When you think about it, IT managers are really in the business of managing how their organizations change. How, for example, do you plan for an emerging technology like SaaS which might fizzle or might force you to throw out the book on everything you thought knew about IT. Well, there's a new book out that can give you some pointers on how to do so from some of the all-time great managers, such as Earl Weaver.
I don't usually do book reviews in this space, much less discuss books that on the surface to be mostly about baseball, but I'm making an exception for a book written by an old friend of mine and of InfoWorld readers. Management by Baseball: The Official Rules for Winning Management in Any Field, written by Jeff Angus and published by HarperCollins, shows how baseball managers and general managers can give better examples of how to manage -- and how not to manage -- any kind of organization than the titans of business. Branch Rickey can teach you more about how to run your staff meetings than Donald Trump, and Pie Traynor demonstrates how not to run a software development project even better than Ken Lay or Jeffrey Skilling.
But perhaps the most interesting story Angus relates from the point of view of how IT managers can manage change itself concerns legendary Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver. Weaver's stated philosophy was that baseball games are won by three-run homers, so he generally eschewed tactics like sacrifice bunts, stealing bases, and the hit-and-run that can help manufacture a run but can also limit what could be a big inning. But as Angus relates, 1968 -- the year that Weaver first got the Orioles job - was a time of an earthshaking seismic shift in the baseball landscape. Higher strike zones and other recent trends made 1968 a year when pitchers dominated like never before and runs were extremely hard to come by.
In other words, Weaver took over the Orioles at the worst possible time for someone of his big-inning philosophy and with personnel that seemed mismatched with the trends of the time. Yet within a year he turned that team into one of the all-time powerhouses, winning 109 games in 1969. How did he do it? Well, as Angus would put it, Weaver attacked his team's problems stochastically. And if that doesn't make it all clear, you'll just have to read the book to understand how Weaver, with a little tweaking and a little experimentation, turned the Orioles around.
Now, you might be wondering what credentials Angus has to be mixing business and baseball management topics this way. Well, you can read the official bio at his website, but what you might not pick up there is that he's always been a Tony Phillips type - i.e., a player you plug into any position and anywhere lineup and count on production. As a sportswriter he's covered baseball, and as a manager and/or technology consultant he's worked for companies as large as Microsoft and Boeing and as small as Paul Mace Software.
But if the name Jeff Angus sounds familiar to InfoWorld readers, that's probably because he's been a contributing writer for many years on topics like knowledge management. His biggest contribution to InfoWorld, however, was made as a manager. He was the original director of the InfoWorld Test Center, building that organization from scratch in a very short time into a sophisticated operation that successfully challenged our much more established and well-heeled competition. As InfoWorld's news editor at the time, I had a front row seat to watch Angus in action in the Test Center, and I can assure you he deserves to be in the management Hall of Fame for what he accomplished there.
If you think you might be interested in what Angus has to say but aren't quite ready rush off to Amazon to plop down your fourteen bucks, let me recommend you scout his blog for a while. Whether you're interested in learning how to better manage a business, a staff, or maybe just yourself, I think you'll find that baseball greats like Earl Weaver have far more to offer than you ever would have expected.
Read and post comments about this story here.
12:43:14 AM 
|
|
