Management by Baseball

Preparation always shows itself in the spontaneity of the moment." - Billy Martin

One of the most controversial managers of the 1970s and 1980s was controversial not for his management, but for his unusually unpleasant personality and perma-hostile behavior. I haven't included Billy Martin in many MBB pieces because I got to experience his behavior in person. I don't like bully-wannabes, but this is not meant to depreciate the skill with which he managed on the field, which was exceptionally good, especially early on with a new team that hadn't yet experienced his portfolio.

Author Bill Pennington recently penned a new volume about Martin, Billy Martin: Baseball's Flawed Genius and there are three great management lessons in there for managers who work for organizations in competitive environments.

MARTIN LESSON ONE: POUR RESOURCES INTO MENTORING
Like every successful manager in Baseball, Martin took on proteges, even though the act of doing it in a zero-sum environment diminishes the opportunities that accrue to the mentor. Some deliver mentoring quite deliberately, making the protege sit next to the manager during games or in the office during game prep, and some do it in a more apparently passive way, just occasionally but rgeularly sharing ideas or asking questions

Martin took on current Baltimore Orioles' manager Buck Showalter as an explicit protege.

“After a week of following Billy around I felt like I had never seen a baseball game before,” Showalter, a college all-American who had won two minor league championships as a manager, said in 2013. “He showed me everything I wasn’t seeing from the dugout.”

That's true Beyond Baseball, too. Most good managers know some techniques or insights most others don't. The secret to good management inside and beyond baseball is bringing those benefits together into one's toolbox and knowing when to call upon one, either because one just knows they are probable winners, or when one is premeditatively experimenting.

Mentor freely. Invest in it for the organization that's paying your way, or, if you're working for yourself, to strengthen your own organization.

MARTIN LESSON TWO: LEARN BEFORE YOU NEED THE LESSON
There are plenty of times something comes up and you have to apply yourself in the moment. But you can become a management star if you collect your data before you need it. When you do, you'll act more quickly and decisively -- people will think you're a star. To do this, you have to pay attention constantly, examine behaviors, data, the interaction between decisions and outcomes.

“He (Martin) showed me a thousand things, like how he stole the other teams’ signs,” Showalter said. “It was about watching the other manager and the opposing catcher, but the opposing batters, too.

“Every team has the batter give a return signal to the third-base coach that acknowledges that a bunt, a steal or a hit-and-run is on. If you watch, you can pick up the return signal — the batter taps his cleats or touches the brim of his cap. The key is to watch closely early in the game when they’re not doing any of those things, then notice the differences later in the game when more of those kinds of plays are going on.”

Beyond Baseball, you're able to do this, as well. And, yes, in a competitive line of work, this is effective for understanding better where others are headed. But merely applying this relentless observation on your own organization's managers and executives gives you advance notice of likely moves and common motivations.

MARTIN LESSON THREE: MINE EVEN THE SUB-TACTICAL MITES
You know that platitude,"take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves."? Well, that a load of crap invented by manager-wannabes who aren't sure what the big things are, or fear they don't know how to execute in that zone. That said, if you're in a competitive environment, the little things matter a lot, too.. As Showalter detailed many of Martin's mite-management:

“He (Martin) showed me a thousand things, like how he stole the other teams’ signs,” Showalter said. “It was about watching the other manager and the opposing catcher, but the opposing batters, too.

“He instructed the infielders in all these intricacies — how you should make tags with a V motion, not a U motion, because a V is quicker,” Showalter said. “He talked about how you should never reach for a throw and never catch it in front of the base. Instead, let it come to you; a thrown ball travels faster to the base than your hands can. He was a stickler for how to perform a rundown, and his big thing was not to catch and chase the runner with the ball in a rundown. The runner has got to go back to some base; let him come to you. Be patient and don’t panic.

“He taught me to have my eyes darting everywhere, looking for something to use later in a game. Take a ball that one of your guys hits into the right-center-field gap. Billy said don’t watch the ball; you know it’s going to be a double or a triple. Watch to see if the pitcher is backing up third. Is the left fielder moving? Are the relay guys in the proper order? How are the outfielders’ and infielders’ arms? You have a checklist of things to look for that might tell you something that you can use later.

A Beyond Baseball point worth internalising is that "don't watch the ball". Too many managers reduce their data input, and many more aspire toreduce it, to a "dashboard", or the minimum number of points with which to make the most decisions. This is understandable, not stupid. But it does leave most of the opportunities for game-changing improvements out of your choices. If you just watch the ball, you're missing too many signals, perceptions of cause/effect relationships, behavioral cues. As it explains in the Management by Baseball book, you have to do continual OMA (Observe, Measure, Analyse") and then redesign your responses in response to what is changing in your environment, because in a competitive line of work, the environment is never static (and that means optimal decisions are givens, merely momentary advantages).

As the epigramme at the top of this essay says, preparation sets you up to make high- speed improvisations that have a foundation in hard facts and observed patterns.

It would be hard to do worse as a human than Billy Martin. But in spite of those attributes (and they had nothing to do with it) he was a magnificent manager of tasks and human capital and his lessons are worth following

In the last entry, I reasserted the critical success factor for successful Agile project staffing is having the balanced blend of skills on the team (that is, copy Baseball). But any project (and Agile ones in spades) is not static. If you've built the perfectly-balanced team, the right people with the right balance of skills & personalities, it's inevitable that as the project evolves/ rolls-on, that on any given day the team'll be unbalanced.

You already know that the ideal management tactics on one project will be different from the next, even with the same team. You probably already know that your management will have to adapt on a daily basis (though in practice, my observation of most managers of Agile and Lean operations suggests even if they know, most prefer a single static approach). Somebody is having a tough day with their family. Somebody who you count on, for example, for meticulous testing, is having a day she needs to do something open-ended or creative. To be Agile, you have to adapt how you manage most every day, even with the ideal team.

La Russa explains to Agile practicioners the core Baseball example of why and then what to do about it. The situation is a playoff, a best-of-five series against the Phillies, the best team in the league that season. Phils have won the first game, so it's almost mandatory to win the second game (lose the second game, you're 0-2 meaning you have to win three in a row against the best team in the league with their dominant pitching). The Cards have their best veteran starter on the mound, Chris Carpenter, and the Phils have one of the best post-season pitchers of his generation in Cliff Lee. Carpenter, on only three days rest instead of his normal four days, (abnormal for most starting pitchers and something he hadn't done in the previous ten seasons) struggled in both the 1st and 2nd innings and the Phils took a 4-0 lead -- a pretty ugly turn of events at a worst-possible time -- the time for the management team to do something to try to right the game/project. He explains in his most recent book, One Last Strike (p. 221):

Fortunately, (pitching coach Dave) Duncan was on the bench. He and Carpenter sat there between innings, and I knew that Dunc was talking with Carp about more than mechanics. As a pitching coach, you have to be part physiologist and part physicist to understand how the body works and and the ball moves through the air and part psychologist to understand how the pitcher's mind works.

Sound parallel to your Agile/Lean management requirements? It should.

I knew that he was helping Carp figure out a way to keep the Phillies right there, to block out whatever distractions there might have been about [...] his high pitch count, and the fact he was going on three days rest.

Carpenter goes on to hold the Phils in the 3rd inning with an eight-pitch, three-up three-down half inning and, because the Cards took a rally into his batting spot in the bottom of the 3rd inning, Carpenter was lifted for a pinch hitter. The Cards go on to win the game, the bullpen preventing the Phils from scoring another run. Two actionable lessons coming up...

After the game we learned from Carp that when he'd warmed up for the game he hadn't felt particularly strong (not surprising...shorter rest), so he went out there in the first couple of innings and tried to put extra effort behind every pitch. He was out of sorts mechanically. Carp told us this: if he ever got the change to pitch with three days' rest again, he [...] wouldn't try to force it. He would "pitch with what he had" and not try to add to it.

