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 our fifth entry in this blog 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.
In our last post in this series, we discussed what sports taught us about fundamentals, repetitions, and continuous improvement. We concluded that 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 and repeatable processes you need to rep those processes to build expertise so that you are ready when the pressure is on. But we left asking the question: how do you know if you’re improving?
Let’s expand on that relevant and related question: Most of us have heard the management maxim that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. If you’re a skeptic, don’t like industrial engineers, or are just argumentative, you may have even challenged the truthfulness of the statement. We’re not going to debate that here, but hopefully we can at least all agree that it is more difficult to know if you are improving without a metric to measure results.
While other sports have certainly caught up, baseball pioneered the use of metrics and statistics to evaluate performance, draft players, and assemble (hopefully winning) teams. This is likely because of the long history of baseball in the United States and the obsession with numbers since the earliest times. In baseball, performance statistics like batting average, OPS, and strikeout rate can be used to determine where a player hits in the lineup or whether they even make the lineup. Likewise, performance statistics such as velocity, spin rate, strikeouts, ERA, WHIP, and quality starts will affect whether pitchers are starters or relievers, how much and when they pitch, and if they even make the team. As most people know, the amount of advanced analytics currently used in baseball could fill a book and is way too much for a blog.
Coaching places a strong emphasis on continuous improvement and performance evaluation. Coaches identify areas of improvement for individual players and the team as a whole, providing constructive feedback to help them grow and excel. Similarly, in business, managers should regularly evaluate employee performance, provide feedback, and offer opportunities for professional development. By fostering a culture of continuous improvement, businesses can ensure that their teams are constantly evolving and achieving higher levels of success.
Performance can be measured—typically with many metrics. The combination of those metrics—both individual and team based—often are strong indicators of how a team or organization performs. Therefore, metrics are often used by ownership and management to determine compensation for players and employees alike. Finally, it’s worth noting that while numbers are helpful for making decisions, the best managers in baseball and business are those who consider the numbers, but also know their team as individuals and evaluate performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.
—Matt Kulp, St. Onge Company
