An interesting blog that I check in with from time to time is Jeff Angus’s Management by Baseball, which features really nice long articles on what business managers can take from baseball. (I work in strategic planning, so this is a nice intersection of my work and hobby.) Most recently there’s a good piece on Ichiro, making the point that Ichiro learnt how to adapt to his new work environment (i.e. the different strike zone of MLB), as opposed to, say, Maury Wills:
If you’re Maury Wills and you can steal bases and the team you bat leadoff for wins precisely because you can steal bases in a low run-scoring environment, it’s hard to have the self-awareness that when you manage in a much-higher scoring environment, base stealing doesn’t correlate very well with winning. It wasn’t that Maury Wills was wrong in thinking his base-stealing success made his team successful, it was that he was wrong to think of “success” as a static goal unaffected by the environment.
The blog is, as Angus points out, the opposite of Moneyball: Moneyball was about taking business principles and applying them to baseball, this is the other way around.
Sometimes I think the whole “what can business learn from other fields” thing is hooey though (that whole Fish! series? colour me skeptical), and you have to properly analyse each claim to see whether it’s filled with genuine lessons or just an chance for executives to “escape” the corporate world. Billy Beane I know makes a ton of money going around speaking to executives about how his work involves exploiting market inefficiencies, and it makes me wonder, why don’t these executives know about market inefficiencies? Or did they prefer to spend their (or shareholders’) money listening to Beane ostensibly on something work-related, rather than a perhaps more relevant, but more dry, corporate speaker?