The two lessons Agile team co-ordinators need to take away from this are these. First, as Carpenter and his mentor La Russa learned again, in the maelstrom of a project falling short, we've all seen errors caused by passivity, but trying to close the entire gap by pushing "too hard" is a standard miscue to avoid, explicit in the XP playbook, but worth following in whatever Agile /Lean method you're using as a piece of your foundation.

Secondly, don't have MBWT (Management By Wishful Thinking) about what the team you have can do. At the juncture of schedule glitch/bump/crisis, it's critical to check in with all the individuals/players and figure out what you have so your expectations and designs are in line with what you can bring to bear on catching up.

PITCH WITH WHAT YOU HAVE & MANAGE WITH WHAT YOU HAVE
Just as in Baseball, even the most flexibly-staffed Agile team will have limited abilities to change its roster. When I'm spear-heading a project, I like to scout out talent with complementary skills outside the team and negotiate in advance the possibility of getting them on the team's roster temporarily. I've found this is a good way to emulate Baseball (where there's a set of minor league teams with marginal talent who can fill in the major league team's roster in a pinch). I call that The Bolt-On Talent gambit.

But even with bolt-on talent, most of the time, you're going to have to figure out how to help the team succeed with the team staffed as it is. La Russa and his coaching staff are master of this.

Starting on page 288 of the book, La Russa describes how his own mentors in a leading Agile think tank, the Chicago White Sox front office, modeled for La Russa how to handle a bullpen and starting staff. The two mentors were Paul Richards, one of the greatest American management theorists, and Ken Silvestri, the Chisox' organization-wide pitching coordinator.

They trained La Russa, then a beginning manager in a minors to have the young pitchers start but use older veterans to come into pressure situation to relieve. This fits the emotional algebra of pitching, because starters get many more chances to work through problems, but relievers have less time to the finish line, increasing the ambient pressure, and frequently, they are coming into a game because there's a "defect" (runners on base or a starter losing sharpness).

So LaRussa, like many experienced major league managers, prefers to have a bullpen staffed with experienced vets. But as he notes on page 288...

A veteran bullpen is the formula we've continued to use over the years -- except, ironically, in our last two World Championships, both of which were won with predominantly young relievers.

In September 2006, [veteran reliever] Jason Isringhausen had gotten hurt so our closer was Adam Wainwright, a rookie. Along with Adam, our other main right- handers in the penwere Josh Kinney, another rookie we'd called up, Braden Looper and Josh Hancock. Our two left-handers were Tyler Johnson, another rookie, and Randy Flores.

He goes on to describe one more "pitch with what you've got" moment during the late pennant drive in 2006 (a year they went on to win the World Series). They are stuck using Jeff Weaver in a key game. Weaver had been a promising young pitcher with some electrifying bright spots, but his inability to be consistent had pushed him to the margins late in his career, and he was absolutely not a starting pitcher you'd want to go to in a must-win game. In this game, pitching coach Dave Duncan decided to break the pattern (and therefore the scouting report the other team would use on Weaver), especially with left-handed batters who had been battering and frying Weaver all season.

Dunc, in his genius, told him "throw your curveball". And he curveballed them to death, mixing in just a few fastballs and changeups. He held them to two hits and no runs over five innings. But when he was ready to go through the lineup the third time, I yanked him. Again we went to our young bullpen - Johnson, Flores, Kinney, Wainwright. We won that {key] game 2-0.

HEWING TO STANDARDS & BREAKING THEM, TOO
So while LaRussa and Duncan went against standards with a flaky pitcher and throwing an unprecedented set of tactics, they had to go with what they had. OTOH, they stuck to standards to protect the win.

Over 95% of starting pitchers are markedly less effective the third time through the opposition's lineup than they are the first two times through. Batters get to see what the pitcher is doing, what's working well for him and not, and can time and better judge what's approaching the plate. Weaver's curveballing the opposition "to death" was a surprise, delivering a marginal advantage to an otherwise shaky pitcher, destined to be a non-surprise the third time the batters got to experience it.

Ergo, even while throwing away a piece of standard operating procedure, LaRussa and Duncan embraced the third time through standard. They didn't try to ride a cute trick past its effectiveness, preferring to bank the advantage.

BEYOND BASEBALL INTO AGILE
As a Coach or Scrum Master or [insert title here] striving to maximize team effectiveness, it's essential you follow the Baseball tenet of "Pitch with what you got", shaping your designs and tactics to maximize each talent's pattern to result in the most winning outcomes. At the same time, you have to be Baseball, and blend the known- winner patterns with experiments and norm-breaking designs that are more apt to succeed than the standby patterns when the situation calls for it.

Be more like LaRussa. Be more like Baseball. That is, Win.

On any small-team project, Agile or otherwise, a critical success factor (maybe outside of keeping senior management from constant meddling, it is THE critical success factor), is the careful blending of skills and personalities within the team to be able to achieve and maintain high performance. Rejecting nepotism or Nepotism Lite (hiring friends because you like them and/or they are easy to work with) as a norm, while concurrently allowing for some exceptions is a challenging but key skill for the manager. Baseball has great lessons for the Beyond Baseball manager, and one fine documented case is Tony La Russa's succesful hiring of the ostracized Mark McGwire, a former player of his and friend, as the Cardinal batting coach. He explained the hire in his most recent book, One Last Strike (p. 300-6)

Mark had to retire prematurely in 2002 because of his (injured -- probably as a result of muscular overdevelopment, the result of working out too much, probably the result of outlawed supplements that enable hard working athletes to extend their workouts) back. Since then, his integrity over the issue of performance-enhancing drugs (PED) had been widely discussed {SNIP}

After he left the game, I kept inviting him to Spring Training. He turned me down a few times, but I found out from his wife that about four o'clock every afternoon, once he'd picked up the boys at school, he watched games on TV. He'd watch a doubleheader every night, and he was really into analyzing the hitters. I'd talk to him once in a while, and he'd always tell me what he thought hitters, including our guys, were doing right and wrong, pointing out details like how well Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodrigues and Albert Pujols were getting on top of the ball and getting through it, getting that great backspin that made the ball carry.{SNIP}

The more I heard him speak, the more I felt everything about his approach would make him an outstanding candidate for our staff. In November of 2009, I decided to make an offer to him for the hitting coach job (for 2010). (La Russa and Cardinal front office management, though, made it a prerequisite that he make a public statement addressing his alleged PED use, to which he had declined to comment for years). We didn't know what he was going to say, just that he had to say something

I knew he would tell the truth, but I didn't know specifically what he was going to say. Mark admitted to using steroids and on the morning the announcement was made he called to tell me what was about to be all over the news.

It took great courage for La Russa to hire an ostracized friend and re-open an emotional knicker-twister of a topic in a profession that demands relentless hyper-focus by everyone on the team. Few managers Beyond Baseball would balance the potential gains of a 97th percentile performer who had massive credibility with players coaching those with whom he had credibility against the controversy.

Had La Russa hired a dud just to get him a job (what I call Nepotism Lite), without regard for his performance potential, I would be terminally critical. Every team of ~50 people can afford one or two middling talents who are vital to the team's morale, and every team of ~50 people can afford one or two very difficult people if they are 90+ %ile talents who get the job done. If you're hiring a difficult human who's ultra-talented, you are taking on more work (office politics, managing outside criticism, managing people's fears) to make more work happen.

After Mark was hired and made his statement, the media focused on my motives for hiring him. Some commentators may have wanted to compliment me, and others to criticize me for presumably hiring a friend out of loyalty and helping him to rehabilitate his career. Regardless of intent, I was insulted by those assumptions. I take my responsibility to my employers, fans, teammates, and the game itself to ever engage in that kind of nepotistic behavior. Mark was hired based on his merits.

Period.

La Russa then goes on to describe the incredible level of and number of skills (Beyond Baseball,anyway) required for being a successful coach/mentor to skill- based professionals.

He wasn't overwhelmed by the workload -- he was fired up by it. It was an attitude that we needed all our coaches to have.

