Management by Baseball

The practice of turnaround is a specialty among the practices in general management within and beyond baseball. Turning around an established organization that's failing requires skills from quotidian management methods, but some additional ones that if missing (and most managers are missing several of them) just about doom the turnaround to fail or under-perform critically. 

When the new ownership of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and its new upper management team recruited a field manager, they recognized they needed someone as capable on the field as predecessor Lou Piniella, but someone who could either not get in the way of the turnaround they had in mind, or better yet, someone who would actually add torque to their drive towards a new model. For that key role, they chose Joe Maddon, who is, based on my experience in a lot of turnaround initiatives, perfectly suited to the task.

Listen to him carefully - there are few practitioners as perceptive as Maddon, and almost none willing to share their processes.

In this second part of the interview (there's more for another entry) I'm going to cover most of the talk we had about turnaround practice, how it affects the product on the field now and in the future. I've changed the order of the sections as they appear because I was not as structured in the conversation as I could have been -- we were having a good time, and I wandered off course a few times.

This is an important aside. A lot of people have judged the Rays' post-Naimoli reality, their front office, field management and coaching, against the putrid record they finished with last year. While their judgment might conceivably prove true someday, I think it's nonsense to take on this stance at this point. The team made decisions to trade away present to get future back; on July 12, the team sent their presumptive "best" player, Aubrey Huff, for minor leaguers, and within the next six weeks, they'd trade Julio Lugo for a top Dodger prospect, Joel Guzman and another minor leaguer, as well as trading Russell Branyan for a minor leaguer. At July 12, they were 39-50 (.438, projecting out over a season to about 71-91), not great but 11 wins better than the 2005 squad was at that date. Some ticket-buying fans would rather see a 2006 win than a 2008 win (or even three of 'em), and I can sympathize. But the front office decided to sell off a face-saving -- if inevitably futile -- 2006 by choosing to peddle marketable, proven, if not stellar veterans in exchange for young players who might prove to be stellar. After July 12, the team went 22-51, a .301 "clip".
     There's an important duality among sports fans and front offices. Some strongly prefer being continually, consistently competitive, while others prefer highs and lows because you win more pennants that way (and struggle more, too). Both theories can bring "success" over time, though the environment  in which a team plays affects the comparative level of the success one is likely to achieve relative to the other. The Devil Rays, battling in the zero-sum crucible in the AL East against two of the best-funded and best-run organizations in baseball, can make a rational argument that it makes more sense to be really bad and lose 100 games a couple of years and win 100 games a couple of years than it is to win 85 games in each of those years. In the NL West, it makes more sense to tilt the other way. If I paid for D-Rays tix and if I'd lived through the Naimoli era, I might feel differently, but as an outside analyst who doesn't and didn't, I think their plan is more likely to work than what they might have achieved if they'd kept the vets.

So here are a mess 'o Lessons from Maddon & The Rays on Turnaround.

THINK EXPANSION TEAM EVEN IF IT'S NOT
When you inherit the mantle in a turnaround initiative, departmental or the whole organization, it pays to think of it as an expansion team. You have the "right", perhaps even the mandate to build everything from scratch. In a turnaround, you have residual plaque...process, habits, technologies, staff. You should ask yourself, "what would I do if I was starting from scratch?", and "which of these existing pieces fit or can be remolded to that ideal?". As Paul DePodesta has said, you have to ask the naïve question, and don't take on the assumptions of your predecessors (after all, if the predecessors' assumptions were all correct, this wouldn't be a turnaround situation. Picking up the interview from where we left off last time...

Joe Maddon (JM): Absolutely. And for me that is my primary goal right now…that the clubhouse is good, the interaction and communication are good. When I came, my #1 goal was to change the culture in the clubhouse and this group.

Jeff (JA): I want to hear more about that. I want to hear about changes and about what you’ve deliberately set out to do. How much study were you able to do before Spring Training or did it start then. Did you get reports? Because this is classic turnaround practice and this has so much value to people outside of baseball. As I said earlier, people don’t get to see the guts of turnaround practice in other fields. 

