchers, such as Doug Davis. But, should the rotation include just the one change, new pitching coach Rick Peterson is determined to make it work.

"You take a look at each guy and say, 'What are incremental differences we can make to help him win?' " said Peterson, who detailed his plan during the organization's recent pitching symposium in Phoenix.

"It's like compound interest. It doesn't grow a lot in one day. It grows over time. If you can get guys to make incremental improvements, you get significant improvement over time.

Simply put, it's classic Deming, but because Rick uses an apt & broadly understood analogy, and because he's boiled the explanation down to just the simplest apparent feature, it's easier to "get", ergo more likely to be internalised in context, ergo more likely to be implemented properly, ergo more likely to trigger significant improvements.

But just how much value would the tiny incremental improvement Peterson posits actually mean in winning potential?

The Kegmen were 80-82 last year. They scored 785 runs (a swell 3rd best of 16 teams) while allowing 818 runs (a scary-bad next to worst). How far away were Milwaukee's last-in-the-league-for-ERA starters from allowing an average number of runs?

If Rick's increment were, for example, 1 fewer hit per series, 1 fewer walk per series, 1 additional strikeout per series, it seems on the surface not an unreasonable target. The average 2009 team yielded 27.4 hits per series, so it's not full-tilt Nam-myoho-renge-kyo to believe better pitching could trim that to 26.4 per series. And aiming to trim the average number of walks per series from around 10 to about 9 seem more ambitious, but the pitcher has a little more control over this, so actual training and focus might yield that.

But how much difference would that 1 hit less, 1 walk less and 1 strikeout more per series (1-1-1) make? Glance at the table below in which the conceptual/incrementally-tweaked Brewers are yclept MIL10.

Not too shabby. IF Peterson's increment was the modest 1-1-1 for the staff, the Brewers would have been roughly composite league average, and a league average pitching staff yielded 727 runs (not the 818 the real 2009 Brewers did). If the 2009 Brew Crew scored the 785 runs they actually did, while yielding a league composite average 727 runs, then according to a thumbnail Pythagorean estimate, one might expect them to win 87 games, a seven-game improvement. It's not, in and of itself, enough to take over the world, but it's Deming-like...an inexpensive, targeted low-overhead quality improvement that frees up slack for attention to other things.

What looked like a ferocious challenge (getting the Brewers' awful starting pitching performance to average) yields to small, incremental changes plotted studiously and executed relentlessly. Deming

But let's get even more specific for a moment. 2009 NL starting pitchers averaged 5.8 innings per start. The 2009 Brewer starters gave up 566 runs in 891 innings (3.68 runs/5.8 innings of starting pitching). Had they been merely adequate enough to yield the league composite average for NL starters, it would have been 2.84 runs/5.8 innings of starting pitching. Over 162 games, league average yields 136 fewer runs than the actual 2009 Brewer starters.

Small, incremental changes executed daily yield to serious, competitive returns. And classic Deming in that the small quality improvement might yield other advantages as well. In this 2010 Brewer case, there's an argument to be made that if the starting pitching is "better", it will put less demand on bullpen innings, meaning incremental available innings can be shifted to "better" relievers, and that could lead to better results. More classic Deming.

Deming's disciple is Peterson, and Peterson is lucky to be working for as experimental an executive as Brewer GM Doug Melvin, but even the non-Melvin shops in Baseball are far more capable of following and successfully implementing Deming than most corporations or academic or non-profit organizations are.

If you're not applying Deming in this economy, then what the heck are you waiting for?

One of the most chronic American business and military management failures arises from success.

In competitive environments, successful organisations find it more seductive to stand pat rather than maintain the effort to find improvements. I've written about this effect before, but I just ran into the exhilarating Baseball example that reminds us that Baseball, unlike business, makes this error less because Baseball is innately smarter than American business and the American military.

The failure I'm talking about is the failure to remember that Whatever Doesn't Make You Stronger Kills You.

OISK v. RISK
I'm working on a piece of writing for a SABR project, and I had the good fortune to speak this month with Carl Erskine, a starting pitcher for the Brooklyn & Los Angeles Dodgers (1948 - 59) about one of his teammates. His teammate, Jim Gilliam, had been brought up in 1953 and been given a starting slot over other candidates with clearer statistical advantages. I was looking to find out if Erskine knew the Dodger front office's reasoning.

