Management by Baseball

Large organizations recruiting for a key position seek stars -- people who just have powerful charisma and overwhelming force of skill, accomplishment and alpha-dog personality. As in baseball, when you find a Reggie Jackson or Roger Clemens, that's great, because no matter what their personal shortcomings or bumpy stretches, they just elevate your entire organization's prospects. All organizations recognize the value of Reggies & Rogers.

Since they seek Reggies and Rogers with such passion, recruiters and scouts frequently fall into a MBWT (Management by Wishful Thinking) pattern, taking someone who on the surface kind of seems like a Reggie or Roger but who is all hat and no cattle. The swagger, unaccompanied by applied accomplishment, is just Potemkin leadership, and, more often than not, is worse than nothing -- the final box score more often than not shows a negative result from thrusting an ersatz talent into the mix.

Then there's Doug Glanville.

While few large organizations know it or choose to act on it if they do, all of them need some Doug Glanvilles, people who, even though they don't have close to Reggie Jackson caliber talent, elevate everyone's abilities through broad interests, multi-disciplinary involvement & emotional intelligence. You can't build a team around such individuals, they can't be your "franchise player", they are just catalysts, key parts all successful organizations in competitive fields have on hand. Organizations that suppress the natural connecting abilities their Glanvilles have will find it hard to excel.

POLYMATHS ON PARADE
Highly-studious, blessed with highly-educated parents and highly-educated himself, verbally-adept at a couple of standard deviations above the baseball player norm, Glanville's path to the elite-talent world of the majors began as a five year old when he started playing a baseball simulation (Strat-O-Matic, specifically) along with Wiffle Ball, so his baseball education blended mind and body both. Simulations are wonderful training tool, especially good ones. They teach a student of them some of the obvious foundations of what they're simulating, and that does several things:

• It provides a framework on which to hang additional, more refined, information,
• It simplifies, at the cost of a little creativity, decision-making by making "automatic" certain components of decisions, freeing the actor to focus more attention to other areas,
• It supports experimentation and gathering experience at no risk to actual operations, by allowing the actor to find out certain approaches almost always fail.

SIDE NOTE: I've used simulations, particularly the urban planning sim "Sim City" as a test for job candidates. It's a powerful technique for exposing people's analytical and personality differences. I'll write about that in depth some other time.

Glanville found it easy (as his ilk always do) to slip between different levels of the hierarchy. As a degreed engineer with a background in transportation planning, he went to his team's front office to give them unsolicited counseling in transportation topics around the design and delivery of their new stadium. He was only a back-up outfielder, but he was fearless in sharing his knowledge with his "superiors" in an organization in which he knew more than anyone else about a subject.

BENEFITS NOT LIMITED BY JOB DESCRIPTION
The benefits of a Doug Glanville extend beyond the immediate skills required by their job description. Glanville, who retired during this season, will not be remembered as legendary by casual fans for his play.

Doug Glanville from Baseball-Reference.Com (link)

 Year Ag       G   AB    R    H   2B 3B  HR  RBI  SB CS  BB  SO   BA   OBP   SLG  
+--------------+---+----+----+----+---+--+---+----+---+--+---+---+-----+-----+-----+
 1996 25 CHC  49   83   10   20   5  1   1   10   2  0   3  11  .241  .264  .361  
 1997 26 CHC 146  474   79  142  22  5   4   35  19 11  24  46  .300  .333  .392  
 1998 27 PHI 158  678  106  189  28  7   8   49  23  6  42  89  .279  .325  .376  
 1999 28 PHI 150  628  101  204  38  6  11   73  34  2  48  82  .325  .376  .457  
 2000 29 PHI 154  637   89  175  27  6   8   52  31  8  31  76  .275  .307  .374  
 2001 30 PHI 153  634   74  166  24  3  14   55  28  6  19  91  .262  .285  .375  
 2002 31 PHI 138  422   49  105  16  3   6   29  19  2  25  57  .249  .292  .344  
 2003 32 TEX  52  195   22   53   5  0   4   14   4  0   6  25  .272  .294  .359  
 2003 32 CHC  28   51    2   12   0  0   1    2   0  1   2   4  .235  .259  .294   
 2003 32 TOT  80  246   24   65   5  0   5   16   4  1   8  29  .264  .286  .346  
 2004 33 PHI  87  162   21   34   1  1   2   14   8  0   8  21  .210  .244  .265   

 9 Seasons  1115 3964  553 1100 166 32  59  333 168 36 208 502  .277  .315  .380 
+------- ---+---+----+----+----+---+--+---+----+---+--+---+---+-----+-----+-----+
 162 Game Avg     576   80  160  24  5   9   48  24  5  30  73  .277  .315  .380  

 Year  Pos   G     PO    A    E   DP    FP   lgFP  RFg  lgRFg  RF9  lgRF9  GS   Inn  
+-----------+---+----+------+----+----+----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----+------+
 1997   CF   30     61    1    0    1 1.000  .983  2.07  2.03                       
 1998   CF  158    360   14    2    1  .995  .987  2.37  2.15                       
 1999   CF  148    386   14    8    3  .980  .984  2.70  2.20                       
 2000   CF  150    380    9    4    4  .990  .987  2.59  2.24  2.75  2.64  145 1275.3
 2001   CF  150    413    8    4    3  .991  .986  2.81  2.18  2.89  2.59  147 1310.7
 2002   CF  117    220    8    0    4 1.000  .988  1.95  2.13  2.30  2.57   95  891.3
 2003   CF   67    144    2    0    1 1.000  .990  2.18  2.38  2.63  2.73   55  499.7
 2004   CF   56     90    0    0    0 1.000  .987  1.61  2.26  2.83  2.53   24  286.0
+-----------+---+----+------+----+----+----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+----+------+
 Total  CF* 885   2062   56   18   17  .992  .986  2.39  2.20              466 4263.0

He had a sweet season in 1999, but really, he was a two-tool player with a merely-adequate major league career. He was a defensive specialist at a skill position. His fielding was consistently good statistically -- better than league average range every year but one and better than league average in errors every year but one. About a career 90th percentile center fielder.

He was an excellent baserunner and a very good base-stealer, with an 83% success rate, above the 80th percentile career for modern baseball stealers with that many attempts.

But his value transcended the numbers.

He was a player representative, using his communciation and self-described "nerd" skills to educate his fellow staffers about rules and regulations and industry trends. He was and is active in the community, bringing his fellow staffers into contact with the organization's customers. He was a talker in the clubhouse, being a joker and keeping people loose. Even in his retirement announcement, a time that would be sad for most, he milked it for laughs, arranging to have a one-day contract with his hometown team, the Phillies, and suggesting it was signed in invisible ink.

People who work in organizations without Glanvilles miss out on knowledge, connections and the ability such contributors have to break up stress and the mistakes that result from stress.

Large organizations are always better off with a lot of Reggies and Rogers than none. The error they tend to make is if they can't find superstar talent, they fall into the error of taking a chance on someone who really isn't one but who looks like he or she just might be.

Usually, they're far better off with a Doug. That talent at connecting people reinforces healthy habits and transcends the immediate stats they can put up. As long as the Doug is adequate, large organizations are better off with a Doug than a Potemkin Roger.