So the team is about seven or eight wins ahead of where they were on this date a year ago. And it’s not like your predecessor was any kind of a bum…

JM: His agenda was different from mine. I think if you analyze a manager’s approach, you have to first establish what the person’s agenda is. 

My agenda from the start was to come in here with the new group of people…young people… I saw the developmental situation as a challenge. I always thought for if I was going to leave the Angels, the best way to do it would be in an expansion situation. Which is what I consider this group to be.

I’m very competitive. You build up this competitive nature against these other teams that have existed for many years. Whereas the Tampa Bay Devil Rays have only existed eight years. I’ve not built up any negative feelings towards this group (as a result of the competitive nature). SO I can come in here and it’s like it’s all new. 

I feel like this is the Devil Rays’ first year. So you lock into that and the first thing you have to do coming in is to listen to people; ask the question “What is it that has been wrong around here”. Because from the outside, you can make assumptions…perhaps it’s incompetent people, there’s been no organization, there’s been no communication, there have been competing agendas. From the outside, those are the assumptions you’ll make seeing a group doing poorly.

But then I met the people who were in the front office – they were highly competent. Yes, there were some new people, but the ones who were left over were tremendous. Hard working, I thought, cared about winning. So I saw this wonderful group of people, bright, creative, so what’s gone wrong here?

Once your take on Maddon's insight that Turnaround is like starting an expansion franchise, it frees you from making assumptions about the past (good and bad). That end is mandatory if you're going to make the required changes, and Expansion Team is a nice technique to put you into that mandatory frame of mind.

MANAGEMENT BY TAKING EXCEPTION
I've never met a totally raw manager who is good at turnaround. Conceptually, it should be entirely possible. A very bright, well-trained by the book, untainted by office politics talent should be able to ask those naive questions and come up with right answers. But I've never seen it work in the field (btw: have any of you? I would love to hear of such cases and in what contexts it worked).

Anyone who ever planned on being a manager should have been keeping index cards or a thick mental filing cabinet of ideas and proactices...bith successful ones to follow and failures to be avoided. A rookie manager shouldn't automatically follow those cues...context changes the benefit/cost of everything, but it's a great list to start with (and usually better than the list the people who hired you to manage can put together -- if their skill sets were tuned to fixing the existing mess, it likely would have been addressed successfully already).

I think Maddon's tack is a close to perfect as I can imagine anyone executes.

JM: I went to Spring Training and met the players and the coaches. There were things I liked and things I didn’t, but one has to ask questions. I did not want to try to do too much too soon, to come in and just open my mouth and all of sudden say “what you guys have done for years is wrong and this is the right thing to do”. That would have been the biggest single mistake I could have made.

I got all that under my belt. But at the same time, I wanted to start getting out some of the concepts that I thought needed to be out there. The things I had had success with in the past, especially those that are always successful, wherever you do them within baseball. Whether it’s offensive concepts or defensive ones or pitching. Teaching the fundamental aspects. There were certain things I wanted to throw out there and have them done in a certain way – boom, right from Jump Street and I wanted to make sure that people understood the biggest part is made up of the little things. That it was important that everyone know not to overlook something as “insignificant”. In the end, nothing is insignificant when it comes right down to it. That is all part of the culture I wanted to change. We went about it with meetings and making things a little different for them. Let me jump ahead a little. I thought the <unintelligible> of the coaching staff was vital.

JA: You worked under a lot of different skippers.

JM: Yes.

JA: And when I looked back your record, I was surprised to see you had been “interim manager” more games than maybe anyone else in modern baseball.

JM: About 70 games. Yes, a significant number. And you’re right. I worked for so many different people and I really try to draw from the best and from their worst, too.. The people who you thought did things poorly…you don’t want to replicate that either. So it’s always important to learn from the people you think don’t do things well.

