A World Where Mediocre People of All Races and Genders Have Opportunities

Today, the Miami Marlins named Kim Ng their new General Manager. She is the first female GM of any of the major professional sports leagues in the U.S. (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), and she is the first Asian-American GM of Major League Baseball.

I’ve been a fan of hers since she joined my Dodgers as an assistant GM in 2001. It’s a historic moment for sure, and it’s also shameful that it took this long for her to get a GM job. Her credentials are impeccable. She’s been in baseball for 30 years, and she has three championship rings. By all accounts, she’s an incredible negotiator, talent evaluator, and manager, and she is highly respected by some of the biggest names in baseball. It seemed like a sure thing for her to get a GM job in the first decade of this century, and she got plenty of interviews. But it never happened, and in 2011, she took a job with Major League Baseball.

Progress has to start somewhere, and this is definitely something to celebrate. However, all too often, people point to barriers like these being broken and think that the work is done. The work is not done. If we live in a world where only exceptional folks like Ng get opportunities, then we will have failed.

A truly equitable world would be one where all professional sports leagues were full of mediocre GMs of all genders and races.

I didn’t fully understand this until I learned about Janice Madden’s groundbreaking study of Black coaches in the NFL. She found that, from 1990-2002, Black coaches far outperformed white coaches. Her research led to the Rooney Rule in 2003, which required that teams interview at least one minority candidate for coaching positions.

Here’s the kicker. Success isn’t just more Black coaches in the NFL. Success is more mediocre Black coaches in the NFL. As Madden explained:

If African-American coaches don’t fail, it means that those with equal talents to the failing white coaches are not even getting the chance to be a coach. Seeing African-American coaches fail means that they, like white coaches, no longer have to be superstars to get coaching jobs.

We should absolutely celebrate when we see superstars in any field who are women, Black, transgender, etc. Representation matters. But we should be even happier when we see fields full of mediocre women and other underrepresented folks, because that is a true indicator of equal opportunity.

I hope Ng succeeds, but in a weird way, I’ll be just as happy if she’s mediocre.

Lessons from COVID-19 on Boundary-Setting and Systems Change

I’m a lifelong Dodgers fan, and I watched elatedly as the Dodgers stormed the field a few weeks ago after winning their first World Series since 1988. I left the TV on to watch the celebration. I love seeing the joy and tears on the players’ faces, watching them hugging their loved ones, listening to the fans cheering. That’s right, fans. They were playing in a sort-of bubble in Texas, where the rules around large gatherings are looser, and there were some fans in the stadium, most of them rooting for the Dodgers, so it felt like a home game.

In the course of the celebration, the sportscasters reported that Justin Turner, the Dodgers steady third-baseman and long-time leader, had tested positive for COVID-19, which was why he had been abruptly pulled from the game and isolated in the eighth inning. Hearing this left a pall on the celebration. It was a stark reminder that this was not normal times, and it led to many questions. Who else on both teams had already been exposed? Would they be okay? What if the Dodgers hadn’t won, and there was another game scheduled the following day? Would they have played?

Then Justin Turner came back onto the field to join his teammates for their celebration. He hugged his teammates and family members, he took off his mask, and he participated in the team photo. My sobriety shifted to shock, then unhappiness. What the heck was he doing?! Why wasn’t anyone stopping him?!

It took a few weeks, but Turner and Major League Baseball’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, finally released statements explaining what happened. Turner had apparently asked to step onto the field with his wife (who was isolating with him) for a photo. In his statement, Turner wrote:

I assumed by that point that few people were left on the field. I was under the impression that team officials did not object to my returning to the field for a picture with my wife. However, what was intended to be a photo capturing the two of us turned into several greetings and photos where I briefly and unwisely removed my mask. In hindsight, I should have waited until the field was clear of others to take that photo with my wife. I sincerely apologize to everyone on the field for failing to appreciate the risks of returning to the field. I have spoken with almost every teammate, coach and staff member, and my intentions were never to make anyone uncomfortable or put anyone at further risk.

According to the ESPN article on the statements:

Manfred said teammates “actively encouraged” Turner to leave his isolation room and return to the field, adding that “many teammates felt they had already been exposed” and were willing to tolerate additional risk. Manfred’s statement said Turner believed he received permission from at least one Dodgers employee and that an unidentified person incorrectly told him that other teammates had tested positive, “creating the impression in Mr. Turner’s mind that he was being singled out for isolation.”

