Yankees or Oakland A’s?

I recently made my annual pilgrimage to Phoenix for Major League Baseball’s spring training.  On the plane, I was reading and a collision of thoughts occurred in my head that would rival that collision at home plate between Pete Rose and Ray Fosse in the 1970 All-Star Game. 

For any non baseball fans out there, stick with this blog post as it WILL be brought around to talent acquisition, I promise.
First is an interesting article in last week’s Wall Street Journal.  In it, the authors propose that one of the leading causes of our current economic downturn was the profound short term thinking of Chief Executives and Boards of Directors.  They assert that the “short term gains at all costs” mentality of corporate America is a huge factor in this unprecedented economic downturn and that the people who run the most powerful companies in our country took their eye off the ball (baseball analogy) of business 101; building solid products, selling them at a reasonable price and supporting what you sell for the long term.  Granted that some of this “short timer” disease was driven by shareholder pressure to continue to grow wealth, the feduciary responsibility of Corporate America has to have a longer horizon than quarter over quarter growth according to the authors.

So what does that have to do with baseball and even more unclear, what does any of this have to do with talent accquisition??

Well, in the age of free agency in baseball, the game of building a winning team has become divided into two camps;

CAMP B: buy the talent with the best statistics from last year in the hopes you can win a pennant this year (Yankees) and

CAMP A: bring in not yet great, high trajectory, under the radar players for a fraction of the cost and grow a sustainable winning team over time (Athletics). 

There are a lot of arguments on both sides (As always, I met my Father and Brother in Phoenix, both avid Yankee fans and proponents of the “buy and try” mentality of the Steinbrenner family) but I’m making my case for the longer term horizon strategy of the Oakland Athletics.  Without going into a huge analysis (this is, afterall, a human capital blog, not one from Sports Illustrated) the Oakland A’s manage to make the playoffs or come within a few games almost every year.  They win and are fun to watch. They take calculated risks on young players and grow them in the organization for as many years as they can before the Yankees buy them. (Jason Giambi, Scott Brosius etc.) The fans in Oakland love them, even the years they come up just short of the playoffs.  Contrast that with the Yankee strategy where winning this season justifies Wall Street type compensation with short term required payoffs (in 2008, the Yankees spent over $420 Million on CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira and A.J. Burnett) Their fans demand a pennant every year (just like the shareholders demand strong growth in profits and share value) especially now that they pay $70 for the cheap seats at the new Yankee Stadium.   I don’t know a Yankee fan that would be satisfied with a good run at a title this year and welcome back the team from 2009 in 2010 if they didn’t make the playoffs.  By the way, in the last 7 years (when the Yankees went really “out there” with the money they pay these guys) the yankees have only been to one World Series (in 2003) and they lost to……The Marlins (another Athletics-minded, lower budget team by the way) proving that chemistry, not just talent, counts.

Ok, so now you see the paralells; Yankees/corporate governance of the 21st century and Atheletics/desired corporate governance post economic recovery.

Now to wrap it up with the final parallel: the mentality of most companies in hiring and building teams.  “Shadow of the leader” as one of my past managers put it, dictates that the behavior modelled by the leader is what the teams beneath them see as the behavior that is desired, even when it might be the wrong behavior.  Just look at the Stamford Bank executive now under indigtment for misleading athorities in their investigation of her crooked boss!  So if the CEO’s lead by “short term gains at all costs” mentality, then it follows that this trickles down to every level of the organization.  Hiring Managers demand “no assembly required” candidates from Recruiters and many “not yet great, high trajectory, under the radar players” go unnoticed and unhired by the company.  Is your company the Yankees or the Athletics?

I’m not saying that Recruiters can fix the economy or baseball but I do believe they can take the lead in fixing the “no assembly required” hiring mentality of their hiring managers.  For a step by step “how to” guide on doing this, read Billy Ball – the story of Billy Bean, the guy who changed the mentality of the Oakland A’s hiring model.

It’s going to be a long season and the environment is ripe for a change of strategy.  Pick up some high level prospects from the waiver wire and be prepared for a champagne shower in 2011 when your “unknowns” of 2009 turn into hall of famers!