Texas Tech Looks Like Apple to Me

A December 4, 2005 article in New York Times Magazine (you have to be a subscriber to get it) has management gurus like Tom Peters all a twitter. The story is about the Texas Tech football team and how they take second-rate talent and turn it into astounding stats that make for a lot of lopsided wins.

Mike Leach, the head coach of Texas Tech, is the sort of quixotic character that seizes the imagination of the average workaday business leader. Bill Gates had this effect in the beginning; if you ever talk to a Boca Raton IBM’er from the 80’s they will tell you Bill Gates stories until you want to cry: Bill Gates could barely talk and would rock back and forth, and always dressed like a slob, but somehow always beat them to market. A lot of the article in the Times Magazine is similar in its feel: the pencil-necked geek from hell knows how to kick some big-league butt.

Even more than quixotic characters, business gurus love sports analogies. Business can be tricky and messy, and the world of sport just seems so clean and clear. It’s hard not to throw in a sports analogy in a meeting where “strategic objective” could turn into “game winner” and “synergy” becomes the equally hackneyed “team play.”

Yet few have ever written about the fact that, colorful characters aside, sports is a pretty bad analogous system by which to compare and describe business. And this makes Michael Lewis’ article less than the epiphany that Peters (who seems to have been experiencing exactly the same epiphany on a regular basis since “In Search of Excellence”) claims it to be.

We can start dissecting the football / business analogy by asking a simple question: who is the customer? In football it is the fan that buys the ticket, or watches the advertising or gives money to the alumni committee. Unlike customers in the business world, who change tastes and preferences more often than athletes change undergarments, football customers are easy to sell to and always have been. They buy wins. Victories. Sure, they may want flash and dash, but if Ditka runs it down the defensive line’s throat 50 times a game that’s OK too. As long as the team wins.

The simple clarity afforded by the football customer and their buying habits is matched by the clarity of football’s concept of “competition.” In a business world where you are selling to, buying from, partnering with, and competing against the same company (take Microsoft and Sony for example), the clarion call of “It’s the guys across the line of scrimmage from you” becomes too wonderful to pass up. Yet while coaches may watch films and plot future games endlessly, at the end of the day the game is all that matters, and winning that game is defined by scoring more points than the sweaty beasts looking to kill you on the other side of the field. It might be comforting to think of the number 1 or number 2 in your business being “the guys across the line,” but we all know (and Peters would agree) that it is the people not on the field when you start the game that are the ones to worry about.

In fact, you can take almost any aspect of the game of football, compare it to the world of business, and come up a yard shor: length of game, rules of game and arbiters of success and rules (referees) are all examples of where the game doesn’t even start until the table is completely set. Simply put: something that works in football can’t just be punted into the business world for an easy score.

Within the world of the hermetically sealed system that is professional sports, people tend to speak breathlessly about any innovation that occurs. Mike Leach’s tendency to spread linemen out like greeters at the local Wal-Mart causes a ruckus for just that reason: its hard to do anything new in a game that has been played fundamentally the same way for over 100 years. For just this reason the pundits tend to jump on any innovation in sports that is disruptive (“Put the Fridge in the backfield!”) and point to the fact that you can’t win without disruptive innovation. But if we decide to use football as the quintessential example of the rough-and-tumble world of business, we could come to almost any conclusion: we could say that you can only win with great leadership (the Lombardi lesson), or a religious devotion to regiment (the Johnson lesson), or by picking up the best QB (the Elway lesson), or by stretching the rules to the point that they barely matter any more (the Al Davis lesson), or that every 10 years the competitive landscape just changes for some unknown reason (some decades the AFC rules, some decades the NFC rules), or that a slavish commitment to numbers and details wins lots of games (the Belichick lesson). In fact, you can take any business orthodoxy you want and find a winning sports franchise that supports its theories.

So what then are we to make of the inimitable Mr. Leach and his flip flops and weird play calling? The obvious lesson is “If you want to win, challenge orthodoxy.” (This, by the way, was the main point of Michael Lewis’s best book: Moneyball). In fact, challenging dogma is at the heart of all innovation. The fact that Texas Tech has figured out a way to win with second-rate talent is no more a lesson than the fact that a college drop-out and an introverted geek could turn the business world on its collective head (Apple). All innovation kills orthodoxy by seeking to find new methods of acceptance and winning in the space created by “And”. The Michael Lewis article is just one more proof of this fact.