JA: Yes, there’s a section in the book called “Management By Taking Exception”, about Paul Richards.

JM: Yes, I read that.

JA: Richards started with the list of those, because of his personality. He was a bitter guy, but it made him good.

JM: I work more from the other end, things I want to do, but I certainly keep those in the back of my mind. My prior minor league managing experience was helpful, too, especially this year in regard to staying with the plan, realizing there were going to times that it would be horrible. Even in Spring Training, I told the guys, “there is going to be some point that we stink. And the major accomplishment out of that moment is that we’ll stick together, that we don’t point fingers, and that we do support one another. Those are the kinds of things that have to be in place before the hit-and-run, hitting the cutoff man, making the pitches n the 2-2 count. That’s where I think sports people get confused some times. You’re always looking for a physical, mechanical answer, and it could be the farthest thing from the actual solution. The physical/mechanical answer eventually shows up when everything else is in place in a functional, healthy way.

A quick side-observation: In Maddon's opinion, mental/emotional attitude is a foundation on which you build fundamentals. Personally, I see it as a loop -- that you can start on either, and each shapes the other. His insight, though, is food for thought. I might need to redesign my take.

THE SINGLE MOST COMMON MISSING INGREDIENT
This is not the science of hitting the Rocket's heater, it's more like hitting a Kevin Jarvis spinner, but I've never met another consultant who will tell you this. The single most common missing management ingredient in bad departments is feedback. Managerial feedback to staff, as long as it's true and reasonably polite, always is a general benefit. It can be verbal or written, it should cover positives and negatives and questionables, it should be prompt (and if you're sure the feedback is correct or needed, then it should be immediate).

JM: But then I met the people who were in the front office – they were highly competent. Yes, there were some new people, but the ones who were left over were tremendous. Hard working, I thought, cared about winning. So I saw this wonderful group of people, bright, creative, so what’s gone wrong here?

They had never been recognized before. They were doing their work on a daily basis, but there’s was no one saying, “Hey, nice going, nice job, I appreciate it, thank you and all the other stuff people need to hear if they’re going to continue to do a good job. So I found out that group was a lot better than I’d thought, because from a distance you think maybe they don’t have a good infrastructure in the front office, but they did.

So it's no surprise that the awful management team gave either no feedback or (next most common in weak management teams) feedback that is only given in the most extreme of circumstances and then only on the negative. An under-30 Bill Gates III once said in a brainstorming meeting, "That's the single stupidest thing I've ever heard anyone say, ever." The mid-1980s Microsoft was a beacon of the weak no-feedback-except negative model.

I have at least one more chunk of Maddon interview worth sharing. But in some ways, this is the most important section, not just for the chance to hear a natural turnaround practitioner's insights, but for observers of the Devil Rays, filling in some flip pages of the comb-bound Cosmic Triptik of their planned journey to the top of the American League East.

This is the last installment of the interview I did with Tampa Bay's then-rookie manager Joe Maddon about his approach to turning around the historically struggling Devil Rays franchise. Maddon's piece of the task is with players and field staff, and establishing a culture of excellence in an organization that has been so far from excellence it has been color-blind to it.

In organizations beyond baseball, most failed turnaround efforts fail because of a shortfall in a single Second Base practice: applying the right amount of pressure. Managers in a turnaround situation need to show sufficient urgency, serious determination to change to indicate to surviving staff that change will happen with or without them, and that it's going to start pronto. If management doesn't execute that, staff can come to believe they'll be relieved of the burdens of change, or that management is just talking about transformation and not serious about execution. Equally, though, management can instill a fire-drill mentality, intimidating and exhausting even engaged staff.

Few managers beyond baseball understand this. Maddon clearly does.

Jeff Angus (JA): I sent you about sixty questions I thought we should talk about some time. But the one I had thought was the big question really was framed in the game last night (August 7?).

