Back in January 2012, I made the argument that baseball is a good analogy for business, especially in how the sport uses advanced metrics to “make better decisions faster “. But I also argued that “relentless execution of the basics isn’t a winning strategy all by itself… the best possible case for running as efficiently as possible is that it may create opportunities that can then be exploited “.

What didn’t get discussed was the importance of the impact player – the person that does the exploiting of the opportunity. Since it’s getting close to October – my favorite month in the sports calendar, it’s hard not to think about impact players… in baseball. And since it’s also the time that RSR is launching a new study on workforce management in retail, I see a connection (again!) between the worlds of retail and major league baseball. Here’s how.

The Connection

Last June at the Demandtec conference in San Francisco, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane (of MoneyBall fame) made the connection by saying that baseball teams and businesses all can gain some temporary strategic advantage by adopting new metrics such as those described in the book. The metrics that made Beane and Moneyball famous of course had to do with correlating certain statistics with winning at the game. And according to the A’s GM, trusting in the numbers really does help any endeavor to become a winner: “The math will work if you trust it. “

The whole purpose of having Billy Beane talk at a business meeting is to drive home the analogy between a statistics-driven game and business. That analogy resonates. But when it comes to workforce management, the issue however is often the lack of metrics. “Poor process metrics/lack of visibility inhibit our ability to respond quickly to events on the selling floor ” is often an internal challenge for retailers who are trying to up their game when it comes to store execution. But Beane didn’t make the claim that adopting new metrics was enough to deliver sustainable value. He rhetorically asked, “then all your competitors adopt it (the new metrics) – then what? “

Good question – and that’s where the impact player comes in.

The Impact Player

20^th Century author James Thurber once commented that “the majority of American males put themselves to sleep by striking out the batting order of the New York Yankees. ” Having spent my early years as a Red Sox fan in Boston and later living as an adult in Oakland A’s territory, its always been fun to look forward to the possibility of some young unknown on the home team mowing down the perpetually fearful lineup from New York. But one thing you have to admit about the Yankees is that the team is chock-full of impact players. And the one that I’m thinking about now for this analogy to retail is a guy named Nick Swisher.

Swisher is someone who obviously loves what he does, and it transmits to everyone in the stadium. Before he went to the Yankees, he was a fan favorite in Oakland. Aside from putting up good numbers, he seems to understand that baseball is entertainment, and he has made it his business to deliver an enjoyable performance, embracing the slightly goofy Oakland modus operandi when he was there, and buying into the NY mystique from the moment he put on the pinstripes. And NY fans (who can be really rough on players) seem to love him as much as the Oakland fans did. By all accounts he’s been a good teammate and he’s a good (if streaky) player. And he’s fun.

Retail is entertainment too, and one of the big opportunities for retail stores is to make the experience satisfying and entertaining – and maybe even fun. But it’s a “chicken or an egg ” thing, As it is with baseball players like Nick Swisher, just being a people-person isn’t enough – you also have to deliver on the basics really well, day in and day out. Then the entertainment value can kick in.

As retailers focus on optimizing their in-store workforce processes and measuring their efficacy with new metrics, part of the goal should be to afford employees the time to make the customer experience more entertaining and fun. But you also can’t turn anybody loose with instructions to “go out there and make our customers happy “. The intangible qualities that some people (like Nick Swisher) have defy easy measurement – but you know it when you see it.

And that brings us to the most important employee in the store- the store manager. He/she is the one who ultimately puts the “team on the field “, and so above all else, an objective of any workforce management effort has got to be to free the manager up from as much of the mundane status-chasing as possible, so that a lot more attention can be paid to the customer experience – as it is unfolding… just like a baseball manager has to do.