What aroused my curiosity was hearing this week that an ex-client (professional services sector, I'll call them 2SmartCo) had chosen to go gently into that good night rather than try to gut it out through the ongoing U.S. economic struggles. One of the reasons 2SmartCo is an ex-client is they had a great service ethic but a billing and collections model that was gratuitously client-unfriendly. In the general panorama of their swell client relations, it stood out like Mount Fuji, rendering it a painorama. I'll get back to them later.

The 1952 Dodgers had won 96 games, taking the National League flag by a comfortable 4-1/2 game margin. Their most obvious strength was their infield, with middle-of-the-line-up slick-fielding first baseman Gil Hodges, perennial all-star second baseman Jackie Robinson, star shortstop Pee Wee Reese, and recognized as slickest-fielding 3rd baseman in the league Billy Cox at the hot corner. Hodges had had his best season yet, Robinson a high-end one that was among his best, Reese had lost a step but was still a great asset, and Cox had produced a typical season at the plate. They'd lost the World Series to the Yankees again, but personnel-tweaking wasn't going to solve that barrier. A great performance most organizations outside of baseball would look to repeat.

So during the winter following the 1952 season, the Dodgers decided to fix what wasn't broke, and do a radical makeover of their infield for the 1953 campaign. They moved Robinson and his sore knees to 3rd base, put rookie Gilliam (0 previous games in the majors, though he had been playing pro ball in the minors and the Negro Leagues for seven seasons) at second, and bench Billy Cox.

At the time, Erskine was, he told me, amazed. "Why tinker with that team, I thought? It was so good," he said. He mentioned that manager Charlie Dressen was a risk-taker and sometimes, in his opinion (and in the separate but identical opinion of Hall of Fame manager Dick Williams who was also on that team) an over-manager at times. But this seemed bold, even for Dressen.

Dressen and GM Branch Rickey, rather than admiring the glass 90% full examined the remaining 10% to see what they could do to fill it up some more. They were focused on two factors they were lacking for: a lead-off hitter who got on base and could run, and a left-handed hitter.

Their regulars leading off in 1952 had been below acceptable...like my client's billing and collections process, not enough to change the outcome in an otherwise excellent season, but ugly. Here's the production for Dodger regulars batting lead-off.

The second factor was they wanted another left-handed bat. The team’s everyday 1952 line-up featured only one left-handed hitter, center fielder Duke Snider. They had solid left-handed fourth outfielders (Tommy Holmes, George Shuba and Cal Abrams), and back-up catcher Rube Walker batted from the port side. But Dressen and the front office knew the line-up would feature eight or seven right-handed batters, and they’d measured the results of that in ‘52. While the rest of the 1952 National League’s batters saw left-handed pitching 27% of their plate appearances, the starboard-heavy Dodgers only saw lefties 16% of their PAs, and that undermined most of their right-handed hitters.

So Gilliam looked like a risk worth taking, a possible lead-off batter who as a switch-hitter could bat left-handed against right-handed pitchers.

In retrospect, the move panned out brilliantly. The 1953 Dodgers went 103-49 (.682, 7 wins better than 2009's excellent Yankee squad), and likely one of the five or ten best National league teams of the 20th Century.

Gilliam himself did about everything an optimist could have planned for: .383 on-base, 31 doubles and 17 triples, 100 walks and only 38 strikeouts, resulting in 125 runs scored and a strong first place finish as Rookie of the Year. Bigger, he blew out of the chute by leading off and getting on base in every one of the team's first 24 games, with a .456 on-base average.

And Cox, the apparent odd-man out, ended up getting 371 plate appearances, and had the best offensive stats of his career.

The Dodgers, like most baseball organizations, understand that whatever doesn't make you stronger kills you, and then ACT on that knowledge.

BEYOND BASEBALL
Back to my ex-client. So I had been called into examine why some satisfaction scores were not at the highest approval rating (because they really did care), and found out the predominant reason was the set of client-unfriendly billing practices I mentioned.

When I presented the results, a couple of people in the management committee were upset that their satisfaction measures were failing their clients. A couple people were defensive. One of the defensive ones was the man who in a re-org had taken over responsibility finance and another department in addition to his own. He didn't have a vested interest in defending the status quo, but it appeared he didn't want to ruffle feathers in his temporarily-acquired department. I suspect he figured that when they got a new "real" manager, she or he would fix the problem. And overall, satisfaction measures were very good to excellent. So the other committee-members decided to stay the course rather than force change/stress on the interim, already-stretched manager.