This is the crux of why this Nepotism Lite is okay in this exceptional case. Nepotism and Nepotism Lite both GENERALLY suck oxygen out of your environment, like nitrates out of a river. La Russa hired McGwire because he had both high cred as a past performer, ergo, as a leader, and also the hire was determined to succeed.

On any small team, Agile or not, you will more often benefit more than not if you are willing to hire a high-performer even if that is a difficult individual or a person who requires you additional management burden. That's a contrarian point of view, of course, which means "Money Ball", that is, a relatively untapped high-performance talent pool you can acquire more easily.

You can be lazy and leave talent on the table, or you can be Baseball and channel La Russa to Agile success. You choose.

In Agile projects, as in Baseball, your Fun Quotient doesn't have to be "at eleven" as a norm, but to get the best sustainable production, you certainly want to err on the side of building an environment that stimulates (not just allows) fun. In Agile, as in Baseball, that will mean, more often than not, you as the leader won't be showing off as much fun as the team, and that is, in most environments, a necessity.

Tony La Russa embodied this stance as brilliantly as any successful Agile leader has, and his transparency is useful to any Agile practitioner or aspiring leader. As he explained in his most recent book, One Last Strike (p. 103-105), it's critical both to actively promote the fun aspects of the project while also being the eye of the hurricane, the calm, unflappable go-to, solid, reliable, relentless make-it-happen center, even if that means you're not looking like you're having much fun.

La Russa wasmore than a master of hiding how much fun he was having (and he was having fun), he looked and acted when at work as impassive, unemotional, neutral as he could. If you ever saw him on televeision during a game, you saw that steely resolve. And having spoken to him a few times in his office when he managed the White Sox, I can testify he was like that off the field, too.

The book makes it clear that was purposeful...part of his natural character, but deliberate, too. He talks about his determination at the beginning of the season that he will retire at the end of it, regardless of the outcome. He, personally, wasn't thrilled with the evolution of the work, which was trending towards more corporate-like interactions, less personal, less Agile.

Put simply, it wasn't as much fun as it had been. That mioght sound strange coming from a person with my reputation for intensity and from someone who was often noted for not smiling.I took seriously the responsibility I had but I loved the competition, the winning and the losing, and the relationships we built

It's true I didn't smile a whiole lot during games. I wanted to maintain the same exterior whether things were going well or going badly. One reason for that is I wanted to set an example for our players and also to be a constant they could rely on.

Yes, there were lighthearted moments in the dugout, on the field, in the clubhouse {snip} but in the middle of the competition, I wanted to be that concentrated center in the middle of the storm.

I had to work at that because on the inside I was a festival of nervous energy, anticipation, excitement, anger, frustration, elation and about just every other emotion you can name. {snip} I will say this about my intense level of concentration: I have zero regrets about how I went about my business, day in and day out. I might have made plenty of mistakes, but none of them came from lack of interest or from lack of attention.

Ultimately, none of this was ever about me; it was always about the players and about winning. Call it "old school" or whatever you like, but the level of seriousness I brought to my job was purposeful and long-standing. {snip} I couldn't alter who I was as a person to conserve my energy or to take shortcuts. I couldn't slow down.It was either do it or don't do it.

And that's the essence of Coach or Scrum Master, too. If you're going to do the role, do it like the project's success depends on your relentless, serious attention. In Agile, as in Baseball, that may mean you don't always get to publically show the high and lows the rest of the team does.

But the Coach's relentless commitment to holding things together does mean the team can have more fun. And more fun delivers generally better quality and quantity, more sustainably, in Agile as much as in Baseball.

Good managers, in and Beyond Baseball, have to (what I call) "Alias" decisions and choose the right spots to autonomically pick the easy call while reserving their contemplative energy for the tough or crucial decisions. People managing Lean or Agile endeavors have to do this more deftly than more traditional ones, not less deftly as many believe. Baseball has great lessons for when to Alias and when not to

Aliasing is when you don't grind through a decision, meticulously measuring probabilities and possibilities. Instead, you count on the weight of history to automatically pick your option. Example: It's Chicago, it's August. You get up in the morning and get dressed for the day. Odds are it's going to be hot. Yes, you could check a weather report, or even three of them, but this is wasted ergs. You need to account for the very high probability of blistering heat in your choice of attire. On this day you have a key client coming into the office to meet with. You remember she always wears something green. That you should think about, perhaps make a choice to wear something green or think through why she might do that. Every millisecond you invest in processing weather prediction is a millisecond you're not investing in customizing the situation to better communicate with your client.

Organizations standardize commodity decisions (that is, alias) in non-zero sum choices (paper clip or staple? E-mail or Twitter broadcast? Discount or advertising?) and that makes sense. But insensibly, they tend to alias decisions in competitive or even zero-sum situations, where documented "standards" make it easy for competitors to predict their choices in advance, neutralizing and then creating a competitive deficit for the Aliaser.

In major league Baseball, the manager daily makes ~300 decisions in the ~5 hours of game preparation and the game itself. Given that volume over that amount of time, it's not only easy to alias decisions, it's a complete necessity. ¿What mollycoddled Fortune 500 CEO could make that many decisions in a week, not even trying to calculate their decision-load for a single work day -- and close to zero Fortune 500 organizations even have five days a year with the split-second, zero-sum decision environment a Baseball manager does?

Aliasing in and beyond Baseball is a necessity if you're going to be successful. But so is periodic contrarian self-examination, especially in an Agile environment or Baseball, where adapting to the exact situation on the ground is an unavoidable pre- req for success.

And that was a principle embraced by Hall of Fame-enshrined manager Tony La Russa, as documented in his most recent book, One Last Strike (p. 306-7). His narrative covers Game 5 of the 2011 National League championship series against the very tough Milwaukee Brewers.

Our bats continued to produce in Game 5, and as we'd done throughout most of the playoffs, we gave our starter an early cushion, with three runs ion the second inning. (Jaime) Garcia took that lead and ran with it pitching two more scoreless innings, and in the bottom of the fourth, when we were ahead 3-0, we got the first two men on base with no outs.

If you are knowledgeable about National League bottom-of-the-lineup tactics, skip to the next paragraph. If you're not, it will help to read this one. The Cards are at the bottom of their lineup, the weakest part in the general case, with the #8 batter being the player in the field that day with the weakest bat being followed by the pitcher at #9. And the autonomic decisions for the bottom of the line-up (both for the team at bat and the one in the field) propel certain patterns. At the early stage of a game, if there are no runners on base, there's going to be a low-probability of batting success at bat. With runners on base, the pitcher is going to (probably) bunt. This is close to automatic, which undermines its success probability because the team in the field adjusts (prevolves) to meet that challenge. And it also means the #8 batter, already likely to be the team's weakest not-pitcher batter, is going to degrade further because the pitcher and catcher, knowing #8 will strive to do something productive knowing the "useless" #9 is coming up next, will conspire to throw #8 borderline junk that is hard for any batter to succeed with. So, in the immortal words of the savage Old Testament diety and Glenn Frey, it's a losing proposition but one you can't refuse. But that's the standard operating procedure.

With the #8 batter and then the pitcher coming up next, the standard operating procedure -- #8 batter tries to make something happen, most likely without success and then have pitcher either try to bunt with one out or just try to make something happen, produces negligible returns. The aliased decision here is almost certain to underperform, but so is everything else. So most managers, in and Beyond Baseball, would just do the s.o.p. Not, in this game, La Russa.

Using some unusual strategy, I had position player Nick Punto (#8) try to move the runners over with a bunt, with (pitcher batting #9) Garcia on deck. Normally you wouldn't do that with the pitcher coming up next since most pitchers can't handle the bat as well as a position player. But I knew that Nick was an excellent bunter and that Jaime had a really good idea of what he's doing at the plate. In a way, I flip-flopped the usual roles of the eigth and ninth hitters. Punto got the bunt down and moved the runners to second and third base.

