Business lessons learned from a World Series champ

I’ve declared for years that baseball is the perfect sport. There are plenty of sports out there to help divert our minds, and I am a fan of a wide variety of sports. But standing firm at the top of the mountain for me is baseball. While many in America turn their back on baseball, I continue to be more and more amazing at the art and beauty with the nuances of the America’s pastime.

Baseball is the only sport where the defense has the ball. It is also a sport where the ball doesn’t score the point. Baseball has grown and transitioned in step with our country’s growth and transition. The sport started out when the United States was a rural sport. Now the industrial country’s sports calendar revolves around the football season. And football is OK, but it has never held a strong grip on my attention. Perhaps I align with political columnist George Will. I think he summed up the shortfalls of the gridiron well: “Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

Sports is a perfect analogy for business. I haven’t reviewed, but if I counted up my various columns and blog posts from over the years, I’m sure the list of sports related business analogies would be long. I get it naturally. After all, I started out as a sports columnists way back in the day. Sports as an analogy for business was never more evident that with the Atlanta Braves and their quest for a World Series championship this year.

Prior to game three of the World Series, the Wall Street Journal’s Jared Diamond offered up insight on the Braves and how this team started out slow before becoming a championship team. “How The Braves Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Shift” tells the story of how the Braves went from disaster to World Champs. At the All-Star break, the mid point of the baseball season, the Braves were an unimpressive 44-45 on the season. A season that started out with such high hopes for the Braves was turning into the kind of season where general managers and team managers lose their job.

That was the dilemma facing Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos and manager Brian Snitker. When a team is underperforming, the leader has to quickly assess the situation, determine the necessary changes and then be brave enough to make those changes happen. That is exactly what the Braves did this past summer, which has brought about bedlam throughout the southern United States where Atlanta Braves fans gather.

Baseball, just like any other business is a game of adjustments. Leaders, fearful of change - or maybe the fear of making the wrong change, can take even the best assembled talent and underachieve. In the baseball season that just concluded, that was not the case for Anthopoulos and the Braves. The end result was a World Championship for the Braves, their first since 1995 and only the second one since the team moved to Atlanta in 1966.

The Braves championship story is a lesson to be learned for managers and leaders who strive to make a difference within their organization. The Braves managers made the bold decision to make a change, and that in itself is a championship story to me.

As I said, baseball is a game of adjustments. There has been plenty written about teams “shifting,” which is the act of moving players away from a typical position defensively based on data for an individual hitter and their tendencies to hit the ball in certain areas. Through the first two months of the baseball season, the Braves did shift their defense around. However, they were doing it at a much lower rate. In fact, according to the article in the Wall Street Journal, the Braves had adjusted their defense less than any other team in the Major Leagues.

The Braves had intel that showed tendencies of their opponents, yet were not taking advantage of market knowledge that they had at their disposal to become more competitive. You see the same scenario in business too, where there are companies out there that miss opportunities to exploit known weaknesses of a competing business. Fear of change is often the reason these opportunities are missed, leaving businesses and teams under achieving.

In the Wall Street Journal article, Anthopoulos has a quote that sums up his situation for his baseball team, and I believe for some businesses as well. “Everyone knew, we can’t continue doing what we’re doing. We’re getting crushed.” The difference is, Anthopoulos and the Atlanta Braves made the change.

Businesses, like the now World Champion Atlanta Braves, have the intel on the business landscape that they face including the tendencies of their competitors. But unlike the Braves, many businesses are stuck dead in their tracks and unable to act. The old adage - still as true today as the first time it was uttered remains true: doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.

Be the bold leader in your organization. Change is unsettling for everyone, even people who lie and say they enjoy it. But even more unsettling is being in an organization that is not doing everything it can do for success. You can watch the steady decline in results, which of course is also a change with almost certainly a negative outcome! Believe me, I’ve watched this first hand. My labor of love for my career was 30+ years in media, the vast majority of that in newspapers. Print newspapers had opportunities to change; opportunities to own the digital world both literally and figuratively. Newspaper companies were offered early stakes in online operations but refused to change even as the data continued to pile up. They ignore the analytics, and unfortunately that is an industry that many think is in a death spiral.

The Braves did not ignore the analytics. We’re not talking a radical change in what they were doing, which can be a good lesson for business leaders. Change doesn’t have to be radical, it can be subtle. But the right adjustment can make a major difference, as was the case for the Braves baseball team. They started shifting more than just about any other team in baseball. Prior to the decision to shift more, the Braves converted around 75% of ground balls into outs. Philosophy changed and that percentage went up - to only 77%, going 63-47 during that timespan. That small increase, an increase of 2% efficiency was the difference between a sub .500 team and a late fall championship parade in downtown Atlanta.

It took a brave leader to get the Braves to adopt this approach. Tom Peters has had a dramatic impact on my professional life. If I am looking for inspiration, Tom Peters is one of my go to writers. His book “The Pursuit of Excellence” - approaching 40 years old, is still relevant and on point today as it was when it was written, and I was in high school. Peters preaches to leaders to develop a bias for action, active decision making and getting on with it. Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos took action in pursuit of excellence and it paid off. More business leaders need to learn from both Peters and Anthopoulos to pursue their excellence.