You want to be encouraging, you want to be supportive. You want to win. You want to keep the pressure enough that people feel like you care, but you can’t be Lou Piniella and give up on a AA pitcher who had to come up because of a roster move or injury or disciplinary and then comes in and makes some ignorant mistake.

Joe Maddon (JM): The great point you just made there, that’s the key. It’s applying just enough pressure to let them know that you care.

JA: That’s got to be one of your big challenges.

JM: It is. That’s huge. You just described what’s I’ve been feeling, and I hadn’t been able to put it into words.

And there are times I just want to relax, but I see if I do that, I may not be showing enough caring. I want them to just go out and do it – I know it’s the players who go out and win the games, so I try to stay out of the way, but there are times if you stay out of the way too much, will they get the perception that I don’t care enough about winning?

The first and most important lesson: you have to deliver a homeostatic level of pressure -- enough to show you care, but not so much pressure that you destroy focus or concentration. In a turnaround, there have been performance issues and it's unrealistic to think your staff can go (in practice, in psychology, in team coherence) from clearly inadequate to excellent in one smooth hyperjump.

JM: But I think when you’ve got the kind of team that allows you to stay out of the way, truly allows you to stay out of the way and just let them just play, that’s when you truly do win. That’ the fine line to be balanced. That’ what happened in Anaheim – we finally arrived at that point where I knew and I’d encourage the (coaching team), “Let them just play, let’s just stay out of the way.”

It happened one time this year…We got to a brief period this year where everybody got healthy and it was going along nice and I told Andrew (G.M. Andrew Friedman), “it’s a good moment. It’s everyone’s job to stay out of their way.” I did not want to try to influence the game by asking them to do a whole bunch of different things.

JA: Was the green light on?

JM: Yes. There green light was on and there were no red lights. We’d already covered what’s a good time to run and not.

JA: But you recognized they were at the right moment to do that, yes? It wasn’t a random experiment, correct?

JM: True. It is truly a tricky thing to be able to do I show you care enough and still be able to stay out of the way.

The next lesson: there's a time to control fiercely, a time to have loose guidelines and a time to let staff experiment by riffing off your baseline  This may be the most difficult practice to handle deftly because no matter how well you choose your times for loosening the reins, staff will have some poor outcomes (that's the nature of testing/experimentation of new practices and methods). If your own management has a tin ear for turnaround (and let's face, the likelihood is they do -- which is why things need turning around, eh?), you can be in the position of being criticized for the mistakes that result from necessary experiments. Ugly but true. Maddon is a little luckier than you are here...his executives are committted to change and, for now anyway, resigned to investing the cale ndar time to make it happen.

JA: So do you handle someone who you every reason to assume they’ll succeed and they struggle for quite a while. And is it different for a young player than a vet?

For example, you have Jonny Gomes and he was Mr. April and then tailed off in May, and not doing so well since and striking out about 25% of his plate appearances.

You have pitchers like that are high variance guys – the ways they succeed and lose are very different game to game (like if I use QMAX to chart their outings), unlike a guy like Jamie Moyer whose starts cluster in a couple of spots – his good starts all look pretty much the same and his bad ones have a commonality, too. But then you have Seth McClung. I’m an outsider, I haven’t actually seen him pitch much, but the numbers indicate he’s all over the place.

How do you handle it when you have a guy like McClung who can pitch at a major league level but you just don’t know when he’s going to?

JM: He’s in the bullpen now. He’s come out of the bullpen three times since he’s come back. And he’s done well three times.

JA: How many pitches does he use?

JM: Mainly fast ball. And slider, but fast ball primarily, and his curve ball a little bit. We wanted to really limit the number of things he’s trying to do.

JA: So far it’s working?

JM: Yes. He was three weeks in AAA. Walked two, struck out 26. Sixteen hits in 16 innings, batting average about one-something against him, and converted all his save opportunities.

JA: And who thought of this?

