The Baseball Theory

If you are failing seven times out of ten, most of us would take that as nature’s way of suggesting a different career field. But for a major league baseball player, that’s a .300 batting average – millions of dollars in salary and endorsements, and a shot at the Hall of Fame.

Most of us know that Babe Ruth also held the major league all-time strikeout record. Some of us know Charles Lindbergh’s other record – he’s tied for the most emergency parachute bailouts of all time. His safety record was so poor that the first company he approached to sell him a plane to cross the Atlantic refused him as a customer.

And there’s the infamous screen test report on Fred Astaire: “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little.”

Success writers often tell these stories to give you hope. Yes, you may be a loser, but so were all these other people, and look how they turned out. But that misses the point:

If you are batting 1.000, one thing’s for sure – you’re not playing in the major leagues.

Successful people frequently have a shocking track record of failures and reverses on their way to the show. It’s what we call “paying your dues.” The things that matter have risks associated with them success isn’t free. Losing is an essential part of winning.

The baseball theory of life is very simple. If you don’t swing, you can’t hit. If you do swing, the odds are against you. For some people, that’s a deeply disturbing idea. But you can also look at the baseball theory with great hope: failure isn’t the long, circuitous road to the top; it’s the only way to the top.

In earlier entries, we’ve talked about the concept of risk (R=PxI, or the value of a risk equals the probability of the event times the impact of the event if it happens).

In pure risk (threat only), you can lower your risk by reducing the probability or by reducing the impact. In business risk (threat and opportunity combined, as in an investment decision), you have four ways to improve the situation: reduce the probability or impact of the downside, or increase the probability or impact of the upside.

When it comes to applying the baseball theory, where the odds of success are always low, the big trick is to reduce the consequences of failure. The cheaper it is to fail, the smarter it is to take a chance.

When salespeople cold-call clients, they expect rejection far more often than success, but one success pays the bills for a hundred rejections. People who’ve known me for a long time know I’ve always got some sort of scheme going. Most fail — I doubt I bat better than .200 — but I know how to keep the cost down so that the occasional winner is good enough.

In other words, it’s not whether you win or lose — it’s how you structure your bets.

Dobson's Laws (Part 1)

I've been practicing my skills as an aphorist through daily tweets since last August, and I'm grateful for the many insightful responses I've received here, on Twitter, and on Facebook. Herewith a collection of the first 123 of Dobson's Laws, presented in two parts.

Dobson's Laws are copyright © 2010 by Michael Dobson under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Career Management and Personal Growth

Your strength in one situation can be a weakness elsewhere. You must know when you're operating out of your vulnerabilities and biases.

Never say it can't be done in a first meeting, no matter how sure you are. People tend to think you aren't even trying.

Sweat key small stuff. There's often something that makes the customer disproportionately happy, and you can always use more good will.

There is no situation so bad that you cannot make it worse.

Your attitude changes the world around you. If you look at the world through rose-colored glasses, it's amazing how often you get roses.

Research shows pessimists see the world more clearly than optimists, but optimists make more money and live longer. Take your pick.

Things are what they are, but that doesn't make you helpless. The world is filled with both opportunity and danger.

Failure can sometimes be turned into success. If Pisa's tower didn't lean, no one would visit it.

Fight the temptation to take on interesting projects that exceed your performance bandwidth.

If you age your work properly, lots of it will turn out to be unnecessary or irrelevant. This is the great secret of time management.

Most of us are not-so-good Samaritans. But being a good neighbor is in your best interest, too. Someday you might be the one in the ditch.

How often do you describe your workplace as a war zone? Taking flak, being shot down, or out for blood...pay attention to violent metaphors.

Faking can be dishonest, but it can also be a form of practice. I've faked liking people so long that now I actually do.

We correlate age with wisdom, but that's wrong. Age provides experience; wisdom is learning from it.

Communications, Cognitive Bias, Perception, Influence

Realism isn't cynicism. A cynic is disappointed that things are what they are. Realists accept the facts and go from there.

When people rate their own decisions as "95% certain," research shows they're wrong approximately 40% of the time.

You have three kinds of blind spots: ones you don't know you have, ones you embrace or accept, and ones you try to overcome.

