Management by Baseball

I've been reading this fascinating business blog called Management by Baseball. Those familiar with my disinterest in baseball and other sports might take this as a sign that this blog is worth checking out.

The blogger just finished a three-part series on "The Book" - the unwritten rules of baseball, comparing them to the unwritten rules of business/life.

"By The Book", a platitude you hear in organizations whose size or industry has shorn them of their entrepreneurial vitality, comes from baseball. But in moving from baseball to other organizations, especially business ones, the model has unnecessarily lost a lot of its intrinsic value. Non-baseball organizations should examine "The Book" baseball keeps for guidelines on how to proliferate policy, how to diffuse it though their organization so people understand it and how to see that it evolves appropriately over time.

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Baseball "knows" and makes it easy to see how procedures should evolve because managers pay close attention both to the immediate & to with trends they've been tracking, synthesizing them. Take a couple of well-known managers as an illustration
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It pays to create ways to diffuse knowledge through your organization without resorting to procedures manuals, and baseball is the shining example of why to do it, how to do it, and when and how to break the mold for decisions.

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