JM: We’ve been talking about it. Comes up here. And I told him the first plan is to put him in the 7th or the 8th inning. He went 1-1/3rd, 1-1/3rd, and then 1 inning. And I was going to close him in the game last night – flip-flop (Brian) Meadows with him. I kept Meadows apprised of this, but I did not tell McClung last night he was going to close.

You’re right on. He totally deserves to be here, but he was totally ineffective.

With Jonny Gomes, it’s different. I used something like this with Kazmir. I used paradox. He was having a problem hanging his slider. So I went up to Kazmir and said “the next time you go out to pitch, every time you’re going to throw the slider, I want you to say to yourself, ‘I’m going to hang this thing I’m going to hang this slider, and they’re going to crush it’ “

So I went up to Jonny, and I said, “A little paradoxical intent. I want you to strike out. I want you to swing and miss every pitch. He hit a double.

JA: That’s interesting…that wouldn’t work for everybody.

JM: Everybody wants to not strike out.

The third lesson is how you loosen the reins and how you show the right" level of concern is going to be different for each staffer. You need to have an overall message that's consistent, but when you get to implementation, it has to be customized to each talent's tendency.

And in a turnaround, one way to show determination to change is through staff turnover. You want to keep your good performers, but some may be good and not fit into the new practices. Some may be good, but have attitudes that blunt effective turnaround. When you bring new talent into a turnaround organization (in or out of baseball), you'll need to choose carefully.

JA: In the balance between “team” and a star…a franchise player, or in the case of the current what you call expansion stage Devil Rays, the player most likely to be your All-Star team choice, how do you handle that balance? In the next few years you’re going to be close enough to striking distance that the front office will load up some vets pre- or mid-season. And if you’re successful, you have this highly cohesive group of players that have matured together. It sounds to me that when y’all choose vets, you’ll need to be as careful on the human side as on the abilities side.

JM: Yes. you really have to be careful who in your locker room carries the biggest stick. If this person is going to have the sense of humor…if he’s sarcastic or cynical, that it can drag down a group of young people…that impacts everybody. Right down to the ticket-takers and the parking lot attendants and the first base coach and the first base coach’s wife, and anybody else who shows up for the game.

I really am aware of that. When I talk about clubhouse chemistry, about getting that room right, about shaping that culture, that impacts so many people. Ray fans want to watch the game and listen to the game and read the newspaper and see that the Rays are on top. And they want to see positive things coming out of the Rays. Well, when you permit a situation or a group of people within your group who you know are taking your people the wrong way, it’s your fault, it’s not their fault, for allowing it to happen.

As a decision-maker in the Angels organization…when I had to hire minor league coaches, if I knew within a month or two that I was wrong and that we’d have to get rid of this person, it was my fault for doing a poor job of selection in the first place. We always try to give the person a year or two and try to flip them and be very honest give them information and say “Listen, this has got to change” but if they did not change, we obviously had to do something because that one person could have a negative effect on so many people. I don’t even know what the multiplier effect of that is. It’s incredible to me that so many people don’t consider that…I do consider all of it. IT ALL MATTERS.

Right now, here, our coaching staff here is tremendous, and I know that the positive and complementary impact they have on that room is wonderful and it’s probably at it’s at it’s highest point right now, though I think it can get better. That group in there really influences our group in such a good way daily. Major league people sometimes miss that point when they choose their coaching staff. For years the coaching staff was viewed this group of people who just throw batting practice, hit fungoes and then go out and have a beer with the manager after the game. That’s farthest from the truth of what you need. What you have to be able to do is communicate and I think as a major league coach the most important skill that’s required is listening. If you lack listening skill, you truly cannot be a good major league coach.

These are the things I see as being important. For example, last night you watched the Rays play, it was very impressive, I thought even though they lost, it was impressive. But the reason the Rays played so well was because all these little things are starting to come together and promote the camaraderie and the good play and the support that makes those possible. And we’re not looking for that to happen over a few days or a one or two years; we’re looking to build a tradition of excellence here. That needs to be nurtured through relationships.

