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Uncertainty, Overwhelm, and the Wisdom of Bull Durham

Uncertainty, Overwhelm, and the Wisdom of Bull Durham

by | Mar 30, 2026 | Just for Fun, Leading Through Uncertainty

We survived the first quarter of the year. Congratulations everyone, job well done.

Did we hope for more than just survival? Of course we did! But hey, sometimes just living to fight another day is a victory and we still have nine more months to hit our KPIs, deliver our OKRs, and nail this fiscal’s BHAG.

So, let’s take a moment to focus on what really matters: Baseball is back!

Along with the hope of the new season, and the warm weather that comes with it, comes an excuse to revisit the wisdom of classic baseball moves. In 2021, I wrote about Moneyball’s lessons in innovation and it continues to be one of the top read posts on my blog.

If you feel overwhelmed by Q1, fear not! There’s no greater source of advice on finding simplicity, solving problems, and leading people than Bull Durham.

 

When you’re overwhelmed, go back to the basics.

Skip: This… is a simple game. You throw the ball. You hit the ball. You catch the ball.

The Durham Bulls are 8-16 and Skip (the manager) has had enough. He’s tried every tool in his coaching toolkit and the team continues to perform poorly, display a poor attitude, and deliver a halfhearted performance. Overwhelmed and frustrated, he turns to veteran player Crash Davis for advice. “Scare ‘em,” Crash offers and what comes next is one of the greatest tirades on film.

But the greatest lesson here is what comes towards the end of the tirade: a description of the utter simplicity of baseball. There’s no strategy, no competitor analysis, no number-crunching, just a simple explanation of the most basic elements of the job. Throw. Hit.  Catch.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by news, technology, corporate politics, the list goes on. That overwhelm causes us to worry, lollygag, and obsess about what could happen. But when we cut through all that to find the essence of what we do and why we do it, things become remarkably clear and the next steps feel obvious.

 

 

Fall in love with the problem.  Not the solution.

Zeke: We need a night off just to stop our losing streak. We need a rainout.

Crash: I can get us a rainout.

The Bulls are on another losing streak but this time on the road. As the team bus pulls into another motel and the players gather their bags, they complain about their problem (losing streak), propose an approach (night off) and propose a specific solution (rainout).

When Crash promises a rainout, it’s not because he knows something about the forecast the others don’t. It’s because he understands that there’s more than one way to get a night off. Like breaking into the ballpark, turning on the sprinklers, and flooding the field.

When we fall in love with a solution (rainout) we get stuck. We focus on making one thing happen, when critical dependencies are beyond our control. But when we fall in love with the problem (need a night off to stop a losing streak), we’re able to see less obvious but more likely and effective solutions.

 

People first. Problem solving second

Larry: [Jogs out to the mound to break up a players’ conference] Excuse me, but what the hell’s going on out here?

Crash Davis: Well, Nuke’s scared because his eyelids are jammed and his old man’s here. We need a live rooster to take the curse off Jose’s glove and nobody seems to know what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present. We’re dealing with a lot of sh*t.

Larry: Okay, well, uh… candlesticks always make a nice gift, and uh, maybe you could find out where she’s registered and maybe a place-setting or maybe a silverware pattern. Okay, let’s get two! Go get ’em.

The Bulls are finally on a winning streak, but off-the-field issue are affecting on-the-filed play and things aren’t looking good. As the players gather on the mound, the team’s Assistant Manager trots out to figure out what’s going on and get the game going again.

After Crash sums up the personal issues, instead of telling the players to be professional, leave their problems at home, and get on with things, Larry focuses on solving the single issue affecting the most people first. It’s only when the players start nodding that he shifts everyone back into work-mode.

Only on Severance can we separate ourselves into work and life modes. Pretending that isn’t the case is counterproductive and toxic. But we can’t let one consume the other because it will ultimately degrade both our professional and personal lives.

As leaders, we need to find the balance between helping the humans grapple with real and personal issues and getting the team (back) on track and doing great work.

 

Ready to keep playing?

Baseball is a game of survival. A foul tip keeps the at bat alive. A walk keeps the inning alive. A bloop single to score a runner send the game into extra innings.

Winning takes patience and perseverance because the game is rarely won or lost in a single at-bat or inning. Just like you don’t win or lose your KPIs, OKRs, or BHAGs in a quarter.

As we start a new quarter, let’s keep it simple, focus on solving problems, and put people first.

Go get ‘em.