The thought behind this was that we needed to score in that inning, even if it was only one run. With just one run, we'd add to our lead and gain momentum. I thought Garcia could get the bat on the ball. I put the contact play on with Freese at third base. That meant when the hitter made contact with the pitch, Freese would head for home, forcing the drawn in infielders [note: they are drawn in because they are presuming the s.o.p. pitcher bunt] to make a play. Even if he was out, we would still have runner in scoring position (and the leadioff hitter, a most effective one coming up to bat).

La Russa's approach violated both standard operating procedure AND the blind faith of many math-centric sabermetricians that loves to point out the frailty of the s.o.p. The pure math neo-sabermetricians will point out that the probability of Punto succeeding lowers the Cards' probability of ultimately winning the game by about 2%, from 91% to about 89%, and if he fails in the sacrifice, the best the Cards can hope for is worse. The composite numbers argue against sacrifice bunts. But the event is not the composite average of all such events. There's a specific context. The move may work or fail, the additional run La Russa is aiming for will score or not in this case. But this even doesn't exist in a vacuum. The next time the Cards play the Brewers (or any team that has a scout at this game), the opposition will know that the #8 might bunt, and that will mean the opposition will need to invest energy in adapting tactics to meet the full toolbox of La Russa's approaches, diluting their ability to deal effectively with any one of them. La Russa may lose or win this one, but it incrementally increases his chances in subsequent ones, regardless.

This is more important in zero-sum situations, where one team's success requires another team's failure, and more and more in the arenas where Lean and Agile management approaches play a big role, zero-sum is the reality.

With Garcia hitting left-handed, the third baseman, although he was playing in for the possible squeeze bunt, was over towards the shortstop [note: another contextual advantage for the Cards] hole.Depending on how far the thrid baseman is away from the bag, the runner can get two to five extra steps closer to the plate. That's a really critical edge, especially with the contact play on, an edge you wouldn't have with a right-handed hitter. Garcia hit a ground ball to the shrtstopand Freese,with a good break, scored the all-important add-on run.

The Cards increased their chance for scoring one run and greatly diminished their probabilities of getting more than one run. Normally, net-negative, but in this context, a win. And further, in forcing zero-sum-competitors to increase their decision overhead many times in the future, a win earning continuing small yields.

BEYOND BASEBALL
Where to apply the La Russa non-Alias? Beyond baseball, I use my autonomic impulse to alias a decision to make a note to myself to examine it. I try to remember if the aliased decision has ever been something we could have achieved better results with if we'd done something different.

You can do this. If you use any kind of Kanban tool or even just index cards in your top right drawer (presuming you are a righty), document your aliased decisions. [Note: I usually use yellow -- for 'caution' -- cards for these aliased moves] You can invite your team to do the same thing. Reexamination is emotionally low-risk in the big picture sense, because team members rarely have personal investment in the standard procedures even if they are comfortable with them.

Baseball makes clear not only the value of Agile and Lean techniques, but it full of solid implementation ideas you can experiment with. You'll almost certainly never need the level of Agile skill even the below-average major league manager has, but if it works in that zero-sum crucible, it should almost certainly work in your own less competitive workplace.

Most "managers" facilitating Agile projects have a classic Baseball problem: Resolving the intrinsic pressure by either deflecting too little of it or too much of it. That's a classic Binary Thinking Trap, one of the most common weaknesses of American managers. Again, Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa has already developed a theory of Agile action you can tap into. It requires understanding and lots of practice, but I think it works better for finding the guts one needs to be successful at Agile than any other I've been exposed to. And the craziest thing about this technioque applied to Agile is that it seems contradictory.

Contradictory, because most think of Agile, properly, as being all about stripping out process to focus on results/outcome, and this Agile technique is one La Russa calls "Win through process".

We spend a lot of ergs as Agile team Coaches or Scrum Masters creating "just enough" of any attribute, investing energy to find the ideal balance between imposing and passivity on myriad dimensions. But it's been my observation that one of the hardest "just enoughs" is just enough PRESSURE.

In my experience helping PMs and coaches, it's been more common for me to find otherwise-talented managers of time and action to fail to sufficiently absorb the pressure from above and instead just push it on down the org chart. That almost never helps the team members OR the project OR the from aboves who want the pressure they expend to deliver benefits.

But the other end of the continuum, applying close to zero pressure, is equally underachieving as a setting. I know...when I started, I just presumed everyone worked as hard as she was able with the project's end goals and objectives at the forefront. That was, more frequently than I would have guessed, not true for the teams I worked with. Further, even when the team was successful at self-managing and self-pacing, most projects, even the best ones, have pressure moments where one or more of the team members have to find a way to break a creative or efficiency ceiling that retards the overall project.

To optimize the team, you have to help them by pressuring them, but not for the hell of it or because management wants you to, but because only when pressure feels normal and manageable can team members harness it to achieve and not suffer from it.

SERVING UP 'THE HUMAN PUU-PUU PLATTER'
Baseball in general, but Tony La Russa specifically, has been a crucible for finding that Agile balance, and there is no shortage of useful practical lessons to document from La Russa's Hall of Fame winning career.

How does he right-size the pressure pile?

By chronically exposing his team to it so when the most vital moments come at them, they know how to use the external pressure as a force they can use. He describes this process in his recent book, One Last Strike (p. 140-143). He's describing a September game against the Atlanta Braves; Tony's Cardinals are 7-1/2 games behind the Braves for a playoff spot with only 19 games to play (a very very long shot to catch them). The game they're in is a must-win, as is every game at this point. They are going into the bottom of the 9th inning, training 3 - 1.

Rookies can be a blessing or a curse, and for the Braves {snip} their rookie closer Craig Kimbrel had been the former. He'd converted 25 straight save chances, and he took the mound against us looking for number 26. Sometimes rookies are good because they are, in a sense, clueless. Too young and inexperienced to feel the pressure.

This very point is true in many cases for programmers inexperienced with Agile ("Rookies"). If they've come from a rigidly-structured waterfall environment, they frequently expect things to work in a way that keeps the pressure off them until the end (and, of course, they equally expect all the flying monkeys wilding anyway, though with pressure more on management than on them).

In this 9th inning, there's a lead-off single, a fielder's choice and a strikeout, with the result that there's a runner on first and two outs.

...we were down to one final chance, down to our last out. Then the curse of being a rookie kicked in. That's too harsh actually -- the unexpected happens to veterans, to. Needing just one more out to close the deal and put a serious dent in our hopes, Kimbrel walked (Rafael) Furcal on four straight pitches.

Interesting. Tying runs now on base. {snip}

That feeling, that sense that something was about to break our way, sat in the pit of my stomach like a bubble inflating. It's more fun to believe than to doubt.

No kidding, and here's one of the main cognitive continental divides between non-Agile and Agile coaches/PMs. Because the non-Agile PMs are trained to believe that doubt or fear is the default stance, the one to live in. If you're open to printing an epigramme as a sign and displaying it facing people beyond the team, you can't do much better than this one.

So runners on 1st and 2nd bases. Kimbrel walks the next batter on five pitches...bases loaded, two outs, perhaps the most inflective inflection point in any sport. And now we'll get to the poster child for channeling pressure to ease pressure...

Bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, two outs -- suddenly, who do we have coming up to bat but Albert Pujols, a .377 bases-loaded hitter with twelve grand slams.

Albert had always been a clutch player for us, but high-pressure situations aren't something that you just wake up born to deal with.

For years, part of our coaching had been that we taught players to to embrace pressure and make it their friend. And they way they'd do that was to confront it. They couldn't hide from it and say Hey, whatever happens, happens so just go out there. No, they had to step up and make something happen when they were expected to make something happen. They had to feel the anxiety, but we had taught them how to handle that anxiety, to use it to become a "go-to" competitor.

How did we teach that? Our first lesson would be never to let them run away. We'd tell each player to feel it -- the more often, the better. Over time they'd just get used to it. Just like if you live near a train and have to listen to locomotive sounds all night long you eventually stop hearing them. It becomes part of your normal state of affairs.

You can't play for months with the attitude of whatever happens, happens, then suddenly in (the pinch) say, Okay, now I'm going to go out there and make a play or get a hit.