JA: When I look at your roster, I see the 1974 Royals. Not a great team, but a young team with more young players right underneath them that pushed the guys already on the roster. And a few older guys, role players who performed better than any outsider would have thought they could. In your case I’m thinking about (Greg) Norton, for example.

JM: And how about (Ty) Wigginton? Wiggy is having the year of his life. Travis Lee is having a little bit of a comeback; even though his offensive numbers a re not good, he’s having a bit of a renaissance right now. But Norton’s a prime example.

JA: His performance, age 33, seems out of the blue. When I saw his name on your roster, I thought it might be a different person with the same name.

JM: He’s been wonderful. He’s a big part of our club now.

JA: One last question. Bench Coach. When I talked with Mike Scioscia, he told me where he got his model, Monty Basgall. And he said Monty was the thinker and Tommy Lasorda was the feeler. And I said to him, so since you are the thinker, is your bench coach the feeler for you? And he said “no, he thinks the game right along with me”.

So you have a bench coach – are you more interested in him being complementary or is he a shadow (like how Scioscia used you)?

JM: What I was looking for was someone with a lot of baseball experience, someone who’d managed a lot because the biggest thing I wanted was the managing instinct to draw from. Bill (Evers) has had many years as a minor league manager, and he’s constantly on top of the game. And I’m getting all that I had expected. I knew he would not be as computer-savvy as I am, and he’s been learning, so I hope next year we can turn it all over to him and let him do all this other stuff (sweeping his hand at a pile of reports he’d produced).
It’s the manager’s job to intellectualize the data. The bench coach’s job is to allow that to happen by doing all the other work I shouldn’t be doing so that I can use my time to think, to talk with the players and with people like you. Truly my significant contributions are I can think and talk. Make sure everything stays on task.

I was speaking with the GM here (Mariners) GM Billy Bavasi, and he likes to say, and it’s true, “You know you’ve done a good job if you feel like you walk in the door and you feel like to have nothing urgent to do.” That truly is the essence of delivering good leadership in the organization. So when I walk in and I feel like everything is under control, that I’ve done a decent job.

JA: That involves a lot of delegation, which I’d like to talk about with you the next time you’re here.

The Devil Rays don't get back to Seattle until September, by which time some of the turnaround developments and how well it's going should be more obvious. Maddon is a blast, and a great role model for managers beyond baseball.

If you want to observe lessons in how to turnaround a failed or failing organization, you can't do better than to start with a few baseball lessons.

One of the most consistent failures in baseball is the Tampa Bay Devil Rays organization. Courtesy of Retrosheet.Org, the Ray's finishes since their inception:

Year Team     G    W    L   RS   RA  PL 
1998 TB     162   63   99  620  751  5E
1999 TB     162   69   93  772  913  5E
2000 TB     161   69   92  733  842  5E     
2001 TB     162   62  100  672  887  5E     
2002 TB     161   55  106  673  918  5E     
2003 TB     162   63   99  715  852  5E    
2004 TB     161   70   91  714  842  4E 

They've failed in a number of ways. As an expansion team, they had only a so-so draft. Then they tried to blast their way into contention with a monocultural slow slugging offense that didn't work. Then they drafted very well, acting as though they were willing to lose in the near term to give young players filed time to sharpen their chops, and this enabled them to set aside money for a run if they ever got decent. Then they got decent, good enough to be a .500 team, but didn't invest the money they'd allocated that might have kept them competitive. That cost them the services of their beloved manager who'd been lied to about the owners' interest in winning. Then they added inanity to impotence with the most incompetent marketing tricks since the 1988 Pittsburgh Pirates' Felix Fermin game-worn sweatsock giveaway.

TURNAROUND TIME -- THE TYPICAL
But new ownership has taken the helm this year and wanted to get off to a quick start in the makeover department. Most organizations will change some of the more obvious faces in front of the public, and Tampa Bay did this with a smart and judicious trio of decisions.