Picasso and the Redefinition of Leadership in the Age of AI

Picasso and the Redefinition of Leadership in the Age of AI

by | Jan 25, 2026 | AI, Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty

Spain, 1896

At the tender age of 14, Pablo Ruiz Picasso painted a portrait of his Aunt Pepa a work of brilliant academic realism that would go on to be hailed as “without a doubt one of the greatest in the whole history of Spanish painting.”

In 1901, he abandoned his mastery of realism, painting only in shades blue and blue-green.

There’s debate over why Picasso’s Blue Period began. Some argue that it’s a reflection of the poverty and desperation he experienced as a starving artist in Paris. Others claim it was a response to the suicide of his friend, Carles Casagemas. But Bill Gurley, a longtime venture capitalist, has a different theory.

Picasso abandoned realism because of the Kodak Brownie.

Introduced on February 1, 1900, the Kodak Brownie made photography widely available, fulfilling George Eastman’s promise that “you press the button, we do the rest.”

An ocean away, Gurley argues, Picasso’s “move toward abstraction wasn’t a rejection of skill; it was a recognition that realism had stopped being the frontier….So Picasso moved on, not because realism was wrong, but because it was finished.”

 
 
 
Washington DC, 2004

Three years before Drive took the world by storm, Daniel Pink published his third book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future.

In it, he argues that a combination of technological advancements, higher standards of living, and access to cheaper labor are pushing us from a world that values left brain skills like linear thought, analysis, and optimization towards one that requires right brain skills like artistry, empathy, and big picture thinking.

As a result, those who succeed in the future will be able to think like designers, tell stories with context and emotional impact, and combine disparate pieces into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Leaders will need to be empathetic, able to create “a pathway to more intense creativity and inspiration,” and guide others in the pursuit of meaning and significance.

  

California, 2026

Barry O’Reilly, author of Unlearn, published his monthly blog post, “Six Counterintuitive Trends to Think about for 2026,” in which he outlines what he believes will be the human reactions to a world in which AI is everywhere.

Leadership, he asserts, will cease to be measured by the resources we control (and how well we control them to extract maximum value) but by judgment. Specifically, a leader’s ability to:

  • Ask better questions
  • Frame decisions clearly
  • Hold ambiguity without freezing
  • Know when not to use AI

 

The Price of Safety vs the Promise of Greatness

 Picasso walked away from a thriving and lucrative market where he was an emerging star to suffer the poverty, uncertainty, and desperation of finding what was next. It would take more than a decade for him to find international acclaim. He would spend the rest of his life as the most famous and financially successful artist in the world.

Are you willing to take that same risk?

You can cling to the safety of what you know, the markets, industries, business models, structures, incentives that have always worked. You can continue to demand immediate efficiency, obedience, and profit while experimenting with new tech and playing with creative ideas.

Or you can start to build what’s next. You don’t have to abandon what works, just as Picasso didn’t abandon paint. But you do have to start using your resources in new ways. You must build the characteristics and capabilities that Daniel Pink outlines.  You must become the “counterintuitive” leader that embraces ambiguity, role models critical thinking, and rewards creativity and risk-taking.

Do you have the courage to be counterintuitive?

Are you willing to embrace your inner Picasso?

Winning in Times of Uncertainty Requires Doing what 91% of Executives Won’t

Winning in Times of Uncertainty Requires Doing what 91% of Executives Won’t

by | Dec 10, 2025 | Customer Centricity, Innovation, Leading Through Uncertainty

In times of great uncertainty, we seek safety. But what does “safety” look like?

 

What we say: Safety = Data

We tend to believe that we are rational beings and, as a result, we rely on data to make decisions.

Great! We’ve got lots of data from lots of uncertain periods. HBR examined 4,700 public companies during three global recessions (1980, 1990, and 2000).  They found that the companies that the companies that emerged “outperforming rivals in their industry by at least 10% in terms of sales and profits growth” had one thing in common: They aggressively made cuts to improve operational efficiency and ruthlessly invested in marketing, R&D, and building new assets to better serve customers have the highest probability of emerging as markets leaders post-recession.

This research was backed up in 2020 in a McKinsey study that found that “Organizations that maintained their innovation focus through the 2009 financial crisis, for example, emerged stronger, outperforming the market average by more than 30 percent and continuing to deliver accelerated growth over the subsequent three to five years.”

 

What we do: Safety = Hoarding

 

The reality is that we are human beings and, as a result, make decisions based on how we feel and the use data to justify those decisions.

