Baseball, Football, and Basketball: Models for Business

Summary

Baseball, Football, and Basketball: Models for Business

The best way to make people understand team work is through sports, whether you follow the sports or not any reference of the sports metaphors is easily understood as the it gives us clear structure and goals are defined.  Sports always brings out the passion and focus which are required to achieve certain objectives and team goals. We often see people giving sports metaphors in business during inter personal communication to convey the team priorities, objectives. In this article we can see the different types of organizations have a similar structural relation to the professional sports such as Football, Basketball, Baseball. Robert W. Keidel article provides us how different sports metaphors and philosophy help in establishing business model.

Business and sports have many similarities in terms of team spirit, team building, competitiveness and winning attitude needed in a highly competitive market. The central argument the author is conveying is that professional sports provides us with paragon and perspective in terms of business goals, visions and objectives. However, the wrong application of the sports inference can be fatal as not every model can be fit in the business. The author conveys that instead of following sports models and applying to various business strategies we should be able to find the right fit for the business model which we are going to implement. This brings about a better efficiency and coordination of different departments in the organization. The major professional sports such as Football, Basketball, Baseball provides us with different organization patterns that implemented around the world. In football coordination is achieved through proper planning and hierarchy, it is the most strategy intensive sport which means business organizations with high workforce can be based upon this model. Basketball is a game which requires a lot of mutual adjustment and understand of team dynamics.  The coach should be able to develop the team’s ability to adjust and to intervene (during a game) on an exception basis. In baseball, it is sometimes good to be disruptive to stir up things rather than following a set of strategies to achieve the desired results. Organizations which are loosely coupled rely on an individual’s brilliance and charisma tend to follow the baseball model of business organization. We can see detailed comparison between sports and organizations below.

Baseball and organizations:

 Comparing business organizations with baseball we can derive many similarities. Baseball has a team of nine players but the tasks are mostly completed by individuals, similarly in some organization task based interaction among unit members is pooled(low) and they perform task individually. In baseball, the geographical dispersion of the players on the field if least dense, the companies following this structure are also mostly wide dispersed geographically. Rewarding and recognitions are also based on individual performances.  In baseball and companies, managerial coordination is unimportant. Examples of the companies following the same approach can be aggregation of basic researchers in which each individual independently pursues his/her own work. Conglomerate companies like HUL can be classified in this category as many companies like Lakme, Bru coffee work individually and are rewarded individually. Starbuck/Tacobells/Baskin robins have outlets all over the world and functioning of one outlet is independent of another. These outlets interact very rarely amongst them, though the growth of the organization depends on the performance of all these discrete outlets as is in the case of baseball teams.