Non-baseball fans often say they don’t like the game because something’s not happening “all the time.” Baseball fans love the multi-levels of strategy. There’s a game strategy, inning situational strategies, which change if someone is on base or not, batter-by-batter strategies and even pitch-by-pitch strategies.
If you’re partial to the up and down of basketball or soccer, the down times between strategy implementation (the action) may seem slow. Of course in the NBA, the last two minutes of a game can take as long as the first half of an NFL game. And, BTW, football fans can’t complain about baseball’s slowness. In two different Wall Street Journal studies they found that baseball games have about 14 minutes of actual playing time per game while football has only 11 minutes.
Think about this in terms of your business. Are you constantly on the fly, making decisions by the seat-of-your-pants? Or do you take time to huddle with your team to decide courses of action? To you strategize on how to work with different customers or vendors and what skills are needed in your next hire?
There’s a good reason why there are huddles, time between pitches and timeouts.
“The most exhausting thing you can be is inauthentic.” Anne Morrow Lindbergh