How else do you explain that despite the data, only 9% of companies took the balanced approach recommended in the HBR study and, ten years later, only 25% of the companies studied by McKinsey stated that “capturing new growth” was a top priority coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Uncertainty is scary so, as individuals and as organizations, we scramble to secure scarce resources, cut anything that feels extraneous, and shift or focus to survival.

 

What now? And, not Or.

What was true in 2010 is still true today and new research from Bain offers practical advice for how leaders can follow both their hearts and their heads.

Implement systems to protect you from yourself. Bain studied Fast Company’s 50 Most Innovative Companies and found that 79% use two different operating models for innovation to combat executives’ natural risk aversion.  The first, for sustaining innovation uses traditional stage-gate models, seeks input from experts and existing customers, and is evaluated on ROI-driven metrics.

The second, for breakthrough innovations, is designed to embrace and manage uncertainty by learning from new customers and emerging trends, working with speed and agility, engaging non-traditional collaborators, and evaluating projects based on their long-term potential and strategic option value.

Don’t outspend. Out-allocate. Supporting the two-system approach, nearly half of the companies studied send less on R&D than their peers overall and spend it differently: 39% of their R&D budgets to sustaining innovations and 61% to expanding into new categories or business models.

Use AI to accelerate, not create. Companies integrating AI into innovation processes have seen design-to-launch timelines shrink by 20% or more. The key word there is “integrate,” not outsource. They use AI for data and trend analysis, rapid prototyping, and automating repetitive tasks. But they still rely on humans for original thinking, intuition-based decisions, and genuine customer empathy.

Prioritize humans above all else. Even though all the information in the world is at our fingerprints, humans remain unknowable, unpredictable, and wonderfully weird. That’s why successful companies use AI to enhance, not replace, direct engagement with customers. They use synthetic personas as a rehearsal space for brainstorming, designing research, and concept testing. But they also know there is no replacement (yet) for human-to-human interaction, especially when creating new offerings and business models.

 

In times of great uncertainty, we seek safety.  But safety doesn’t guarantee certainty. Nothing does. So, the safest thing we can do is learn from the past, prepare (not plan) for the future, make the best decisions possible based on what we know and feel today, and stay open to changing them tomorrow.

Customer-First Leadership? Your Employees Call BS

Customer-First Leadership? Your Employees Call BS

by | Jun 10, 2025 | Customer Centricity, Leadership

The data speaks for itself: Your employees don’t believe you practice customer-first leadership.

According to Gallup’s research, only one in five of your people think you make decisions with customers in mind. That means four out of five watch you say one thing and do another. Every. Single. Day.

And it’s getting worse. Fewer than three in ten of your employees feel proud of what they’re building for your customers. As a result, employee pride in what they create and deliver is at an all-time low.

You know what this means, don’t you? Your customer-first messaging isn’t inspiring anyone—it’s insulting them. Because they see the truth behind your town hall speeches, and the truth is that customers aren’t first.

 

How Are We Still Screwing This Up?

Customer-centricity has been business gospel for decades. We’ve got libraries full of case studies, armies of consultants, and enough “customer first” wall art to wallpaper the Apple HQ. So, how the hell are we getting worse at this?

Because most leaders treat customer focus like a box to check. They say the right words in town halls and analyst calls but make decisions that prioritize quarterly numbers, internal politics, and whatever shiny new idea they come up with.

Leaders say customers come first, then cut support staff to hit margins. They preach customer obsession, then ignore feedback that requires real change. They commission expensive customer journey maps, then never look at them again.

Employees see it all.

And when employees stop believing in what they deliver, customers know it immediately. Every burned-out support call, every half-hearted sales pitch, every policy that punishes the customer to boost the company’s profit.

 

 

You CAN do better

You only need to look as far as the telecom industry (?!?!?!) for an $800 million example.

In 2005, Arlene Harris co-founded GreatCall (now Lively) and did something radical: she built a company based on the Jobs to be Done of senior citizens.  While everyone else chased flashy features for younger markets, she recognized that older Americans didn’t want a smartphone—they wanted a lifeline.

Harris delivered with the Jitterbug, a simple flip phone with giant buttons.  But that was just the beginning.  Focusing more on helping customers stay safe and connected than cool features for the tech geeks, she quickly built an ecosystem offering emergency response, health monitoring, 24/7 human support, and caregiver connectivity.

