What Game Are You Playing?

If you think that business and sports have a lot in common, think again, and again. Are you playing baseball, or football, or basketball? The answer, says Robert Keidel, can make all the difference between winning and losing.

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I was searching around for ways to make an undergraduate business course more interesting," says Robert W. Keidel, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Applied Research Center. "This was a few years ago, at Temple University, and years ago, at Temple University, and since there were a number of varsity athletes in the class, and since I'm something of a sports junky myself, I started to use local sports teams -- the Eagles, Phillies, and 76ers -- as concrete examples of what I was talking about." The questions he began to throw at his class seemed simple at first: How does planning and executing a game plan against the Washington Redskins resemble setting up a long-linked production line? Why woud a brokerage firm reward a key executive the same way the Phillies do Mike Schmidt, their $2-million-a-year cleanup hitter? The more Keidel explored the parallels, however, the more excited he got about applying the model in his own organizational consulting work.

Keidel's personal history contributed something to the scheme. He was raised in a family that owned Robert Wooler Co., a commercial heat-treating plant in eastern Pennsylvania ("classic basketball organization," he says), and he took degrees froim Williams College and The Wharton School before spending three years in the Navy ("classic football"); later came a PhD dissertation on the Jamestown (N.Y.) area Labor-Management Committee, and the Temple faculty appointment ("classic baseball"). As a consultant and "team-builder," he had used other types of metaphors before, but, he says, "the problem [with analogies] is what do you do after the initial uh-huh? I mean, it's cute and it frees people up, but it really doesn't take you very far. With sports and business, you go back and forth so much it's almost impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins."

Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Keidel's work is that in using the games of football, baseball, and basketball as the metaphorical lenses through which he looks at business organizations, Keidel notices properties of the lenses themselves that most casual fans overlook. Basic elements such as team structure, decision making, power flow, and reward systems are cast in surprisingly sharp relief.And while the modern era of players' strikes, franchise shifts, and corporate Super Bowls has inspired much commentary on how businesslike the realm of sports has become, little has been said about what makes the different games themselves distinctive. Keidel says a lot.

In fact, he has packed his observations into a highly readable and insightful book, Game Plans: Sports Strategies for Business, which was published in September by E. P. Dutton. Last summer, INC. sent senior writer Joseph P. Kahn to interview Keidel in western Massachusetts. Kahn's report follows:

We met on the campus of Mount Holyoke College, where Keidel was conducting College, where Keidel was conducting a seminar in team building for a large manufacturing company. When I found him, he was playing with some charts he'd drawn up to illustrate his vision of the conceptual relationship among football, baseball, and basketball organizations. I happen to like sports a whole lot more than I like charts, so I asked him which game had most engaged him in his younger playing days. "Baseball, I guess," he answered with a smile, "although my baseball career peaked when I was 15. I played some sandlot football, and I got cut from my high school basketball team. Now I mostly play golf." Keidel also admitted that as a fan, his internal calendar gets most confused in October, when the three major sports seasons all run together. Given that viewpoint, and the fact that baseball's All-Star Game was on that night, it was not surprising that our conversation ran up-court or down-field as often as it roamed around the boardroom or factory floor. Like any good coach, moreover, Keidel began with the fundamentals.

INC.: Your basic premise is that baseball, football, and basketball represent three different basic models of organization, is that it?

KEIDEL: Right. The core difference among them is how they achieve co-ordination. In baseball, it's in the design of the sport. A baseball manager has very little to do other than to get the right players into the game at the right time, in the right batting order and location on the field. The players themselves act independently, although in a coordinated manner. Baseball is also very situational in terms of the teamwork required. Typically, on any given play, you get two or three players interacting for a brief period of time. The guts of the game is all individualistic: throwing the ball 95 miles per hour, catching it, hitting it.

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