{snip} Feeling it is the first part of learning to deal with pressure. The second part is preparation. If you've done everything you can in advance to put yourself in the position to succeed, you'll be more relaxed and better able to deal with the pressure that comes with having to perform. {snip}

The third part is the golden rule when it comes to high-stress moments {snip}: When you're in a position to perform, getting distracted by the possible result creates more pressure than anything else. If you're focused on the result, you feel the anxiety. Instead, concentrate on the process not the result. Win through process.

How does all this translate when Albert's got the bases loaded with two outs in the bottom of the the 9th against the Braves? For one thing, he doesn't think What happens if I fail or success? His total focus is on the process that defines his best at-bat for the situation.

BOTH THE TEAM AND YOU
This channeling pressure to ease it is important for the team, but as the coach/scrum master, it can be even more important to you. You need to do all the preparation for success the way La Russa's players have to do for themselves. You will have to suck it up when a team is struggling and not let the outcome affect your courage, even if you choose to tweak some process.

PRESSURE IS. You need to aikido it into team momentum. Just like La Russa.

Some of La Russa's techniques are as valid beyond Agile/Lean environments as they are within strictly advanced environments. For the first time in this series, I'll cover a technique cluster that is as effective for managers who work outside Agile or Lean shops as it is within it. That cluster is around transparent decision-making that has the by-product of effort-free mentoring.

I learn something useful from every manager I worked for or with. But the Gold Standard for managers I've worked for is Rachel K.E. Black, a Boeing honcha. I got a lot of lessons from her, but the one that has earned the most for my clients over the years is the following.

There are not very many good managers, and every large organization will be populated mostly by suboptimal managers, many of whom are that way because no one has trained them properly. Therefore, the most important thing a good manager can do for their organization, more important than manage well, is to teach lesser managers and non-managers who might become managers how to manage better.

She called this process "replicating your DNA". She did not learn it from Tony La Russa, but it's identical to a cluster that's broadly applied in Baseball.

The challenge is, of course, you need to manage well at the same time. Ergo, that training would turn out to be a lot of effort you probably couldn't easily afford. So the Black technique to make this efficient was to be very transparent about decisions, invite push-back. And then use the engagement with the push-back as an excuse to explain one's decision factors and the logic tree.

This process produces many, non-ivory-tower, case studies, roughly in real time. That makes context clear, too. It takes very little courage for a good manager to do it, and the swell thing about the Black technique is that it takes more courage than bad-managers-who-know- they-are-just-pretending-to-know-what-they-are-doing generally have. (Yes, it's true the cruddy managers who don't know they are cruddy sometimes don't hesitate to share their crud-encrusted thinking, but more often than not, those cruddy ones don't believe in transparency, so they are generally out of the meme pool as trainers).

LA RUSSA'S IMPLEMENTATION
A good question I know you're asking is, "How exactly do I execute this?". Let's go to his recent book, One Last Strike (p. 233-234) for a clear, textbook example.

The thing about baseball is that it's the most open and obvious of professional sports, which means virtually everybody who's watching, whether they have a little or a lot of Baseball know-how, is going to have an opinion on what the strategy should be. It doesn't work to the same degree in basketball, football and hockey because many of the things that happen in the game aren't quite as obvious to the casual fan. With all that scrutiny, if you don't make the "right" decision (JA NOTE: that is, one that has a good outcome for the team), you get nailed. And if you do, you get hailed. There is a lot of pressure to put the blame for a loss on somebody or some bodies.

Some managers get very defensive when they're asked about their strategy. Right away, they assume they're being criticized and they take it personally. The better attitude to take is that people are paying attention and you should be ready to explain the thinking behind your choices. As a decision-maker, I always viewed the questioning as an opportunity to explain what my process was. Then, if those asking the questions were being fair-minded, they could at least say, "Yeah, I can see where he was coming from," even if they didn't agree.

Note here that the "fans" or "press" types La Russa refers to here are, in your own case, the team members you're managing and fellow managers. You may have to get them slowly into the habit of asking. The incurious won't necessarily ask questions, but they may pick up some decisions of yours they can later apply without asking (you're revealing the solution formulæ). And the incurious are also telling you they are not ready to be tracked as management material themselves. The questioners, OTOH, are definitely showing one mandatory attribute of management potential -- process curiosity. A little more from the book:

I picked this up when I was a young manager in Chicago and our general manager Roland Hemond told me that if the questioning came from someone in the media, take it as an opportunity to explain what you were thinking and not as a challenge. Your response might or might not impress the questioner , but if you didn't know the answer, or if you acted like the questions bothered you, or if you gave an answer that was pure B.S., then you didn't belong on the bench managing the team. The only times I balked at this have been when I thought somebody had an agenda, wasn't intending to be fair, or was trying to create controversy.

The juicy part of applying the Black/La Russa technique is you really are replicating your decision-making DNA. Some recipients will take it as "correct", some will take it and tweak it, some will reject it and come up with alternatives. But by making yourself clear and transparent, you are saving yourself time in the long run while boosting the team's potential for effectiveness and nurturing the talent of potential managers.

And that final element...building up many managers for the future, is a much more significant legacy for your own management career than any set of decisions you're making.

In the previous entry, I used the example of a La Russa tactic description to describe a managerial orientation. In this one, I'll show you how you can use this very tactic, The Unintentional Intentional Walk, in your own shop IF you face rival managers or even executives up the chain from you who care more about getting their own way or advancing their own career than the health/survival of the organization.

That is, a statistically normal organization if you work in the corporate, elected officeholder or academic worlds.

THE TACTIC IN BASEBALL
In Baseball, many managers, especially in the National League, will defend by using the intentional walk in a situation where there are one or more runners in scoring position (that is, in a situation where they are threatened with a significant outcome change). La Russa, like all managers, uses that some. But he prefers something called the Unintentional Intentional Walk because that uses an opponent's aggression against her or him.

Again, here's his book on the replacement technique:

One of the strategies we employed a lot was the "unintentional" intentional walk, and it was particularly effective in the National League, where the pitcher hits. Often the eighth-place hitter comes up with two outs, a runner in scoring position and the pitcher on deck. If you walk the eighth-place hitter and the pitcher makes an out, then the leadoff man comes up to start the next inning (NOTE: and this is an incremental advantage to La Russa's opposition). We'd rather try to use an eighth-hitter's aggressiveness against him, hoping he'll swing at a borderlibne pitch and get himself out.

We had a sign for it. {SNIP} You're telling the pitcher he's going to pitch at the edge of the strike zone or off the edge. (NOTE: which are harder to hit well){SNIP} What you have going for you is that the hitter, since there's an RBI situation, wants to get that bat going. And he may be more apt to chase a pitch out of the strike zone. And sometimes you might get a call from the umpire on one of those "edge" pitches, which changes the count (NOTE: to a count more favorable to La Russa's team).

The italicized text in the extract is the key: Using the antagonist's aggression, a key way-of-being that leads to his understanding of his success, against him.

BEYOND BASEBALL
¿How do YOU use the Unintentional Intentional walk? I counsel managers I'm coaching to go to it only under duress (just as La Russa uses it in Baseball). Specifically, you apply the tactic in an organization that is facing the predictable advance of individuals with power who degrade accountability to feather their own career.

I've written lots before over the last ten years about the need to enforce accountability at every single juncture because of Angus' First Law of Organizations:

Corporations where accountability-sluffers get into positions to affect hiring choices tend to not mind accountability-sluffers and, probabalistically, are scared by accountability-embracers. Over time, they will hire more -sluffers. Accountability-embracers are more likely to feel uncomfortable and leave, or be held accountable to sluffers' sluffing and be forced out. External job candidates who are sluffers will be incrementally more attracted and -embracers incrementally less likely to be. Over time an organization will shift, and as it shifts, -sluffers will be competing with other sluffers, meaning the tricks and tactics that worked on -embracers are decreasingly valid, the population of ambitious-without-loyalty increasingly competing with each other for a fixed number of power slots.

