Baseball & Business

Yesterday, one of my directors at work was giving us a pep talk about continuous improvement, etc. To drill it into boneheads like yours truly, he used a football analogy. He said, “We are the quarterback of the organization. If we throw a great ball and the receiver drops it, we have to get in his face about it, but that doesn’t mean we stop throwing the ball back to him”. I thought this was a nice way to put it. Business is a team sport. If another team makes a mistake, we should be calling them out about it, but that doesn’t mean we should lose trust in them.

A cup of Joe and a meeting later, I was thinking of how many sports terms we come across in business everyday, especially baseball. How if I do a great job (ok! That’s rare!), I would have “hit it out of the ball park”. If Joe Smith goofs up, he is supposed to have “dropped the ball”. People arrange meetings to “touch base” with others. If the numbers from my analysis don’t look right (often the case), they are “not even in the same ballpark”!

If a task is easy to achieve, it is a “slam-dunk”. If I have an incorrect understanding of a project, I am “way off base”. If I am big risk-taker, I am labeled as one who “swings for the fences”. If a major change occurs midway through a project, it becomes “a whole new or whole another ballgame”. Executives think about employee succession strategy, otherwise known as “stocking the bull pen”.

Of course, we have all heard of someone getting “strike one, two, three and out”. If he/she had “stepped up to the plate” and “hit a home run”, “right of the bat”, they could have saved themselves. I guess when your manager “throws a curveball”, it is hard to hit indeed. Finally, if all of this did not make a whole lot of sense to you; obviously, you are “way out there on the left field”!

Of course, there is a whole another analogy about “rounding bases” and “getting home”, which I won’t get into, in this piece!! ;-)