In some small way that is what I have been trying to do with this blog: challenge business dogma. Question capitalist orthodoxy. Not just for the purpose of being contrarian (although that certainly is a lot of fun), but for the purpose of questioning whether the system of business can sustain itself with an orthodoxy that starts at the unexamined concept that capital is more important than talent. Every bad business behavior you see is based on that fundamental assumption. “Capitalizing on talent” is a better focus for business than “preserving capital.” And that starts with the way that recruiting and staffing organizations define their charter and do their jobs.

So my hat is off to Coach Leach for once again proving that those who dare to challenge the status quo are the ones that win big. And to those whose status quo is the belief that CEOs are just like quarterbacks… well, let’s just say I hope you find a new game.

Comments

[Colin K]

Jeff,

Lot of good stuff in there. But wouldn't you say pro sports is full of great lessons specifically for recruiting in business? Do you want to make a lot of money or win a championship? New York or LA? How would you like to have your day-to-day work all over the front page of newspapers ;)

A Cal economist did a provocative paper a few years ago about going for points on the 4th down:

http://espn.go.com/nfl/columns/garber_greg/1453717.html

Cliff's Notes: Professer says coaches should go for points more, coaches say 'There's too many intagibles' to apply the cold logic of mathematics.

It's the exact same thing you hear when you introduce statistically-based management techniques to any business process, be it writing code, manufacturing, or legal briefs.

But yes, in the end there is nothing the world needs less than another sports analogy...

[Heather]

I think the football analogies are good for simplistic, tactical lessons (how to score), but don't apply to customer behavior. So, now i have to bring up that I am a Trojan; that has everything to do with an emotional tie to my university versus the fact that we are the "market leader" in division 1A. I'm a guaranteed customer based on an emotional connection, so it's not really a market. Having been a Trojan during the bad years didn't make me buy UCLA. I was still a Trojan.

I guess maybe we can take the simple lessons (4th down and long, you have to decide whether to take a chance or punt, for example), but not assume it's representative of the market. I think that part of the benefit of the sports analogy is that the emotional reaction is transferred to the business issue. You just have to be selective about where you use it.

[Jeremy Langhans]

i dont know anything about sports, but i do know that there are 5 important lessons here:

1. its all about who you know + what you know
2. more importantly its about how you apply those things
3. usc rules. (sorry, i live in the OC)
4. jeff is a smart guy. (blatent kiss up to the guy cuz he deserves it)
5. life has a funny way of doing extraordinary things with plain ole' ordinary peeps (like me)

fun times,
Jer

[Lance Knobel]

The economist Steve Levitt has pointed out the very selective use of statistics Lewis uses to make his case: http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/2005/12/04/colelge-footballs-billy-beane/.

Levitt has also been a persistent critic of the Moneyball thesis of baseball.

[Jeff Hunter]

Thank you all for your comment. I appreciate it. I especially wanted to comment on Lance's comments.

I was not a fan of Levitt’s book in that I thought it mashed weighty topics (“Does Abortion Lower the Crime Rate?”) with statistical flights of fancy (“Are Naming Conventions Dependent on Race and Socioeconomic Status?”). I am of the same mind as the New York Times book review – Freakonomics is an important book that deserves the notice it gets, but not because of the way it was written, or even the topics it covered.

What I take away from the comments that Levitt has had over the last year is that Lewis’ analysis is not rigorous enough to merit the almost sycophantic devotion people show to the solutions that he writes about. I would agree with that. Business people are usually sorely lacking in the simple understanding of what Gibson said: “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” There are few innovations that are new by the time they are noticed by a larger audience.

However, I thought both of Lewis’s pieces (Moneyball and the aforementioned article) are critical reinforcements of the idea that orthodoxy is a poor excuse for lack of performance. Since I write a lot about topics in the Human Resources world, I am especially attached to this idea, as most of the failure of HR can be attributed to a slavish devotion to a cost / risk reduction orthodoxy.

Again, I really appreciate your comment. Thanks for writing.

[Lance Knobel]

I had equivocal feelings about Freakonomics. I found it a rather thin book that talked down to the audience and, certainly in the case of the naming discussion, was heavily padded to make the work book length. Levitt's work in economics journals – without the "friendly" filter of his co-author – is far better.

I think the reason he comments on Lewis is that he is completely in agreement with the notion that, as you put it, "orthodoxy is a poor excuse". What has made Levitt's work interesting to an audience of non-economists is his own strong challenges to orthodoxy.

The mere act of challenge, however, is not significant. It needs to be backed up with rigor and thought. There are too many business fads that are just fads because they seemed an attractive, seductive idea, but the substance was lacking.