If you work inside one of the plurality of publically-traded corporations that behave that way, you already know the First Law. If you don't, a more transparent example of this effect is documented for the chronically-underperforming Pentagon, since the end of World War II, a classic Less With More management culture.

With the necessity of us, as managers, to defend accountability, even when it costs us, "politically", is a challenging situation. When people with the same level or more power start trying to grab authority while sluffing responsibility, we have three alternatives. We can take them head on, which is healthy but costly. We can issue the intentional walk, that is decline to engage them and let them get their way. Or, we can issue the Unintentional Intentional walk -- without taking them head on, aiming to use their aggression against them.

Here's one example:
A manager I was coaching works in a transportation company. Outside of SF Muni & the commercial airline sector, transportation organizations tend to be accountable because the outcomes they deliver are pretty obvious -- the shipments get there or not, on time or not. So accountability-sluffers tend to be rare and are always pretty noticeable.

He's one of those quietly-competent guys who is programmed to let his accomplishments mostly speak for themselves, but he and his family also play tennis with influential executives and their families and this has given him extra coverage. But the company had recently hired an aggressive young MBA who'd formerly worked for and been recommended by a big name outside consulting firm that was working on our company's high-level strategy. The new guy liked to mouth off about strategy, an area he was familiar with and understood well.

But New Guy's allies in the consulting firm were getting him invited to meetings that were covering operational details as an observer (not a bad idea) and New Guy was using these meetings as a platform to assert ideas he didn't have the authority to push, but tried anyway. He'd already succeeded in two other departments in getting them to take on all the work of his thought-initiative without having to take on any work beyond being an advisor. If either succeeded, he'd take the credit, but in case of failure, his hands appeared clean, a classic consultant approach. That's what he'd done in the consulting company to advance, according to a couple of my acquaintances who worked there.

My guy just "knew" this was going to happen to his department sooner or later. I coached my guy on the Unintentional Intentional Walk. In this case, instead of resisting, we actually pushed New Guy's idea (a decent one...that helped us choose this tactic) in the meeting, but insisted only the New Guy was "qualified" to lead the development team and didn't back off. My guy had enough leverage with his execs to both good-mouth New Guy while putting him in the crosshairs. New Guy would either succeed (good for the company) or fail (bad for New Guy and sluffers everywhere) but he was going to be measured by his own skills and not take selective credit for others'.

Better yet, my guy maximized the effort by making sure his acquaintances across the company worked the tactic, too. New Guy tried it again about a month later in a different group. Even though he hadn't done a shred of apparent work on the initiative he was leading, when the other team insisted he was the man for the job, he said he was overbooked. They set it up so when New Guy finished my guy's group's effort, he would start theirs, and now he was booked well into the future. A week later a third group did the same. New Guy was booked for almost a year of project leadership he didn't want and maybe didn't know how to execute on.

New Guy became Ex-Guy about ten months later, leaving on his own two feet by returning to the consulting company he'd come from and to an apparent promotion, but without delivering any of his initiatives. The company lost the opportunity to see what at least one good-looking idea might have delivered. In exchange though, they resisted advancing an accountability-sluffer into a nexus where he could have amplified his style to the detriment of the host company.

Further, they learned the Unintentional Intentional Walk, one of Baseball's cleverest ways of finessing a stressful decision environment.

Adhering to a process you've proven works effectively and efficiently in the context of a team is optimal. But you need to vary the use of Optimal methods gently and continually over time.

No line of work is more effective and illustrative Agile and Lean norm than Baseball. One great practitioner of the mix of art and science of knowing when to simply apply the Optimal move and when to riff off it is now Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa, who desribed it in his recent. He documents it in a way any manager can "get" it in his recent book, One Last Strike (p. 231-233).

In the book, he discusses "intentional walk", a managerial technique he uses far less than the norm. Statistically, the walking a batter to get to the next batter gives the other team in the composite average an advantage. That is, that if you roll up all the cases in which a manager chooses to apply it, the choice nets out as negative over all cases. Baseball Prospectus last year published this info for the 2012 season rolling up every event for the 2012 major league season. It reports what difference on average events correlated to runs the batting team scored in the inning. For example, "HR", a home run, was worth, in the overall mean average case, +1.4 runs for the batting team in that inning.

As you can see, the IBB, the intentional walk, nets out negative for the team of the pitcher that issued it, on average about .17, or about one-sixth, of a run per instance. In general, any sensible manager would lean against this net-negative tactic. La Russa is a metrics-informed manager, and also leans against it.

But here's the Truth -- he doesn't automatically NOT use this sub-optimal choice. In the beginning and middle of his career, he was usually at or near the bottom of use in the IBB. In his final year of managing, 2011, he still used it 44 times, third lowest for the league.

NOTE: If you haven't thought through the consequences of the differences between the National and the American leagues, managers in the National use the intentional walk far more often than their American peers. This is because the pitcher is part of the batting line-up in the National but has a designated hitter in the American. Pitchers, as whole, bat worse than players not named Robert Andino who play any other position, so the intentional walk of the batter hitting in front of the pitcher to make the pitcher either bat or be dislodged with a pinch-hitter, is the most frequent application of the tactic.

And while La Russa's frequency of intentionl walks is very low for the National League, American League use is so much lower, his ranking would be more moderate.

There's the Lean/Agile exemplar: that almost any practical technique/tactic/process could be "Optimal" in any given context...of time plus team plus cost plus organization plus decision environment plus team-members-on-the-given-day. Optimal is not static and because it isn't static, push-button management using the discovered optimum, even though it fails less often that other choices will in composite, may underperform many other possibilities in the specific context.

La Russa's is a classic innovator. His ability to reject the intentional walk, while still being able to use in in contexts he finds beneficial for it is an elegant example of Agile/Lean management practice.

BUT WAIT. THERE'S MORE...
La Russa is an advocate for a variant of the IBB that he can use in lieu of it -- in certain contexts: The Unintentional Intentional Walk.

Here's his book on the replacement technique:

One of the strategies we employed a lot was the "unintentional" intentional walk, and it was particularly effective in the National League, where the pitcher hits. Often the eighth-place hitter comes up with two outs, a runner in scoring position and the pitcher on deck. If you walk the eighth-place hitter and the pitcher makes an out, then the leadoff man comes up to start the next inning (NOTE: and this is an incremental advantage to La Russa's opposition). We'd rather try to use an eighth-hitter's aggressiveness against him, hoping he'll swing at a borderlibne pitch and get himself out.

We had a sign for it. {SNIP} You're telling the pitcher he's going to pitch at the edge of the strike zone or off the edge. (NOTE: which are harder to hit well){SNIP} What you have going for you is that the hitter, since there's an RBI situation, wants to get that bat going. And he may be more apt to chase a pitch out of the strike zone. And sometimes you might get a call from the umprire on one of those "edge" pitches, which changes the count (NOTE: to a count more favorable to La Russa's team).

There are side benefits, even when it doesn't work. The team gets used to applying it so when it comes up again, they will have more experience with the tactic. The opposition number-eight batter also knows you may use this subtle technique, and may use brain cycles thinking about it even when you're not. That divides her attention, and that's a benefit to you, too.

BEYOND BASEBALL
It's not without risk of failure (and to be realistic, almost nothing is, unless you're Goldman Sachs and you carry in your pocket or perhaps on your payroll both main political parties' choices for Treasury department- and S.E.C. leadership). The difference between being a good manager and a great one is picking your spots for innovation/riffing off of the Optimal choice.

The majority of managers gravitate towards what I call Binary Thinking (simple dualities such as "good v. bad"). Binary Thinking makes it hard to apply things the way one must to be truly good as a manager of the First Base skill set, that is, stochastically. The optimal model is stochastic, neither random (investing an equal amount in any eventuality no matter how likely or unlikely) or deterministic (invest in the likeliest n options only until there is no more to invest), because evolution is stochastic (not exactly hitting the bull's eye of potentiality every time but scattering arrows clustered variably around the bull's eye, getting sparser with distance from the bull's eye).