Results and growth at 2SmartCo stayed steadily acceptable for three years after. But my inside sources told me a few weeks back that the billing/collections process had never changed and, in the tightening economy, had become more pronouncedly client-unfriendly (Angus' First Law of Organizations: All human systems tend to be self-amplifying). Challenged clients slowed payments, and some receivables owed by failing clients became uncollectible.

This dissolution was probably preventable. The decisions made three years ago were made for comfort, not performance. They're weren't as 2Smart as they thought they were; they weren't 2Smart 2Fail. They were hoping good enough was good enough.

It wasn't. Whatever doesn't make you stronger kills you.

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.

¿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.”

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

Back in January I wrote about the "Roger Clemens Move" the A.L.'s 39th best starter pulled during the off-season.

Paul Byrd had retired to spend time with his family, but he left the option open to play part-time during a team's stretch run. And that's exactly what today's news ("Byrd set to resume career with Red Sox")indicates he successfully pulled off...in this case after coming out of retirement for four starts in the last couple of weeks for minor league affiliates of the Red Sox, The Louisville Hugger has been called up by Boston to fill in for the ailing Tim "The Vicarious" Wakefield.

According to the linked story, Byrd's plan almost didn't work -- as of a month ago, he hadn't heard from any teams, but he had kept himself in shape, and he has a history of having the ability to throw strikes when he wants. Even an old Byrd can succeed for a team with a productive offense, because he has that skill.

BEYOND BASEBALL It's an interesting move more organizations should consider: tapping into reasonably-skilled talent to fill in sporadic gaps.

With Byrd back in the nest, though, I thought a reprise of the January piece would be informative:

Byrd Plans Late Return... to a Feathered Nest

Baseball podcaster Jimmy Scott does weekly interviews, most frequently with ex-players, and the gem of his recent interview with former American league pitcher Dick "The Toledo Titan" Drago was during a discussion of various managers Drago had played for.

Drago, btw, had an unusually interesting career. He started with an expansion team; he was a jack of all trades...after his rookie year, he was a starter for four years, a swing man for one and a reliever for the last seven seasons -- one of them as "the closer" for a legendary World Series hopeful, the 1975 Boston Red Sox).

Metro was the worst kind of bad manager (beyond Baseball, anyway): the manager (usually a guy) who believes that being a stern disciplinarian is the most effective way to reach your goal. According to Drago:

...he was a tyrant. Charlie Metro was in the organization, and he was one of these disciplinarians who had crazy ideas that didn't work...One of his favorites was he was always running the pitchers. he always had a stopwatch in his hand. We'd go out and do our sprints and he would have his watch (and time everyone).

We ended up finding out the watch didn't even work.

BEYOND BASEBALL
One of the first surprises I learned to prepare for in my management consulting work was innumerate managers who faked being in command of their numbers. They generally choose one of two techniques to blind you with pseudo-science:

1. Waving around, locked elbow style like Jack Cust hunting a flyball, a Balboni-size volume of output that is waaaay too elaborate to be of any use because you can't ever find within it the handful of points that were insightful or actionable, OR
2. Fabricated nonsense, usually proprietary, they could claim you couldn't possibly understand (and, secretly, they don't either). I call this nonsense Potemkin Metrics.

When you meet managers who use #2, made up spit, especially numeric spit, it tends to be not only someone who's innumerate, but someone whose management "theory" predominantly involves ideas that usually get resisted, and they're going to try to shove the objected-to practices down employee throats using the impression that they really know what they're doing.

Baseball is the perfect test lab for measuring the relative merits of competitive strategies, so the lessons I'm about to share (generously coughed up by Oakland A's manager Bob Geren (who was once traded for Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers).

But before the lessons, and because I can hear that whinger in the back of the room getting ready to complain that business and war are a lot more competitive, let me reiterate why this is Truth.