The fundamental flaw of almost all management thinking is the assumption that we are all rational.

You want someone to know something, to do something, or to feel something - there are no other reasons to communicate.

In English, gratitude and ingratitude are opposites, but flammable and inflammable are synonyms. Language is a leading cause of fires.

When there aren't standards for empirical proof, our common ground turns into scorched earth.

Telling people it's going to be OK often influences the likelihood it will be. That's not lying; it's premature truth-telling.

The customer is always right only at the end of the project, when they decide if they're happy and want to pay you.

Say back to them what they said to you before arguing. Until they hear their words in your mouth, they don't believe you listened.

A customer only needs two qualifications: a need, and the wherewithal to pay for it. You have to figure out the rest and then supply it.

Every communications medium has some special virtue nothing else can replace. After 6,000 years, we still chisel some messages into stone.

In the South, an honest politician is one who stays bought. But real politicians are always dependable. Their word is their stock in trade.

Seminars on dealing with difficult people are mostly filled with difficult people. Try looking in the mirror.

Jokes reveal pain and offer insight. Read the cartoons people tape to cubicle walls. They're often cries for help.

Creative Thinking, Problem Solving, Decision-Making

What do you know now that you wish you had known earlier? You can't replay the past, but the lesson might be useful in the future?

Failure is essential to all creative endeavors. Learn to fail early, fail often, and fail cheaply.

What's half of thirteen? A mathematician would say 6.5, but a graphic designer might say "thir" or "teen." The answer depends on the goal.

There's always a question that will illuminate key problems if asked early enough. Try on lots of questions to find the right one.

Fortunately, doing the right thing and the smart thing are usually the same thing. Ethics and self-interest often go hand-in-hand.

An often overlooked way to overcome procrastination: delegation. Is there some way you can get someone else to do it for you?

You are not there to do what the customer (or your boss) says. You're there to do what your he or she *wants.* They aren't always identical.

Real life seldom conforms to the clean, crisp edges of a model. Models are useful, but don't confuse the map with the territory.

Always identify the "good enough" point, even if you don't settle for it. How can you exceed expectations if you don't know what they are?

There are two ways to learn from experience: Have an experience, learn. Or find someone else who's had the experience and learn from that.

SideWise Thinkers know that reality is nuanced and complex. Beware the person who claims to explain it all in 140 characters.

"Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns." Rumsfeld missed one: unknown knowns, things to which our perceptual biases blind us.

You don't procrastinate because you're a "procrastinator," you procrastinate for a reason. Knowing why is essential to overcoming the block.

Creativity trainers mostly teach you how to generate ideas. Useful, but inspiration's only 1%. The rest (the hard part) is follow through.

The Godzilla Principle: Baby monsters are easier to kill than the full-grown variety. Some solutions come with expiration dates.

If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing badly. That's why we practice what we care about: we start bad, then work up.

Models aren't true or false; they're useful or not useful. A map of Chicago may well be accurate, but in New York City it's not very useful.

Inertia, friction, and entropy are universal: they affect people and organizations as well as physical objects.

Think "both-and" instead of "either-or." People want seemingly opposite things all the time. Often, they achieve them.

Friends and Enemies

Map the political environment around you by identifying allies, opponents, neutrals, fellow travelers, and enemies.

Two factors determine how people treat you: (a) the quality of the relationship and (b) the degree of common interest.

Allies have common interests and a good relationship, so they tend to win when you win. Use them wisely.

Opponents have conflicting interests, but a good relationship. They're valuable; always treat them with respect and fairness.

Fellow travelers have a common interest but a poor relationship. Trust them only as far as their own self-interest takes them.

Enemies have conflicting interests and a poor relationship. Negotiate interests in the short term; build relationships over time.

Neutrals shade in all four directions. Some are best left on the fence; others need to be lured into the game.

Six Skills for Managing Your Boss

I didn’t learn to appreciate the art of managing up until I first had the experience of managing down. One of the common surprises a new manager experiences is how much time you spend doing things for your employees. And when it comes to your employees doing things for you—well, I was so naïve when I first became a supervisor I actually thought that meant that people would do what I said.

How quickly we learn.

When I talk about “managing up,” people often think that’s something you do to your boss, that the goal is for the employee to get power over the boss. But that’s not the case. “Managing up” is something you do for your boss, and if you’re the boss, it’s something you wish more of your employees knew how to do.

At work—and at home, for that matter—we live inside a tightly woven web of mutual obligations. If you’re the boss, your employees are obligated to do certain work for you. And you normally have obligations in return: you review and approve and advise and decide. You go to bat. You run interference. You receive the passed buck. And occasionally you call for a Hail Mary play.

You have a similar relationship with your own boss, and he or she with his or her, and so ad infinitum. And that’s not even getting into the more complicated lateral relationships that cut across organizational boundaries.

Management, in a nutshell, is getting work done through the agency of other people. Whether those people actually report to you is largely irrelevant. You have to manage in three dimensions: up, down, and sideways. The official power you get as a supervisor or manager is never adequate to the task at hand. Ultimately, we’re all Blanche DuBois, from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire: we rely on the kindness of strangers.

We had better be good at it.

A few years ago, my wife Deborah and I researched and wrote a series of three books on the practical challenges of the workplace: Coping With Supervisory Nightmares, Enlightened Office Politics, and Managing UP! As we interviewed managers on what worked and what didn’t, we also looked back on our own careers. We had learned most of these lessons the hard way ourselves, many of them imperfectly, and more than a few we had missed altogether.

While the target audience of the book was new supervisors, we quickly learned that higher ranks of leadership were far more interested in the skills we had identified. That’s because we feel the need most keenly because we’re also on the other side.

Of course, you’ve long since learned the basics, but like us, you probably acquired your knowledge the way the cat learned to swim—by being thrown into the deep end. Even more importantly, you’ve learned what’s at stake.

Managing up isn’t just about taking care of your personal career, although it does. Managing up is the missing link in the relationships you need to run a large, complex organization in today’s crisis-prone environment.

SELF

To manage up effectively, you have to start with yourself and move outward. The first issue, the first rung on the ladder of MANAGING UP, is you: the self. A big part of your success in managing others, in whatever direction, comes from your own fundamentals: the quality of your work; the value of your word; and the content of your character

STYLE

From the inward self, we move outward to style: our own and that of others. None of us checks our humanity at the door when we clock in. For better and for worse, human beings have personalities, preferences, and interests. Friction is unavoidable. Without lubrication, the machine grinds, and eventually freezes.

SUBSTANCE

Style without substance, however, is insufficient. We begin our rise up the management ladder by demonstrating technical merit. But we quickly discover that there’s no such thing as a promotion, not really. Instead, each level is a career change, and we have to discover for ourselves what we need to be successful at the next level. The current age requires continuous learning: what do you need to know next? Where do you need to grow?

SYSTEMS

We can’t do it alone. We need systems in order to function effectively. Leaders are necessarily generalists; the higher you go the wider the set of skills and knowledge you need. Eventually you need to know everything, and that’s impossible. We feel we’re stuck in the Peter Principle trap, promoted to the level of our incompetence. But we can pull ourselves out. There are two ways out. Sometimes we have to acquire new skills and knowledge…or else we have to manage others to provide the work we need.

SYNERGY

The word of the day is “team,” because none of us, it is said, is as smart as all of us. Sadly, sometimes the opposite is also true. Nothing is dumber than groupthink gone wild. The real synergy involves balancing the wisdom of the team with the wisdom of the individual. If “there is no ‘I’ in ‘team,’” it’s equally true that “you can’t spell ‘team’ without ‘m-e.’"

SOLVING PROBLEMS

General rules will take us only so far. We have to apply our skills tactically as well as strategically. Managers manage problems as well as people—not to mention problem people—up, down, and sideways. Some bosses are harder to manage than others, and some live up to the old observation that “BOSS” spelled backwards is “double SOB.”

In an ideal world, you want your work environment to have certain characteristics, from the level of challenge and responsibility you desire to how you want to balance the demands of the office and the home. It's unlikely that happy accident alone will achieve what you want. Take responsibility for managing the relationship between you and your boss, you and your peers, and you and your worklife. You'll be much better off.