understandable

The Detroit Tigers’ Burnt Weeny Sandwich:
In Which Necessity Was the Mother of Enervation

Whatever doesn’t make you stronger
kills you

Sometimes even good management can ignore the elephant on the table.

Sometimes its understandable…foolish but not critical — when those problematic pachyderms are not the difference between success and failure under about any circumstance. For exple, I had a client about a decade ago in the Oakland, California area. They spent a noticeable, though not vast ount of money, renting parking spaces to give them to employees for free. The landlord raised the rates over 100%, well over the price of public transit (fairly convenient) alternatives. The firm had never subsidized transit or van pools, only parking, and I thought this was a great opportunity to both save money and redress a fairness issue (subsidizing employees who use a car to get to work; no subsidy for those who use other methods). I couldn’t get them to change their view, as obvious as the stink on the Burnt Weeny Sandwich was, as much as I waved my arms, they could only see clear to debate two options — absorb the increase or kill the benefit, vitiate a small piece of the bottom line or undercut morale. The client’s management had, like we all do, an inability to see something they can’t conceive of, even something drop-dead obvious.

Sometimes, thbass guitar string
elixir string
ough, its dad-gummed suicidal — and that’s when you just have to scratch your head. Sometimes it costs you a pennant you could easily have won.

Case in point: the 1950 Detroit Tigers.

NOTE: This is not very detailed…but its a total Howler…such an egregious exple of ignoring methods of self-preservation to keep a dysfunctional status quo that I want you to know most of the key self-imposed limits the Tigers bound themselves with. There were more I left out; these alone are an indictment of crappy front-office preference for comfort over the chance to win. But its pretty long, even for my norm.

THE VIEW FROM THE DUGOUT
Ive been reading this extremely engaging book, “The View From the Dugout — The Journals of Red Rolfe” I got at the SABR National Convention, and that I recommend whole-heartedly. One of the small handful of “scientific” managers in the 1940s and 1950s, Red Rolfe was a Dartmouth College graduate (English major). According to editor Willi M. Anderson’s intro: