What Business Owners Can Learn From The Red Sox Collapse
What can we as business owners learn from the Red Sox collapse? It is really very simple and quite obvious and a terrific lesson for us all to learn from… again that is, as we really all know the issue. There has not been anything close to that level of extreme talent on one team for quite a while, certainly many years. There can be no question that from April to August, five months of a six-month season, the Red Sox were arguably the best team in baseball, or at least one of the top two in both leagues. September came and they dropped a 9.5 game lead and have not made it into the playoffs. A more colossal meltdown does not exist, at least not in recent memory.
It was a team meltdown, not an individual player or two, not a short series or one game, but an entire month and the entire team, the last month of the season when all the chips are on the table. The best team in baseball folded its tent and played like little leaguers, losing to much poorer teams consistently, over and over and ultimately losing the entire season. What happened? Who was responsible for this? And what can we as business owners learn from this?
As I said in the beginning, it’s simple, it’s obvious and, it’s preventable. It is all about the management effectively leading the team to victory. The talent was clearly there yet the team malfunctioned. It’s the management’s failure, no one else’s. It’s not just about management accepting blame, it is about management not doing their job, as what other job does management have besides leading their team to victory? Properly prepared, with the right context and appropriate standards in place, the management of any team must lead their team to victory or it has failed to do it’s job. A colossal demise like the one we have just witnessed can only be left on the lap of an ineffective manager who, over the course of a month, could not find the way to rally his troops to perform to their potential as an effective unit capable of winning. Sad, but true, and a perfect example of what can happen to any team without appropriate, effective management.
Ask yourself if you are doing what you must to be an effective manager and to lead your team to win.