For you to have any chance being successful in a system that at least pays lip-service to Lean or Agile, one needs to be willing to riff off all but the most static systems' Optimal choices. Follow La Russa here. Never stop experimenting with stochastically distributed variants off the Optimal.

I'm interrupting the La Russa Invention of Agile series to share a quick and joyful book review just in time for last minute Kwanzaa and Samain shoppers to transcieve something cool. And it's an odd object for me to recommend.

It's the exact kind of "novelty" book that usually ends up being one of those phoned-in, phoney gimmick ideas some unimaginative publisher talked some mediocre house writer to pen. Last year's Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World's Most Loved (and Hated) Team is thoroughly-amusing, readable, perfect bathroom book, whether you love or hate the Yankees (or like I do, respect the long history of skillful management while rooting against them no matter who they're playing... except one team).

The work is a collection of original essays by a blend of Yankee-haters but also by Yankee lovers who share their observation of Yankee haters. The 24 authors were well-chosen, especially at the beginning of the book, because while a couple of authors were phoning it in, they are the kind of authors who can totally get away with it because of their effortless humor. I count the Roy Blount, Jr. and Pete Dexter essays squarely in that category. Blount's, a jumble sale of cute anecdotes about the team and the players and his experiences as a fan tossed in no particular order. In less skillful hands, this is a prescription for mediocrity, but if you're willing to slalom though his topic shifts, the work is a total delight.

Pete Dexter's essay is hyperfocused on a single Yankee and said Yankee's doppelgänger, Dexter's feckless dog. Laugh out loud material. Which isn't how I'd describe Sally Jenkins' essay, reminiscences of her street athlete childhood, how she got various scars she wears to this day, and how it relates to the Yanks' Early Steinbrenner Era. It's a joy, because while I've read Jenkins for years and appreciated her insight without loving her work, this is a revealing and engaging glimpse into the person behind the byline.

Damn Yankees is light. It has only the most slender connection to management topics (some of the sociological insights by and about Yankee haters do illustrate personality angles you should take into consideration when you manage people). It's a fine book that'll put several smiles on a baseball-engaged person's face.

I frequently tell my clients the (oversimplified but) actionable truth, "There are two kinds of managers: the opportunity seekers and the mistake-avoiders". One of those settings will be the twitch setting for a manager having to make an instant decision. In the ideal world, each individual manager can channel both at will, and while each organization will have a predominance of one setting over the other, each organization will also have at least some managers with power in the minority zone.

To be good at Agile and Lean methods, you'd better have a bias towards opportunity and away from failure-avoidance, because agility rests on action in an environment of uncertainty. That's a bias, not an exclusive way of thinking. Safety- critical organizations that get too many opportunity-oriented power nexes end up losing their way, frequently at a cost of human life. When the Reagan Administration, run by opportunity-seekers, decided they needed to window-dress NASA's space program so they could privatize it so they could sell it to businesses that were political allies, the executive team overruled the failure-avoiders (engineers, classic exxxxtreme failure avoiders) who were concerned with safety. The resulting Challenger disaster did convince a small incremental number of people that government doesn't work, but it didn't parlay into the privatization plan, because more people came to mistrust the privatizers.

But, in general, Agile and Lean methods are entrepreneurial and where entrepreneurial management has value (for example, NOT in conducting space missions) the opportunity-seeking setting needs to trump failure- avoidance in twitch or very short-term decisions.

Baseball is a perfect test bed for testing management theory for competitive lines of work, because its zero-sum outcomes and almost perfect transparency make seeing and tracking cause-->effect, input-->outcome correlations easy. If it works in Baseball, it's very likely to work in your less-competitive, less precise management environment.

Where does Baseball set the Set Point for a competitive endeavor? Almost all the way to opportunity seeking. One natural master at the setting is former White Sox, Athletics and Cardinals manager Tony La Russa. He documents it in an actionable way in his recent book, (pages 368-369). His explanation relates to his 2011 Cardinal team and their World Series efforts. Game Six; they are down three games to two, and one more loss will deliver the Series to their opponents. The bottom of the 6th inning has just ended, badly, for the Cards, and painfully, because tied at 4-4, they had the bases loaded with one out and not been able to take a lead. Worse, they had not only not succeeded with the clutch-hitting part of the game, but one of the most baseball-smart players on a team that valued baseball smarts had allowed himself to be picked off base for the second out. Emotionally, failure-prevention would be a hard setting to fight here.

Between innings, I did my analysis. I had two options. I could think of these two instances of the benefit of getting a run without a hit and not getting even more runs with a clutch hit, as a refecltion of our offense not really producing.

Or I could recognize the positive of having tied the score going into the last three innings of a home game. I took the latter view, telling those other thoughts to get the hell out of there before they'd even had a chance to settle in. I did the same when I briefly thought that if we were to lose, this would be the worst possible way, because we were not playing well to this point.

Those runs we'd gotten -- or maybe the Rangers had handed us -- were important. Just as the times we'd limted them to a single run were important. Don't do something to lose the ganme when on defense (failure-avoidance). Do something to win the game on offense opportunity-seeking). Do that nine times and you win. {snip}

I was unhappy about out not playing a clean game, but I kept the positive self- talk going. I learned a long time ago that if I gave the guys any suggestion that I was upset, that I was giving in to the negative or acting at all like this was not our night, they'd pick up on that and feed off my negative energy.

BEYOND BASEBALL AND INTO AGILE
Agile and Lean management yield the security of heavy process and tried-and-true in exchange for opportunities to increase product innovation or safety and increase overall productivity. If your setting it too close to the failure-avoidance pole, you;'ll both make yourself crazy and make the work effort underperform.

I'm not suggesting positive thinking alone can deflect failures (see Challenger example, previously). Positive thinking is a millenial cult unless you attach it to balanced action.

What I know to be true, though, is that as a team coach or scrum master or leader, if you share the negative emotions with the team, only worse outcomes can happen. If you share the positive, it may or may not buffer the negative, but you're no worse off than if you chose to be passive and did nothing.

You don't have to be a "happy idiot" and blow up the Challenger so a few political cronies could make some incremental income. But to succeed in Agile or Lean management requires relentlessness, and part of that relentlessness, as La Russa documents it for us, is to channel positivity about the present and future, even when it's tough. That's just part of the manager's work.

Too many experienced managers limit their ability to adapt to rapidly-changing or even slowly-evolving decisionmaking areas because they don't keep a broad portfolio of mentors' templates.

What I mean is a big part of management is decisions and how we go about choosing how we will execute those decisions is dependent on how big our toolbox is and how much of it we're adequate with or have mastered. The people who make good managers observed their own bosses when they were non-managers, and recorded their techniques and how these worked in varying contexts. Then, when they become managers themselves, they field and respond to the decisions they are confident they have nailed down but riffle through their mentors' techniques for the rest.

Mentors, in this use, don't have to be one's own supervisors, they can be peers, rivals or even people who report to you. In Baseball, it's s.o.p. to use everyone as a potential source for successful templates to emulate or for failures to avoid. Arrogance about status is almost non-existent as a barrier in identifying ways to improve.

In Baseball, furthermore, one channels these other experts all the time, even when not in the middle of a decision to be made.

There's a great example of how they do it in Baseball that Tony La Russa wrote about in his recent book, (pages 119-121). The situation is this: part way through the 2011 season, La Russa's St. Louis Cardinals were on the ropes, when they got an added challenge. La Russa's key field management partner and confidante, pitching coach & strategist extraordinaire Dave Duncan, took a leave from work to attend to his wife's critical health condition.

I was still going to be in touch with him because that's Dunc: even if he wasn't right next to me to bounce ideas off, he was still there in the dugout because of all the things he'd taught me over the years. I can't say for sure what effect Dunc's absence had on the pitching staff at first. Dunc being Dunc, he didn't want to make a big deal about his leaving, but the guys did know what he and Jeanine were going through. I wasn't about to use that as a tool to motivate them. Baseball is baseball and life is life, but if guys were going to take some inspiration, learn some lesson about how to deal with a difficult thing head-on, they could find no one better to emulate than Dave Duncan.

BEYOND BASEBALL
there's absolutely no reason to sluff this technique. If you're not yet a manager, or early in your management career yourself, start collecting "mentors" and their decision-making templates. And if you're senior, and you're not already doing this, it's not to late to up your game. When you keep the portfolio of mentors in your decision-making head, you have a more rounded team of experts and their expertise than you can bring to bear just resting on your own native tools.

It's standard operating procedure in Baseball, and Baseball management is a lot more capable and effective than leadership is in your own endeavor. There's no excuse in the practice of decision-making to not follow La Russa and his Baseball peers.

When you're in an Agile or Lean environment, the resistance factors to applying the Baseball approach are way lower. Agile and Lean both recognize the team is responsible for most of the tactical decision-making, and managers who follow the team are not ridiculed as they are in many corporate and almost all military and academic settings. But not all managers in these environment realize they should not just "let" the team make decisions, but that they should actively be mining those decisions as mentor templates.

If you're not doing this already, it's not too late to start.

People managing Agile/Lean initiatives are too often reporting to the functionally naive executives who believe, or claim to believe, one can do "More With Less", a dying but still too-common cult-like belief. And those cultists will use any excuse to thrash or torment the operational manager whenever something doesn't work out. Hard to believe, but in some significant ways, that buys the manager some efficiency in decisionmaking...because if you're doomed to aggressive criticism not matter what you do, you are free to do the right thing, not the politick thing

This freedom extends beyond Agile projects. This liberating cognate would have been a perfect salve for the beleagered management of the team that rolled out the not-agile Healthcare.Gov project. More than a month before the delivery deadline for the web-based exchange registration system, an executive announced the team would need to stop working on the site's construction and delivery because funds were running low (¿remember the sequester?). He needed time to try to gather funds from related agencies to pay for the last lap.

That meant for at least days and maybe more time than that, work on the project was stalled while the deadline was not, a universal, almost-guaranteed formula for quality shortfalls. Since the site appeared on time in the state it was at that moment, it seems highly probable that either the team cut testing corners, or tried to do "more with less", kless time that is, again an almost guaranteed formula for either quality shortfalls, budget overruns, or both.

I was not a fly on the wall, but I'm lived through enough of this type of donnybrook before to share an educated guess you probably already know. Someone(s) up the chain of command had politick reasons (not utilitarian ones) to deliver on the deadline promise. Maybe that someone(s) also had pledged the budget ceiling would not be broken. So the team leader/scrum master/ stigmata-collector had to suck it up, knowing full well SOMEthing would break: either the budget, the testing protocol, or the deliverable or some squalid puu-puu platter of those.

But that human pin-cushion of a team leader was going to be frelled no matter which of those almost-guaranteed failures happened. Because the combination of (the total visibility that any human services government project has) .and. (the politickal opposition's determination to flay the team even if nothing had gone wrong) guaranteed not only a poor functional outcome, but a career- limiting outcome for the team and its leader.

In that case, the team leaders were liberated. They were going to be "moving on to pursue other interests" NO MATTER WHAT. So instead of trying to please their many critics or non-operational management, they could have done the functionally right things.

LA RUSSA'S RIPOSTE
The way this works is best explained by Tony La Russa, one of the inventors of Agile management techniques and the now-retired manager of the St. Louis Cardinals.

He describes a decision that is guaranteed to cascade throughout the game he's managing. This is not just any game, but a very critical game, the 3rd game of a best-o'-seven World Series. ( Baseball managers make more decisions for each game than the average C-level exec makes in a month). His starting pitcher is Kyle Lohse, a team member who has had a high-quality comeback season, but is, as the season is wearing on, starting to struggle earlier and earlier in games. And it's a given in Baseball that a team wants the starting pitcher go finish 6+ innings because that protects the team from having the weaker members of the bullpen appear more.

It's early in the World Series (not so early either team can finesse a loss, but early enough that any decision to use or not use team members has sharp consequences for the rest of the short, zero-sum tussles). As La Russa writes in his book, (pages 348-350):

The first time through the order, Kyle Lohse has his usual arm action that produced good velocity and movement as well as deception on his off-speed stuff, but in the span of six pitches in the bottom of the fourth he gave up three runs. We could see he wasn't the same pitcher we'd seen those first three innings, and when he gave up another hit, it was time for (key, usually reserved for late innings, not a weaker relief pitcher, Fernando) Salas.

This was an unorthodox way to try to get a win but this was the World Series and our evaluation was based on who had the most quality pitches to give. I didn't worry about what would be said about it, or (what would have been said) if I hadn't made the move. That's the immunity I talked about -- just do what you think is best -- if it doesn't work out you're going to get hammered either way.

BEYOND BASEBALL
There are, sadly, no shortage of these situations. Corporate life, fortunately for people who work in that realm, has less visibility as Baseball or government, but we've all faced key initiatives with strong advocates and "opponents" (rival executives) who would love to capitalize on glitches or failures for their own personal aggrandizement, regardless of what the cost would be to the organization.

It's costly in time, careers and stress. Think how much stress you could avoid or deflect if you could channel La Russa and Baseball's way of doing it: When a hammering is inevitable either way, do the right thing.

Agile and Lean management requires the manager to be flexible in adapting methods, systems and techniques not only for "local" conditions (meaning the specifics of your own shop and the specifics of the project) but also for evolution in those conditions. But as I explained in an earlier entry in this series, to be effective, you have to individualize management tactics for each individual talent in your team.

Former baseball manager Tony La Russa gave extra thought when he was inventing Agile management to specific tactics that were powerful, that cost a little effort and delivered high return on that effort. I call that tactic, "Speaking in the Talent's Language"

That language, at its simplest means using each person's slang or closely-held words. We all to this to some degree; when you work in a shop where people commonly use creepy connectors such as "from the get-go" or "at the end of the day" or by starting sentences with "So," it becomes very difficult for normally socialised people to avoid using that language. But, in general, most people on the team will understand you if you use this local vocabulary. And then individuals each have their own, specific words that at work are local to them. And if you can incorporate that vocabulary into your personl communications with team members, you'll tend to get better return on communication effort.

As the North America becomes more multi-lingual, speaking in the talent's language sometimes requires communicating, literally, in a "foreign" language. And if that what it takes to optimize the talent's potential, then to master the Agile management panoply, you better go that way. Here's a concrete example from La Russa himself, from his book, One Last Strike: Fifty Years in Baseball, Ten and a Half Games Back, and One Final Championship Season (pages 335 - 337). That last season La Russa managed the St. Louis Cardinals, and won the World Series, they early on rode the success of a very young pitcher, Jaime Garcia, who had carried them in the beginning of the season, but as he racked up innings and his young arm healed more slowly, and as the opposition learned to identify his skills and patterns better had had lesser and less-consistent results in the second half.

Garcia is a bilingual man who grew up in the U.S. but for whom Spanish was his first language. La Russa is going to him in a post-season game, but has been protecting him with lower and more specific appearances of late. If La Russa uses traditional, no-Agile techniques, he'll just manage to optimize the team but not "waste" ergs checking in with the team member.

In the lead-up to the game, I'd sought him out a couple of times, just to check in with him to see how he was doing. Jaime's from Reynoso, Mexico, but grew up in Texas. As we talked, we slipped into and out of Spanish and English. I'm not completely calculating when I do this, it just comes naturally to someone who's bilingual. Having these shared languages helps with personalizing -- it establishes another point of commonality with some of the players, just as anyone would look for in getting to know another person

Using, or learning, a foreign language is a maxxxximum connection-builder. If you can do this to advance your abilities in your own management environment, that's a better investment than yet another analytical model or financial system. But you don't have to go that far to succeed with speaking in the talent's language.

Just be attentive to each team member's forms and styles of communication and the vocabulary they use and mis-use and customize your communications to deliver better outomes.

No one expects you to be as good as La Russa, but he and his mentors invented Agile; you just have to strive relentlessly to be that good.