Jane Kravitz

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Introduction

Robert Keidel’s thesis is to demonstrate the analogue between three popular and pervasive American sports, and Business Models, in his article titled ‘Baseball, football, and basketball: Models for business’. This metaphor develops when managers strongly identify with a particular sport and project its underpinning playbook onto the entire organisational structure and decision-making process.

Each sport embodies a model of interconnected relationships and interactions. This “interdependence” may be:

• Pooled interdependence – Each part of the structure works independently of the others.
• Sequential interdependence – The work of one part leads to the working of the other, in a series.
• Reciprocal interdependence – There is a “back-and-forth” flow of communication among all parts.

Sports parallel business design on the following parameters:

1. Need to compete externally – Businesses and sports face intense, global competition for resources and services/products. The results of this competition are dynamic and ambiguous.
2. Need to cooperate internally – Cooperation between members is necessary to produce results in organisational and sports teams.
3. Need for strategic HR management – To enact game strategy and maintain “people-intensive” teams, sports and organisations require visionary HRs.  
4. Generic structure – Size and structure of sports teams and corporations mirror each other. They function based on similar size range, clusters, divisions, etc.

Keidel outlines each sports model’s underlying team structure and its implications for team management/coaching through the following sports models:

Baseball

In baseball, each player’s contributions are relatively independent of the others. Overall performance is dependent on how each team member performs individually, and so team interaction is minimal (not exceeding 2 or 3 players at a time). Hence, players work together in a loosely coupled system with minimally dense field dispersion.

Coordination is achieved through gameplay rather than pre-game strategies. Decisions taken before and during the game are largely tactical. Thus, the desired ability of a manager is that of a tactician, taking decisions in real time, rather than a team-builder. Since baseball operates on individual performances, development efforts emphasize enhancement of individual skills based on players’ execution.

Baseball companies are also loosely coupled, such as sales-driven and research-oriented organisations or geographically dispersed companies, where each employee pursues his deliverables autonomously.