The ponies run, the girls are young,
The odds are there to beat.
You win a while, and then it’s done
Your little winning streak.
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat,
You live your life as if it’s real,
A thousand kisses deep.
- Leonard Cohen.
When the Lord made me, he made a ramblin' man. Many adventures find me in the guise of people and stories of people as I make my way across America working hard for Rockin' Chair Money. This little story arose from my unconscious as I fed my conscious mind a ton of information from the pages of American Way's August 2014 cover story "The Boston Paragon". I find myself getting all those thoughts in shape a day after a thrilling 2014 World Series which saw the Giants trump the Royals with a royal 4-3 victory in the Fall Classic. The baseball season is over and this is what Etta James had to say about it...
So we ramblers board AA1339 from Nashville headed to DFW on a Hot August Night as the New Moon Over Nashville made her presence known up above. I am not a huge fan of American Airlines but I am a huge fan of the American Way magazine. The folks who put AW together are "angels" as David Ogilvy ( the adman not the Orwellian Comrade Ogilvy! ) once called the folks who put the Readers Digest together. As we planted our tired butts in those seats which are a century old , a smiling David Ortiz greeted all those who reached for the AW magazine "in the pocket sleeve in front of you" as the crew like to say...
Once I ingested and digested the amazing story of "Big Papi" and pictures of the famous Ortiz selfie with the President, my imagination began doing the thing it likes to do best - fusing together disparate filings of information and dreaming up a case story! David Ogilvy once called this "unhooking your rational thought process"...
The lucky old sun gets it's energy to sustain us from the fusion of similar nuclei but one's imagination is like a magnetic field in which the dissimilar nuclei of information can fuse together to produce some thought provoking stuff. Legendary media scientist Marshall McLuhan compared this 'brushing of information' in one's mind to a woman in fishnet stockings crossing her legs. I give the American educational system moving to this type of learning by visuals the same chance as that of finding a mothball in heaven or the classic snowball in hell. Snowballs and mothballs are both white come to think of it.....
The question : Are you cursing change ?
My thoughts first turned to the sad state of American Airlines. Now only if the airline could do justice to the American Way magazine I thought and in normal cases one might think the other way. See how sadly I feel about this airline. I like to call Dallas "The Dubai of the South" but the airline that is closely associated with DFW is a far cry from what I witnessed and experienced when I flew Dubai's flagship airline Emirates. I almost feel like if you took the 'entire resistance to change' in this country and focused into one organization it has to be American Airlines. Even the great German physicist Georg Simon Ohm would be dumbfounded trying to measure this resistance to change.
But resistance to change is a force of nature you could say. Even a company with the name "Siemens" ( a unit of conductance and the inverse of resistance ) can resist some change! The companies who have always survived in the long run and are still standing are the ones who were exceptionally managed and who embraced change and said "things were good so far, but it is better down the line".
A company can be thought of as an electrical circuit and for current to pass through the circuit to produce some fruit the "Siemens have to be greater than the Ohms". To simplify even more you can say that conductance should be greater than resistance for that bulb to shine to the best of it's mathematical limit.
Are you a conductor or a resistor at your company ? If you are a resistor there are chances that your job may become that of a "conductor" on a boat or a bus here real soon. Take sharp note : the ground beneath you is always shifting. Will you be swallowed up by the earth to be never heard from again ?
In today's world the pace of change inside the organization simply has to be greater than the pace of change outside it. Any organization can have a great winning streak and then fall down the beanstalk because of a ton of reasons. Ask the Boston Red Sox who know a thing or two about having a dry spell after some 'glory years'.
The 2004 World Series for the Red Sox was a godsend because they had been waiting patiently for 86 years to win the Fall Classic. The Red Sox dry spell is one of the longest dry spells in sports history - a dry spell that would even put a Texas drought to shame - drier than Churchill's martinis he drank facing away from the direction of france.
My other favorite 'dry spell' in sports is the 20 year 'no f1 champions in our stable of prancing horses' that Ferrari endured from 1980-1999 and then Michael Schumacher ( then 32 years of age ) crushes the championship hopes of every other F1 driver from 2000-2004! But nothing compares to the 86 years of drought that the whole city of Boston endured.....even the youthful energy of JFK couldn't inspire the Red Sox in the 60's!
I go by feel and I am not going to draw tables and analyze to death 3 decimal stats on why a team as hallowed as the Red Sox had such a dry run. All I want to point out is a lesson or two organizations can learn from the Red Sox Story. It all began with a pretty simple question as I came to the end of the "Big Papi" David Ortiz story in the American Way magazine.
