Lessons Learned from the LA Angels

Hi All, and Good Saturday Morning!

Actually, it's late Friday night, and I had just watched the Boston Red Sox come back from a 7-0 deficit to defeat the Tampa Bay Rays in the ALCS. For those of you who don't watch baseball, if Tampa had won that game, they'd be on their way to the World Series. If Tampa does eventually go to the World Series, it would be shocking given that they had never had a winning record in their franchise history, and had just come off a miserable 2007 season with basically the same players.

Now, onto the other, more painful side. I'm an Angels fan; have been for 11 years, and what I have seen in three of the past five years is not only painful, but is a microcosm of how a business fails. This past year the Angels had the best record in the Major Leagues and lost to Boston in the first round of the playoffs, just like they had lost to that same team last year and two years before that. The Angels are a perfect example of the old 'penny-wise, dollar-foolish' adage. Throughout the year, their mantra was 'one game at a time'. The manager refused to let them think about the next game. While this made for a loose team, 'Hey, there's always tomorrow', what it did was to suck all the emotion out of the team. When it came time in the playoffs to ratchet it up, they had no emotion to go on. They were robots. They lost a game and said, 'oh well, there's always tomorrow's game'. Well, after losing the series, there was no tomorrow's game, and the Angels were left feeling numb. They had no emotion, no passion, and no focus that comes with those attributes. Good teams rise to the occasion. Poor teams melt. In business it's the same way; when the heat gets turned-up, the good teams play better, more focused, and see the goal at the end of the project, not just the end of the day.

The Angels would do well to learn from some of the high performing teams in industry; it's not what you did today that defines you, it's what you do over time that does.

Let's hope the Ducks get that message.........

Cheers,

Kurt C Schneider
Lead Product Accelerator
Tech Bridge West