For one thing, competition in Baseball is a lot more fierce than the endeavor you're in because success is zero-sum. For every win there has to be a loss -- none of that rising tide lifts all moats stuff. That's not true in business or in War. The second unarguable reason is that in baseball, you have to win right now, and you have to do without seriously affecting your chances of winning tomorrow. It's a long haul, and you can't just do what most publicly-traded corporations do (or the Governor and legislature of California do) and slide gains or losses between fiscal quarters to make things look good. The daily table of standings in the paper prevent any corporate-like attempt to fog the truth. Finally, winning is inevitably measured on a balanced scorecard. You need to win in the measurable ways (game wins, attendance), but just as much in the immeasurable ways (development of young players, resting of old ones, level of "good will", intensity of interest of current fans and kids who could be paying fans in a decade). Sandy Alderson, the brains behind the gathering of brain power that built the A's when they were a persistently excellent franchise, is as successful a formulator of scorecard balancing as you can find anywhere in North American management (a lot on that in an earlier entry). Baseball's just better at all these competitive challenges than is the norm for "good" in any other endeavor.

In sum, you have to win today and tomorrow, in measurable and in immeasurable ways in a zero-sum system where every win guarantees a loss in the system. And I promise you that in your endeavor, you have it easier than that.

BOB GEREN'S WISDOM The Oakland Athletics are having a tough season on the winning-today measure. Both the batters they acquired in the off-season to boost the immediate value of a line-up filled with young, unproven players were disappointments relative to what the team had hoped for. Those two are now gone and one, Matt Holliday was the most productive hitter they had this year. They're in last place by a long dangle as of today...

As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle's Steve Kroner:

Before Thursday's 6-4 loss to the Rangers, a team fighting for a playoff spot, Bob Geren was asked if, at this time of the year, he manages any differently whether the opponent is in the race or not.

"Not at all. No way," he said.

"You try to beat everybody everyday. I can't even comprehend managing a different style against one team or another. It's all about winning, if you're in first place or whatever place you're in.

"You want to win every inning. You want to win every game. You want to win every series. Who we're playing is irrelevant."

And that's an essence of Baseball you need in your own management. Geren is putting a lot of rookies on the field, players who at this moment are not as good as their opponents. He doesn't give up; he Like Geren, you try to bring your best game every single day, every hour. And if you can't, you build up the other areas of your scorecard. You win by relentlessly experimenting with young players' talents and in training and in never stopping observing the results of your experiments and then incorporating your analysis into action, and then seeing what happens and doing it all over again.

There's no resting in Baseball management, no slack-off. There shouldn't be in your line of work, either. To repeat Geren:

"You want to win every inning. You want to win every game. You want to win every series. Who we're playing is irrelevant."

One of the easiest management assignments in the world is when you work in a struggling workgroup that's been doing the same things over and over again without success, resulting in the purge of a manager and your ascencion to the position. It's less exciting than coming from the outside as a fixer -- more latitude that way -- but when you've been promoted internally, you already have a ton of detailed knowledge about the mechanics of what has been failing and working, personalities, workflows, processes, and unquestioned assumptions. "Where all the skeletons are buried".

I recommend that course for all employees, even those without management ambition, because it makes even a dull job more interesting. But when you have a job like Jim Riggleman has had, bench coach for a struggling team, that's one of the critical pieces of your very job description...to be a "shadow manager" and to be there at the right hand of the manager for advice and perspective.

But it appears Jim Riggleman, 16 games ago given the job of interim manager of the struggling Washington Nationals, is about to let an essential personality trait, personal loyalty, get in the way of doing the things he needs to do to achieve enough success to be the not-interim manager. It's sad, because in overhearing him interact with other coaches and staff last year and in watching him prepare for games, I found him to be thoughful and studious and intelligent.

RECENT RIGGLESAGA
When before the 2008 season, lifelong baseball man John McLaren got his first chance to start a new year as a major league manager, he chose to hire a powerful combine of experts as coaches, many of them former major league managers themselves. This requires a lot of self-confidence -- many managers hate to have anyone around who might replace them, but McLaren has high emotional intelligence as well as traditional baseball knowledge, and recognized that each of his College of Cardinals, er, of Mariners, would be non-backstabbers. His bench coach was Jim Riggleman.

McLaren, with his college, put together a master plan that included the cognitive DNA of his expert & loyal staff and launched the season with it.

The 2008 season was a frelling mess for the Mariners, the core reasons being it was a pitching-and-defense team with pitchers who were playing injured (Erik Bedard), or underperforming (Jarrod Washburn), or meeting head on The Bigotry of High Expectations Not Justified By Skill Level (Carlos Silva), declining defense, and not enough middle-of-the-lineup oomph to even provide a hint of success. The roster was the limiting factor, McLaren wasn't squeezing the most out of what would have been a last place team anyway, and he was sacrificed after game 72.

