Strengthening your supply chain one link at a time.
In the realm of sports, baseball stands as a testament to the importance of teamwork. It is a game where individual talent and contribution must blend seamlessly into a cohesive unit to achieve maximum performance and success. Interestingly, the principles of baseball can be applied beyond the diamond and into the world of business. In this fourth entry in the series, we are exploring how lessons from baseball can help entrepreneurs and managers build winning teams, develop effective strategies, and cultivate a culture of success in their organizations.
Coaching in most sports places a strong emphasis on continuous improvement. One of the first things coaches tell players is that if you want to get better you need to practice. Both team and individual practices include repetitions (often called “reps”) of the fundamentals. But it’s more than just repetitions. I remember my high school basketball coach often saying, “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.” The point is that those reps build muscle memory and muscle memory creates instincts and reactions. As you increase the foundation of automatic responses, you can continue to add on higher skill levels. If you continuously get in good fundamental reps, you should continuously improve.
Similar theories will apply in the business world. If you have inefficient processes, your workforce will be limited in the results they can provide – no matter how hard they work or how many reps they get in. If there is a lot of wasted movement in a baseball swing, you may have success in the weekend slow pitch softball league, but you will not touch good baseball pitching. If you have a distribution center picking process that forces people to walk miles unnecessarily to collect items spread far apart and placed on the top of difficult to reach shelves, you may be able to ship orders in the lazy days of summer, but will fail during end of year holiday peaks.
Whether trying to improve your batting average or trying to increase the throughput of your fulfillment center, you need to refine and improve your processes as much as possible. Once you have established repeatable processes you need to rep those processes to build expertise so that you are ready when the pressure is on. Continuous hard work will lead to continuous improvement; however, results can be limited by suboptimal processes. But how do you know if you’re improving? More on that in the next post in this series.
—Matt Kulp, St. Onge Company