MLB previously chided Turner for breaking protocol, adding that Turner “emphatically refused to comply” when asked to leave the field. But Manfred acknowledged Friday that the league “could have handled the situation more effectively” by assigning a security person to closely monitor Turner and quickly transporting him to the team hotel.

“Mr. Turner has publicly recognized that his conduct was wrong and has expressed remorse for that conduct,” Manfred wrote. “I have spoken to him personally and I know that he is extraordinarily upset by the incident. By all accounts, Justin is a leader in the clubhouse, a contributor to his community and a responsible person who was instrumental in the Dodgers diligently following the health protocols all season long.”

I think this was a good outcome, and I applaud everyone involved. There was no single person at fault. It was a collective responsibility, and everyone owned up. The next step is to learn from this and to improve the system.

I live in San Francisco, where our local leaders have moved cautiously in accordance with public health officials and scientists, and where there’s been a culture of compliance and support. People wear masks for the most part, and folks are generally well-intentioned in supporting differing tolerances for risk.

Still, it hasn’t been easy. I’ve felt more cautious than many of my peers, and I’ve drawn some boundaries around distancing and being outdoors, which has meant not doing a lot of the things that my friends want me to do. Everyone has been supportive in principle, but I constantly feel that support tested in practice. People ask to go on a distanced walk, and then they walk right next to me, or they wear their masks below their noses. People gather outdoors, and then it gets cold, and they say, “Why don’t we go inside?” Even though I’m generally good at protecting my boundaries and I’m not conflict-averse by any means, I’ve given in more than once. I feel like I’m constantly fighting a number of forces and tendencies — many of them based on my own longing for normalcy — and afterward, I always feel crappy and scared. But I don’t blame anyone. I know it’s hard for everyone, and I can’t imagine living in other places right now where there’s violent disagreement around what the norms should be.

Last month, my sister shared this comic by Ali Solomon that exactly encapsulates how I feel about all of this. Check it out. It’s brilliant.

Last May, Atul Gawande wrote a wonderful article about how we might safely transition out of lockdown based on what he had learned from his hospital’s practices. He wrote:

These lessons point toward an approach that we might think of as a combination therapy—like a drug cocktail. Its elements are all familiar: hygiene measures, screening, distancing, and masks. Each has flaws. Skip one, and the treatment won’t work. But, when taken together, and taken seriously, they shut down the virus. We need to understand these elements properly—what their strengths and limitations are—if we’re going to make them work outside health care.

And later in the article:

As I think about how my workplace’s regimen could be transferred to life outside the hospital, however, I have come to realize that there is a fifth element to success: culture. It’s one thing to know what we should be doing; it’s another to do it, rigorously and thoroughly.

In my professional life, which is fundamentally about systems change, we get so caught up with finding high-leverage strategies, it’s easy to forget that nothing works in isolation. And among the different combinations that are necessary for success, culture is almost always one of the required strategies. As we’re experiencing right now in a large-scale, visceral way, culture change is really, really hard, even when everybody is aligned and has the best of intentions, which is rarely the case.

“Failure” Is Part of the Game

One of my favorite work maxims is: If you’re not fucking up, you’re not trying hard enough.

I try to drive this home with all of my teams in all of my projects. But what does it actually mean, and how do you actually create a culture that encourages this?

Baseball offers some beautiful insights into this. In baseball, if you manage to hit the ball successfully 30 percent of the time over the course of your career, you are considered a great hitter, quite possibly a Hall of Famer. That means you’re “failing” 70 percent of the time. But no one thinks of it that way, because hitting a tiny baseball coming at you at 90 miles per hour from 60 feet away is freakin’ hard.

If you’re going to adopt this attitude in your own work, you have to be clear about what a good success rate actually is, and you have to celebrate when you achieve that rate. In Silicon Valley, for example, most VCs are in the high-risk, high-reward business. Many VCs cite a 10 percent hit rate as success. If they hit that rate, they celebrate.

With some of my projects, I go so far as to add, “Failure of effort” to my checklist of success. For example, in my second Changemaker Bootcamp pilot, I had one workout that went horribly awry. I actually checked that off as a success indicator, because it gave me confidence that I was really testing the model rather than playing it safe.

The other important thing to do is to differentiate between different kinds of failure. I like to think of it as failure of neglect versus failure of effort. One of my favorite coaches in baseball always says that he’ll never complain about a player getting thrown out trying to steal, because it’s a failure that stems from effort, not neglect. (Stat geeks object vociferously to this strategy, but that’s a topic for another day.)