The same roster + the same game plan + a different personality making slightly different decisions = minimal, if positive, change.

Washington Nationals' manager Manny Acta hired Riggleman to be his bench coach in the off-season with the thought that the team would benefit from his knowledge and experience and that Acta could count on his personal loyalty which, as it proved, he could. Because when the Nationals' G.M. Mike Rizzo fired Acta from his position at the helm of the woeful and woefully-underperforming even their intrinsic woefulness , Riggleman had nothing but considerate things to say about his friend Acta at his kick-off press conference, as reported at Nats320.

Question: Mike Rizzo said a couple of days ago that sometimes you just need a different voice. The things that Manny may have been doing were fine, but need to be presented in a different way. How will Jim Riggleman’s voice be different from Manny Acta’s? Riggleman: “I don’t know if it will be much different. But there is something to that. That is the kind of statement I made in Chicago. I was there for five years (as manager for The Cubs) and I was let go there. And I felt like that if I were in the General Manager’s position, I would have done the same thing. I would have let Jim Riggleman out of there because I know he was saying the right things but we need to get someone else to give this message because the players are not getting it done. So that’s basically what it amounts to. I don’t think you can change a lot. I know Manny wouldn’t change anything that he did. And I wouldn’t question anything that he did. I just want to try to continue to pound the message in and maybe coming from someone else maybe they will respond or maybe they won’t—but we have got to try that.”

No one, not even Manny Acta I suspect, would have considered him disloyal if he had said as part of his answer to the question quoted above, "We've been underperforming and I'm going to have to do several things differently from what Manny was trying, including X and Y", X and Y being the items he most noticed as the "shadow manager".

When you take on a new management assignment, you have a very short period, not even the Cloud-Cuckoo-Land "100 days" U.S. Presidents are imaginarily given, to have a high impact. You need to choose concrete changes (even if only small ones), implement them effectively, and tell staff and other management you're doing them, and point out the differences they made.

Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision. --Peter Drucker

In the previous post, I wrote about minor-leaguer Pat Venditte, a switch-pitcher for the Yankees' feeding Charleston Riverdogs of the South Atlantic League.

Venditte goes against standard analysis for young pitchers because part of his effectiveness is the switch-pitching (giving him a small platoon advantage against most batters regardless of whether they bat right- or left-handed), and since this method is so rare, it cannot fit any category with the word "standard" in it. But the coup de boule here that keeps the Yanks skeptical of Venditte no matter how well he performs, is that his skill set doesn't include power that can overcome most opponents -- he's a finesse pitcher who had succeeded "only" in finessing raw A-league batters.

I raised the argument that it made sense to promote him until he failed, and as long as he was such an unusual talent, it would take longer for opponents to get used to him and adjust.

Well, since I wrote the entry, the Yanks have promoted Venditte to their Tampa A League team and in the subsequent three innings over two appearances, the port-starboarder has performed at the same statistical level against very slightly-better competition. He has a long way to go and a lot of success at more levels before one can imagine the very definition of non-standard getting a crack at pitching to major leaguers in a regular season major league game.

While I'm pretty militant in my advocacy of experimentation, and while Baseball is probably the most testing-refining-test-again line of work in North America, I am ready to also argue the case for not investing a lot in Venditte.

REASON #1: WHAT IS PAST IS PRELOADED
When the management work requires a lot of decisions (as I've written before, a major league manager makes several hundred decisions a game...and that's only during the game itself, and excludes all the pre-game decisions about line-up and preparations for likely contingencies), it becomes critical to shorten the amount of time from realization a decision is required to delivery because in most competitive systems, waiting too long to act is a choice to not act -- the situation passes you by before you can apply your will to it.

It's vital, therefore, to reduce the number of decisions you will invest innovation in. What's worked generally in the past will work generally in the present...until it doesn't work well or sometimes at all. That's evolution, and while you have to be prepared for it, because there are sunny days even in an Ice Age, you can't simply ignore what generally works. You should relentlessly make experimental decisions that riff off of generally-true, even if only by a little. But unless you commit to doing that automatically, any attempt to innovate on every decision will result in Decision Entropy -- randomness leading to, at best, overall mediocrity.

