Legendary New York Yankees baseball player Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak was on the line. In a Sunday night game against Cleveland, he had come up empty in three attempts and the home-team Indians were ahead.
In his fourth at bat, then, after hard-hit infield grounder he took off and dashed for first base, trying his best to beat the throw. The ball took a bad hop — bad enough to send it over the right shoulder of shortstop Lou Boudreau — and it looked like Joe might make it.
Boudreau, though, in an instinctive reaction reached up with his gloveless right hand and caught the ball as it whizzed past his ear. He made a quick toss to second to get the force out and the throw to first was just in time for the double play.
DiMaggio was out at first and his hitting streak came to an end at 56 games, a record that still stands today.
Lou Boudreau would go on to become a Hall of Fame player himself and, of particular interest to business leaders, was the last real player-manager in major league baseball to take the field every day with the rest of the team. He was, in fact, the Cleveland Indians’ player-manager in 1948 when they won the World Series for their second and, so far at least, their last championship.
Up until the television era, player-managers were not all that unusual in professional baseball because combining the two jobs saved the team owners a salary. Once the revenue from television broadcasting rights began to roll in, though, baseball became a big-money sport, complete with unions, agents and bloated compensation contracts. Player-managers no longer fit into the picture.
In the real world of today’s businesses, though, player-managers are still very much a part of the growth picture for smaller firms — and it is one of the toughest jobs an entrepreneur will face. Growing a business can be tough on entrepreneurs, though, because it often demands skills that they might not have, and may not even realize that they need. This is especially true in the motivational side of leadership.
Motivation, like baseball, is simple without being easy. One of the especially difficult aspects for entrepreneurs is that they have to adjust their roles to the different stages that a successful, growing enterprise goes through.
In a successful growth process we often see an entrepreneurial start-up being run initially by a “star player,” usually the founder-owner, who is not only part of daily operations but also provides leadership and guidance to the few others in the organization. Usually, in this stage guidance is fairly loose, rooted in example and motivated by the contagious excitement and enthusiasm of a new enterprise.
As the enterprise grows, the role of the star player morphs into that of team captain. It is in the latter part of this stage of growth, though, when internal management issues and “putting out fires” first begin to emerge as burdens. It is also at this stage that the enterprise is vulnerable to costly mistakes.
Usually in response to a mistake or “surprise” of some sort — often the discovery of a financial error — the role of the entrepreneur undergoes another metamorphosis to player-manager. At the beginning of this stage the firm might not be large enough to support a full-time manager, but the managerial responsibilities of the entrepreneur begin to absorb more and more time. In fact, as the business continues to grow the player-manager entrepreneurs often find that managing the key players, whose egos begin to emerge at this stage, becomes a full-time job by itself.
More often than not, at this point the firm’s bank lending officer will step in and “recommend” that a competent financial person be brought in to improve the quality and timeliness of reports and avoid any more surprises. Depending on the person brought in, this is often enough to carry the firm through the initial stages of its next growth stage. It is also a period in which human resource issues and strategic decisions demand more and more attention and the player-manager becomes less a player and more of a manager — and is gradually becoming more distant from the workforce itself.
As the firm continues to grow, it begins to look more and more like a traditional business organization, with a leader who is the CEO, and a few key staffers who are, or are likely to become, corporate officers responsible for the major divisions of the business. The entrepreneur finds himself or herself concentrating on strategic product and financial decisions and is often surprised when his or her vision is either not understood or not shared by the entire workforce team.
Editor’s note: This is the first of two related columns on how growth affects the business structure and the entrepreneur’s role. Next month’s column will deal with some of the motivational problems that arise and ways to solve them.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant. He can be reached at otisrep@aol.com.
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