With my teams, I try to go out of my way to reward people for failure of effort, because I want to encourage people to follow their instincts and take risks. I’m not always good at this, especially in high-stakes situation.

Last July, we had a terrible Delta Dialogues meeting, which was documented in our final report. There was one moment in particular when one of the facilitators advocated strongly for a particular move that the rest of us did not feel good about. I supported it anyway, because I understood his reasoning and because he felt so strongly about it. The move didn’t work, and he felt awful about it.

In our debrief, I tried to state as clearly as possible that, if I had to do it again, I would do exactly the same thing. We were dealing with a lot of complexity, and we had to make strong moves if we were going to be successful. That meant we were going to make mistakes, and we needed to be okay with mistakes of effort. I wanted my teammate to understand that I supported him and believed in him, and a mistake of effort wasn’t going to change that.

Still, I’m not sure I conveyed that message successfully, because I was absolutely dejected by the overall outcome, and I was probably sending very mixed messages. In particular, I didn’t think we had prepared adequately for the meeting — failures of neglect — and I was very angry about that.

In the end, it all worked out. We were ultimately honest with ourselves about what we controlled and what we didn’t, and we made a lot of adjustments based on what had happened. In a followup meeting two months later, my colleague made the exact same move. This time, it was perfect, and that meeting ended up being the best one of the whole project.

The key to doing anything hard is to strive for perfection, but to expect a certain amount of failure. In practice, this is hard, especially when you’re a high achiever used to a certain level of success. Your ability to embed this mindset into structures (such as your success checklist) will help you do this more effectively, but at the end of the day, it’s all about practice.

Three Tips on Life from Pete Rose

Last month, ESPN launched a film series, which includes a series of web shorts. The first short in the series was a piece on baseball’s Hit King, Pete Rose, entitled, “Here Now.” There’s a line from Rose in the film that I especially loved, where he outlines his philosophy on hitting, on business, on life:

  • Be aggressive
  • Be more aggressive
  • Never be satisfied

Rose obviously had its flaws (as do we all), but this much is indisputable: He was a great ballplayer, one of the most exciting and inspiring ballplayers ever to watch, and a good manager. We could all learn a lot from how he played the game.

Moneyball and High-Performance Collaboration

On Friday night, the movie, Moneyball, opens in theaters nation-wide. It’s based on the book by Michael Lewis, which I reviewed on this blog back in 2003. I was pretty shocked that they turned a book about how data is changing baseball into a movie starring Brad Pitt. I’m even more shocked to hear that the movie is pretty good, even by sports fan standards. Regardless, it’s a great excuse to revisit the ideas in this most excellent book and to explore the implications on high-performance collaboration.

In a nutshell, Moneyball is the story of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, who used (what was then considered) radical new ways of measuring performance in order to stay competitive in a market where other teams (e.g. the Yankees) were spending orders of magnitude more money on talent. It documents the huge, ongoing culture shift in baseball away from old-school, hard-scrabble views on player evaluation to a more data-driven system.

In my book review, I wrote:

How do we measure the effectiveness of collaboration? If we can’t measure this accurately, then how do we know if we’re getting better or worse at it? Baseball has the advantage of having well-defined rules and objectives. The same does not hold with most other areas, including collaboration. Is it even possible to measure anything in these areas in a meaningful way?

I think we’ve made progress in exploring this question. There’s a world-wide trend toward leveraging the tremendous amount of data now available to us in order to try and understand, in real-time, how we behave and why. This is a good thing, and we need to see a lot more of this.

At the same time, we also need to be careful about a potentially false sense of confidence about what all this data actually means. I love what Joe Posnanski wrote about Bill James, the father of sabermetrics:

If there is a guiding principle to all of Bill’s work, it is this: What difference does it make? The world is a complicated place. Baseball is a complicated game. This, more than anything, is what the Bill-as-cartoon people miss. He does not think that there are RIGHT answers and WRONG answers, certainly not to the questions that rage in his head. He just thinks that there are ways to get closer to the truth.

“We will never figure out baseball,” he says. “We will never get close to figuring out baseball.”

This, I think, is the critical final piece. Curiosity might have been the flint, distrust of conventional wisdom might have been the steel, but that only gives you a spark. What turned the work into a raging fire was that Bill James has never really believed that he had figured it out. He never even believed that you COULD figure it out. All he wanted to do was get the conversation going, advance the ball, give people new things to think about, let the discussion evolve and keep evolving.

Replace “baseball” with “life,” and you have a philosophy worth living by.

Picture by pursuethepassion. Licensed: CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0