The question was "How can an organization as magnetic as the Red Sox go almost 9 decades without winning a World Series and what can organizations learn from a losing streak rather than learning from a winning streak ?!" Also keep in mind, during the 86 years the Red Sox didn't win a World Series, they have the Yankees to thank for a rivalry that kept them close in the nation's pastoral consciousness thanks largely to the greatness of the American media machinery. If you don't have a worthy enemy, is it worth the fight ?
The dry spell for the Red Sox began with the famous & infamous trade of Babe Ruth to the Yankees after that infamous 1919 season. "Meet Wolfsheim. the man who fixed the 1919 World Series". Remember those lines from the Great Gatsby ?! Some words which went like "Get Ruth from Boston" were mentioned and a deal was in place and there are all kinds of stories out there on how Ruth went to the Yankees but they don't matter here.
After the BR trade Boston became rabid and even Joseph ( the old testament guy ) couldn't have told them about the great World Series Famine that was about to befall Boston for the next 86 years. The change was the genesis of the famine. Boston cursed the change and even gave it a mythical name ( The Curse of the Bambino ) that is as American as America itself. Babe Ruth went to the Yankees at the turn of the Roaring Twenties and had a rip-roaring time writing some of the early pages of baseball history. He even made more money than the President one year. You could say Babe Ruth was the F Scott Fitzgerald of baseball!
I also compare the Babe Ruth trade to the trade of Joseph ( the old testament guy ) to the Egyptians by his brothers and the ascendancy of Joseph in Egypt thereafter. But then again, like every human being, Babe Ruth was another Joseph ( the new testament guy ) looking for a manger. Play ball - that's all Ruth knew and what else can the man do but find a home to play ball ? You have to bloom where you are planted even if you work at Bialystock & Bloom and you are forced to churn out one bad play after next. Sometimes if you persevere long enough you'll make a hit as exemplified by the persistence of David Ortiz over the course of his fabled career.
David Ortiz displayed great leadership to bring the Red Sox back to winning ways. Recently retired Yankees star Derek Jeter points out about Ortiz that "A lot of guys in Boston ( Red Sox ) have had personalities over the years...but his has stood the test of time." David Ortiz was determined to prove that the team was bigger than the curse and has led the Red Sox to 3 World Series victories to-date in the 21st century. A big "leadership moment" came in the 2013 World Series against the Cardinals when he called a team meeting in the middle of a game ( a first ) and told everyone to enjoy this 'once in a lifetime' opportunity. The Boston Herald heralded it as the "King's Speech" the next day!
I don't want to be a ramblin' man and a howlin' wolf about the need to change faster or get left behind. There is no such thing as 'no worker left behind' in this free market battle.
What I want to distill and instill into your skull is this : just because you lost "The Bambino" of the organization , it doesn't mean you have to go the next 9 decades in the dump. You
may not even have the luxury of going 9 months.
Reserve your nostalgia for some place else other than work. Don't curse the changes, but write a new verse by seeking out and developing the next set of great players who you make so good that he/she can't be retained. Purpose-driven companies have to make getting the "A-players" their highest priority ( and even a core value ) because even though we are faced with the prospect of increased automation in the coming years there is no denying the fact that talent will still be the greatest differentiator between a good company and a great company. No place for bad company ( no music puns intended ).
If the "Bambino" of your company leaves don't sweat it. It will feel like it came out of left field but go seek and develop the next Babe Ruth or the David Ortiz and keep getting the A-players at the heart and soul of every major strategic growth initiative. Be bouyed by the void, transform yourself by renewing your mind and an opportunity to transform the organization will present itself. It may feel like walking a mine field, but the field is the mind. The game is won on the 'mind field'.
World population is supposed to hit 9 billion by 2050. We are at 7 billion currently. 36 years and 2 more billion folks on top of this earth is a while to go. But the machinery of creation is a wonderful thing and there is always - ALWAYS - an awesome human being around the next corner who was built for "the times" and who will adapt to change faster and move our race forward. Find those awesome humans and don't settle for second best talent! Don't get your red socks in a bind over change. Change is always a good thing and if you can't change fast enough , you may not even have change to buy hot dogs at the ball game let alone go to a ball game!
Always make a great pitch for change and automation in your organization because as they say the only constant is change and less is more. I'll leave you curious with this leaf from the book "The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies" by MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.