They hired Andrew Friedman, to be a young GM with a very different background who could bring in tested ideas that weren't widely-used inside baseball. They brought in an experienced and successful executive to complement him, Gerry Hunsicker, who'd helped build the Houston Astro team that has had such a successful run in the last few years. Then they hired a new manager, Joe Maddon, and while he isn't as well-known as his predecessor Lou Piniella, like Hunsicker, he's got experience with winning teams.

TURNAROUND TIME -- THE SUPERCHARGE METHOD
Most turnaround efforts might have gotten that right. But it's the universally powerful and rarely-used supercharge technique, one of my own favorites, that I suspect will make the most difference in their effort to gain respectability.

According to a story by Alexis Muellner in the Tampa Bay Business Journal, executive management are finding out all the turnaround knowledge stored in the heads of the Devil Ray line staff.

Until then (the new ownership group took charge), the culture within the organization was oppressive, stifling and negative, Silverman told a crowd of more than 150 at the Tampa Bay Business Journal's Power Breakfast series Tuesday.

"Fear governed the entire workplace," he said. "I knew it because I lived it for two years."

The problem wasn't the employees, he said, nor the market. {SNIP}

Before announcing the ownership control change to the public last October, employees were gathered, given comment cards, hard hats, new polo shirts, and empowered to be ambassadors to a fan base and the corporate sector that had been alienated. More than half of the Rays' employees have been with the organization for six years or more. 

There's a large contingent that has been there since inception 10 years ago. But until now, they were never tapped for their insight, and the office had a culture of closed doors, Silverman said. Meetings that used to comprise two or three people now contain eight.

"Comment cards keep flowing in to this day," he said. Among them was an idea to create a giant fish tank with live Rays swimming in it, which has come to fruition and is being built in collaboration with The Florida Aquarium. "The change has been radical," said Silverman. "There was great institutional knowledge," he said, and the club as adopted something Silverman said he learned while working at Goldman Sachs: "Our people are our greatest asset."

This is information that's usually ignored. If management had been open to the ideas, they would already have tried them out. Listening to them provides a couple of frozen ropes..

The first benefit is that by being listened to, the employees of a sick organization get some rays of hope, and hope triggers higher effort and usually better morale. The second benefit is a lot of ideas. They not all good ideas, but you can be confident they haven't been acted on, and that means every single one is an opportunity to cut some new patterns. By not being MBAs or business majors, the line staff who have been ignored will have stored a ton of ideas no one has had the guts to try. And line staff know a lot of details, inefficiencies, tangles, blockages, that the management that created them haven't seen or refuse to see. The more the situation needs redirection and redesign, the more likely it is the brunt of the pain will have been borne by the line staff, the more likely it is they will buy into changes, even uncomfortable ones.

I'm not suggesting you implement all proffered ideas without considering their value. But if you listen with an open mind and involve a large number of people in steering a turnaround, you have a lot more torque at your disposal. In manufacturing, of course, this is s.o.p., and in many aggressive manufacturing organizations, it's a vital core of their process (check out lean manufacturing blogs, such as my favorite, Learning About Lean, by Joe Ely -- and check out his "Gang of Seven", collaborators who attack from multiple angles specific business problems). In other lines of work, it's just as effective (perhaps more so because fewer competitors have the guts to do it, so it delivers more difficult-to-match innovations).

And one last note: I have had good luck starting at the bottom of the hierarchy and working my way up. And start implementing at least a few promising ones within 48 hours. This tends to electrify the people you haven't talked with yet. As I already mentioned, the higher up you go, the more likely the ideas have been heard and acted upon, so there is a denser backlog of opportunities waiting to be acted on at the bottom of the org chart.

The Devil Rays are not guaranteed to turn it around because they have chosen to involve staff in redesigning the methods & processes of the organization. They are guaranteed not to be replaying the same old crud like a Seth McClung bloodbath that will just never end. They will be  trying something different with broad internal energy.