One has to just quickly make decisions with proven tendencies because in most situations, the results will be adequate and the time saved in the decision process will provide slack to invest in bigger, more variable situations/decisions.

Repeating what was successful and low variability tends to be a winner in more cases than exceptions. And the good pitchers like Venditte tend to be successful until the reach a level where their gimmicks can't overcome the Seven Sigma performance of AAA and major league baseball players. And so passing on investing in Venditte and the other very talented but abnormal players leaves coaches and team staff more time to invest in the individuals who embody the more-likely-to-succeed characteristics.

Which leads us to ...

REASON #2: UP OR OUT, IN BASEBALL & BEYOND
In a competitive endeavour where, as in Baseball, The Talent Is The Product, any laxity in hiring the best and making them better assures falling short or even failing. That's true in a minor league system and in your own organization, too. So in baseball, they have this model: Up or Out. To oversimplify it, if you are not succeeding to a large degree at a given level by a given age (alternatively, by a given amount of field experience), it's time to go and make room for someone else who might be able to succeed.

It seems bloodthirsty, but resources (coaching, roster spots, et.al.) are limited, and it's educational suicide to spread your resources so thin that the candidates with a good chance of succeeding don't receive enough to get critical mass. If you had nine adequate outfielders on a team sharing plate appearances and field time, none of them would get a critical mass of experience to experiment, learn, recognize patterns. So you cut the four or five that seem least likely to make it to the majors. Of course, it doesn't mean focusing all the attention on one is a path to organizational success, but in general, Up or Out succeeds at focusing resources on the individuals most likely to succeed.

A side-effect of this good system is something bad...what will probably happen to Pat Venditte. Because they are just waiting for him to hit his ceiling, they are likely to "see" that result, even when it's just a slump or a short chain of poor luck, than if he was a guy with a 98 m.p.h. heater.

Presuming your own organization is not a sheltered workshop, you have to make sure every single hire adds to your quality or quantity or both. Everyone who is not making you better or faster or more capable to respond to a changing environment or boosting overall morale while holding her own is taking up a spot for someone who might.

Even, too often (grrrrr), if you lose the chance to harness the talent of a person whose approach defies everything that usually has limited achievements.

In Baseball (and all other endeavours), managers benefit from pattern-recognition, noting what works and what doesn't and generally avoiding repeating efforts that mimic or parallel past failures.

If you know the printer you send your four-color glossy work to and that does a great job of it is also always late with mediocre product when you send them a two-color job, it doesn't serve you well to send them your two-color work again. Though, volume discounts aside, it probably doesn't mean you should stop sending them the four-color jobs at which they excel. No big epiphany, that. We managers survive and thrive because we recognize patterns and act on 'em.

¿But what about innovation that breaks the (not unreasonable) expectations of standard operating procedure? Breaking standards is Innovation's norm (because if it was standard, it probably wouldn't be an innovation).

It's a very tough situation because if you always stick to standards, you cannot exceed standard performance except through luck, and management, as Branch Rickey once said, "Luck is the residue of design", that is, more often than not, luck seems to favor more coherent planners. And if you break standards all the time, you miss out on the highest upsides but also the worst crashes.

So it's with mixed leanings I read the New York Times' Alan Schwarz piece this morning on the A League reliever Pat Venditte, apparently pro baseball's only current switch-pitcher. Venditte labors for the Yankees' affiliate, Mike Veeck's Charleston River Dogs. And when you see that Veeck affiliation, if you haven't looked yet at Venditte's stats, you may think the 24-year-old is another brilliant but satirical Veeck promotion like Vasectomy Day or Enron Night, but you'd be off base.

Please note, against lefties he's allowing 5 baserunners in 10 innings (when allowing twice as many runners, 10, would be "very good") and striking out 19 in those 10 innings (when striking out only 10 would be "very good"). Against righties, he's allowing 18 runners in 18 innings, "very good", and striking out 19, "very good" plus a stitch. Feel free to ignore the E.R.A. ... as a reliever it's not particularly indicative. But the single home run allowed over his 28 innings is stingier than average.

He's worth paying attention to, but...

As Schwarz wrote:

The Yankees, whose bullpen is among the worst in the American League, have two arms in Class A ball leading the minor leagues in saves. The left-handed one has kept hitters to a .121 batting average; the right-handed one has not walked anyone in 20 innings. This would all be rather straightforward, except that both arms belong to the same body.