When Best Buy acquired GreatCall for $800 million in 2018, they weren’t buying a phone company. They were buying something rare: a trusted, high-value services company with intensely loyal customers.

Harris succeeded by doing precisely what the data shows most leaders aren’t doing: genuinely understanding and serving real customer needs.

 

WILL you do better?

Customer-first leadership isn’t a box to check.  It’s basic leadership integrity. It’s the difference between meaning what you say and just saying what sounds good.

When four out of five of your employees don’t trust your customer commitment, the problem isn’t your strategy deck, digital transformation, or tariffs. The problem is you.

So here’s your moment of truth: When was the last time you listened to customer service calls? Not the sanitized highlights your team shows you—the raw, unfiltered frustration of someone who can’t get help. When did you last sit in a waiting room and watch how people navigate your system? Or stock a shelf and see what customers actually do?

If you can’t remember, that’s your answer. If you’ve never done it, that’s worse.

The question is: Will you keep performing customer-centricity, or start practicing it?

The Radical Power of Listening and How to Harness It.

The Radical Power of Listening and How to Harness It.

by | Aug 26, 2020 | Customer Centricity, Tips, Tricks, & Tools

“When you say, ‘uh-huh’ over and over like that, I can tell you’re not listening to me.”

Me, age 7, to my mom

 

It doesn’t take a lot of experience to know when someone isn’t listening.  From a young age, we can tell when someone is listening and when they’re simply responding.

When we’re with the person, we notice the lack of eye contact or the blankness in their eyes showing us where their thoughts are actually at. When we’re on the phone, we hear the repetitive and monotone mumbles that tell us they’re attention is elsewhere.

Yet often, what we want most is simply to be listened to.

This is true in our personal relationships and in our relationships with the businesses and organizations we support.  We want people and businesses to listen to our opinions, to understand them, and to thoughtfully respond to them.

Instead, people and businesses simply “hear” us.

 

There’s a big difference between listening and hearing

According to the Oxford University Press, hearing is “the faculty of perceiving sounds” while listening is “give one’s attention to a sound” and “take notice of and act on what someone says.”

As I explain to my clients, surveys, focus groups, and even in-depth qualitative research is often a Hearing exercise – the company develops a list of questions, asks their customers to answer the questions, then tabulates the answers and passes them along to whoever needs them.

This is a transaction.  An exchange of information.  It is not listening.

Listening requires engagement.  It happens during EPIC conversations, those typified by empathy, perspective, insights, and connection.

Listening accelerates innovation and drives transformation.  When we’re listening, we’re learning new information and discovering new insights, which enables companies to create and act differently, differentiating themselves from the competition and ultimately gaining an advantage.

 

Listening takes practice but here are 5 simple steps to help you get started:
  1. Drop the agenda – Before you have a conversation within someone, identify the 1-3 things you need to learn and leave space for at least 1 surprise. If you go into a conversation with an agenda or a long list of questions, you’re only going to hear what you want to hear because your mind is primed to seek confirmation for your opinions and to reject anything counter to what you’re hoping to hear.
  2. Follow where they lead – During the conversation, don’t worry about trying to steer the conversation or “keep things on track.” If you only need to learn 3 things in the conversation and you have 30 minutes or an hour, you have plenty of time for tangents, stories, and random connections.  This is where the surprises and the insights come from.
  3. Ask Why – Channel your inner two-year-old (or Toyota Production employee) and ask “Why” multiple times. When you ask “Why” you get personal, surprising answers that point to the motivations behind people’s choices and actions.  When you ask “What” you get rational, expected, even obvious answers that you, and your competitors, have heard before.
  4. Say as little as possible – Follow the 80/20 rule and spend 80% of your time listening. When you ask a question, don’t go into a long pre-amble about why you’re asking it or follow it with a long list of options or examples.  Simply ask the question and the answer will come.
  5. Let the silence work for you – After you ask a question, start counting silently in your head. Before you get to 8, the person you’re listening to will start talking.  Silence makes people uncomfortable but it’s also when the brain goes into exploration and discovery mode.  And the longer the silence goes on, the faster the brain works to come up with something to fill it.  So, stay quiet and let the brain work!

 

Whether you’re talking to a customer, a colleague, or a friend, you’re talking to someone who wants you to listen, to hear and understand what they are saying.  These 5 tips will help you do that and, if done well, discover something wonderful and unexpected with the power to transform.

Originally published on April 20, 2020 on Forbes.com