Pat Venditte, the only switch-pitcher in professional baseball, is one of the most dominant — and well-known — players in the minor leagues. National news organizations travel to Charleston, S.C., to revel in his uniqueness. Fans see his statistics and dream of matchup mayhem. But experienced talent evaluators see not just one underwhelming fastball, but two. Sorry, kid.

S.O.P. HATES PAT VENDITTE With stats like that, in an organization hungry for relief pitching, common sense tells you Pat Venditte would be getting groomed for a major league tryout, probably being advanced to AAA. Standard operating procedure, though, treasures a big fast ball, and Venditte simply doesn't have one he can produce with either arm.

As Schwarz wrote:

... other numbers loom larger: his age (he turns 24 in a few weeks, having spent four years at Creighton University) and those mediocre fastball readings. He is dominating much younger hitters with well-located stuff that probably will not survive as he moves higher.

If you have finesse but not overwhelming power , you have nothing to fall back on. You can learn finesse if your power fails, but if your finesse fails, you can't suddenly learn power (not intuitively obvious, but essentially true in the real world). So Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson can re-start a loss of power with a monster curveball or slider, respectively, when batters started being able to do a little something with any fastball they threw that wasn't their best. Jamie Moyer and Doug Davis don't have that affordance; if their control goes off a little bit, they have no alternative on which to fall back.

In general, prospects with middling fast balls crap out -- the failure proportion of finesse guys like Moyer is a lot higher than the failure proportion of power guys.

Of course, it's somewhat a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because S.O.P. says finesse guys are quicker to crash and burn if something goes wrong, the inevitable something-going-wrong activates the quicker management trigger finger that presumes the standard -- that dude has failed.

BEYOND BASEBALL This quick managerial trigger finger too often cuts short a successful experiment. Experiments are held to a much higher standard than everyday vanilla decisions are. And to a large degree, they should be.

If you make a different reasonable decision every day in response to repetitive identical issues and get comparable results, you're wasting cycles -- it's one of those events that probably doesn't offer much variance in outcomes. If you picked one approach that worked and just made it automatic, you save brain time you could apply to areas on which you could have more effect.

If you could make a decision that consistently outperformed others, even just a little, that is worth your while. But the risk in changing procedure tends to make S.O.P. lovers resist and push back when possible.

I did some pre-microcomputer era work for a retail book place that had two owners, and one just loved S.O.P. Once a year, they had to shut down on a work day during the Xmas rush to do inventory for a state inventory tax. They were just too busy and stores just a little too big to count all the stock and the value of each piece away from work hours. SInce I'd been a clerk in a pair of book stores before, I asked them to experiment beforehand with sampling shelves, picking every third row of the six-row shelves, and and changing the rows they counted each time they moved to the next shelf. We tested the sampling for six shelves against the counting-all-rows sums for each of them, and overall it was within 2%, with the worst difference for an individual shelf being 5%. If they implemented the inventory sampling, they would save about half their labor hours and cost, and be able to be open an extra day between Xmas and New Year's.

I was confident they would embrace this, and one owner did, but her partner would not. The partner had worked for a store that had gotten in trouble because they had fabricated, Bernie Madoff-style, an ersatz inventory and had been caught in an audit. Of course, the inventory tax audits were always samples themselves. But S.O.P. as defined by the tax authority dictated counting everything.

Her full-count approach was safe, but put a ceiling on their Xmas performance they wouldn't have had otherwise.

AND FURTHERMORE... Any experiment to try a sensible/possibly-rewarding innovation goes up in value as the number of competitors willing to follow you goes down (inversely proportional, as Joe Grzenda used to say). So a franchise willing to dedicate a few of their energy bars to refining the work of finesse pitchers, building up a coaching capability & technology and scout pattern recognition lessons (in differentiating the will-certainly-crap-out-at-the-next-level from the needs-only-to-learn-this-to-succeed-at-the-next-level), all optimised for that kind of talent, might find a dense nugget and a set of reproducable successes where competitors find only "a problem waiting to happen". Which y'all already know if you read Paul De Podesta. Again, if everyone sticks to standard operating procedure, you have competitive entropy, a Lucretian Dance of Random Chance, a Whole Lotta Aaron Sele Goin' On.

The chance to gain through innovation in blisteringly zero-sum arenas such as bookselling and Baseball argues the Yanks should be willing to try out Pat Venditte at AAA, and give him a chance against more selective and experienced batters to see what he can do. In my heart, I want them to; I find innovation exciting.

But still stored in my head are additional management reasons they probably shouldn't. In Part II, to follow, I'll lay out the management reasons that argue against taking the risk in Venditte's case.

From an anthropological perspective, one of the most amusing aspects of the American culture's marketing subculture is the idea that gender (in this case, male<--->female) makes for great marketing. In small, pre-industrial societies, the concept is very powerful. In large, diverse, cultures where the means of communication have been industrialized and work categories are less strictly gender-based, the differences (for marketing purposes) between males and females is blunted.

That hasn't stopped the publishing industry from pursuing the idea that almost any idea worth peddling is worth trying to squeeze into a category. Oh, yes, very few of my female friends would take a free subscription to Maxim (but not none of them); and few of my male friends would either. But both would agree Australian Handyman is the best-ever read. So books frequently get targeted by publishers for gender-specific audiences, and this trend gets enhanced by authors making pitches to publishers...because the authors realize the publishers will be more inclined to take a bite at their positioned pitch.

On the other hand, Baseball is wonderfully gender-neutral. Women constitute roughly 46% of game attendees, & that's the largest proportion of female fans for any of the big professional sports. (and for those of you who want to suggest, "well, it's still not half", I challenge you to discern the difference between 45% and 50% in eyeballing the crowd specifics at the next MLB game you attend). 

In spite of that, there are a matched set of gender-specific gender-directed Baseball books, and both are well worth reading by both women and men, if the underlying subject is of interest.

The new one is Parables from the Diamond, a devotional-without-calendar by preacher Phil Christopher & journalist Glenn Dromgoole, subtitled Meditations for Men on Baseball & Life. Each of the one-page essays has a title, a quotation, some reminder about a life issue and a thumbnail reminder. For example, "It Was 'Almost' a Home Run" or "A Broken Bat Still Has Value" reminds the reader that sometimes 'almost' is useless, and that once things pass from one state to another, they have value for different purposes.

The book is targeted to men, specifically, and Baptists in particular. Maybe the authors wanted it that way as part of their faith; maybe the publisher wanted it because they wanted the marketing boost or were ignorant about the broad span of women's interest in the sport. But almost all the insights have meditative value for women and men both, and for non-Baptists (like me) as much as anyone else. Because lessons in Baseball are so embedded in the intellectual and ethical/moral structures of most people in the baseball-mad countries of the Americas, tying back to Baseball for enlightening perspective has every bit as much value as non-faith based devotionals as tying Management lessons back to Baseball has for readers of this weblog.

I recommend the book, a gentle reminder of important life lessons I rarely write about, focusing on the Management, not Big Life Issues, insight Baseball has to offer. Of course, there are exceptions when I wax philosophic about Big Life Lessons.

Jackie Koney & Dierdre Silva finally published their mega-year, mega-publisher book, It Takes More Than Balls: The Savvy Girls' Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Baseball, designed to help other women get up to speed on the game's mechanics and history. I've met the authors at SABR meetings and ballpark events before, and their writing is engaging and smart. So why is it aimed at women, not people-in-general? Well, I suspect the gender-specifying lust of publishers is a part of it, but among men who don't know about baseball, how many of them will admit they need lessons or background? Sheet, there are male guys in SABR who need lessons but pretend they're experts.

Ergo, I heartily recommend Silva & Koney's book (or ballpark outings) for any novice you know who needs or wants to know more about the game; it's witty, informative and endorsed by Cal Ripken Jr. which is not something I can say about my own book.

Whether it takes balls or more than balls, there's always a marketing idea worth stretching. And if there's a worthwhile book or two behind it, well, that's magic. Because Baseball, Management and Life all take balls, and all take more than balls.

AND A MEMORIAL DAY THOUGHT...
...for you on this Memorial Day. A heart-rending memo (if yer in a rush, skip the prologue & scroll straight down to the memo) about the deprivations suffered by U.S. REMF troops in Iraq we all have to hope have been addressed forcefully. And it will help guide your own conduct towards the troops returning from Iraq who may be suffering from one or more of the problems delineated.