The Little Prince | CorporateIntel

Psst, pass it on: After a 32-year intermission, the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series! After winning the National League West the previous seven years—this year will be the team’s eighth consecutive division title—and exiting the playoffs without the Commissioner’s Trophy, the 2020 postseason finally brought a championship banner back to Chavez Ravine.

The Tampa Bay Rays played with heart through the entire postseason. It takes untold athletic ability, strategy, and grit for any team to make it to the World Series, and while this year’s final prize went to the Dodgers, there is little question we will see the Rays again soon in October baseball. Both teams filled Globe Life Field with players of unquestionable excellence, and the six-game series came with all the unpredictability that makes baseball relentlessly nail-biting no matter your expectations.

The Dodgers simply had to get this done.

After so many failed attempts to full triumph over more than three decades, losing becomes an all-too-familiar feeling. It’s astonishing how quickly that feeling can be replaced by sheer glee. At this moment, I am experiencing glee. Devoted Dodger fans everywhere are experiencing glee. I’m finding it a different form of glee than it might have been any other year. This particular form of glee is a much-needed gulp of surely lasting but highly compartmentalized glee.

Let me try to share that qualified celebration, limited in practical application, boundless in idealistic resurgence.

So much that matters is going on in our world. We are approaching the end of one of the most difficult and painful years in our nation’s history. The year ahead of us is filled with anxiety and uncertainty no matter who is elected to lead the nation. It is only reasonable to ask ourselves why something as inconsequential as professional sports matters.

If you’re not on the team, employed by the team, or an owner of the team, does it really matter who wins the MLB World Series?

Does being a fan of any team matter?

I think it does, but only in a well-rounded, emotional context where we hold our priorities in balance.

Is the drama and endurance of a championship delivered by your home team a matter of life and death? No, in any mentally balanced sense, certainly not.

Is it a joyful diversion that can ease the burden of otherwise overwhelming demands on our time and attention? Yes, I think for many the game is just that. It has been for me.

I needed baseball this past summer. It was only a sixty-game season, but I needed all sixty of them. Even if I didn’t have time to watch them all, I needed to read about them the next day, to look at the box scores, to see who was healthy and getting the job done despite harrowing circumstances.

I needed the break from the political headlines, from the horrors of coronavirus, from the social injustices inflicted on those deserving better, from the inescapable racial bias tearing apart people’s lives, from the wildfires that came much too close to home while savaging the homes of others, and from the daily navigation of my own leadership responsibilities.

We all need things that are fun and fulfilling. Call them luxuries in perspective, but without something to capture the imagination in a time where so much focus is devoured by the absurd, our equilibrium can hang in the balance.

The Dodgers have given that to me when times were less stressful. They win, they lose, they lose when it matters most, but like every team, they reemerge every summer. This summer they mattered more.

It was more than a diversion. It was more than entertainment. It was psychological relief. It was a place I could go that really didn’t matter in the big picture of getting through 2020, but mattered enough to deflect a few minutes of serial stress each day.

I love baseball because my father loves baseball. It’s a way we discovered to connect. My dad was a talented ballplayer in high school and college. He loves to tell me if only he could have mastered hitting the curveball, he might have made a run at The Show. My brother is also an amazing ballplayer, a power hitter and respected star in high school and college. I never had the gift. I just couldn’t put the physical together with the mental. It wasn’t my thing, but it was a great way to talk to my dad.

I have no memory better than going with my dad to see the Detroit Tigers play downtown at the old Tiger Stadium. The Tigers were my first team. I collected all the baseball cards season after season. When the Tigers won the World Series in 1968, I was a little kid. I listened each night to Ernie Harwell call the game on an AM transistor radio under my pillow, with one of those really uncomfortable earplugs muffling the broadcast. To this day I can name the Tigers starting lineup in those days from memory.

There was an even more important bond I shared with my father as a child. We couldn’t afford to go to major league baseball games all the time, but he played softball every week and I loved to cheer on his team. I kept the scorebook in longhand, old school. After each game, I would calculate the updated batting average of every player on the team in longhand, old school.

I’d tag along for pizza with the softball team after their games and make the rounds telling everyone how they hit versus last week and last month. Some of them noted I was pretty good at math for a kid my age and thought I might be a decent student. I guess that was a learning moment for me. We can’t be good at everything, but maybe I’d be good at something.

Those are perennially restorative thoughts encoded in protective mode on my aging biological hard-drive. When I moved to Los Angeles in the early 1980s, I knew I was going to be here for a while, so it was time to adopt a new team. That was the team of Jackie Robinson. That was the team of Sandy Koufax. That was the right team for me.

In 1988 I had so little money the idea of going to a World Series game wasn’t a remote fantasy. When former Tiger Kirk Gibson helped the Dodgers win that series with that legendary walk-off swing in Game 1, I thought to myself the World Series would come again to Los Angeles, and then perhaps I’d have the money to see them win it all in person.

It’s been a bit of a wait.

And I still didn’t get to see it in person! With so many complications this year, traveling to Arlington, Texas, just wasn’t a viable option.

Dad and I were supposed to go to the All-Star Game this year at Dodger Stadium. Covid-19 also nixed that. We texted with ardor all through the postseason. Hey, it’s the 21st century. No more old school.

A diversion is not the same as a distraction. A distraction can be an annoyance, shifting our attention from determined contemplation. A diversion can be a gift, briefly capturing us with a complementary story thread that sheds light on our more serious obsessions.

When I am seriously focused on work or the ills of the world, I may think I want neither distraction nor diversion. The child in me may say otherwise, that I lose when I am too serious. You may not love baseball, but the child in you wants the same escape. I found mine this summer. I will again next summer.

It’s often said in various ways that baseball is a child’s game played by adults. Bart Giamatti also warned us that it will break your heart. In Field of Dreams, a father and a son mystically share a catch that was always meant to be. Not every diversion can open your mind and your heart. I was talking to a rabbi recently who assured me that anything that can open our hearts is essential to our well-being. He used the metaphor of baseball in his Yom Kippur sermon. Coincidence? Maybe.

Our trip around the baseball diamond begins and ends in childhood, where simple stories can last a lifetime. The Little Prince reminds us of the difference between childish and childlike. One undermines our maturity, the other ensures its sensible evolution. I hope your diversion may be as inspiring, uplifting, and rejuvenating as mine.

And psst, pass it on. For once after 32 seasons, our Blue Crew doesn’t have to repeat those mightily dispiriting words: Wait ‘til next year.

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Photo: MLB

If you went to elementary school circa the 1960s, you remember that one of the few times TV was brought into the classroom—likely a dusty, early model, enormous 21-inch Zenith B&W CRT with bent rabbit ears, strapped to a prison issue, grey steel rolling wheel cart—was for the Apollo lift offs, splash downs, and moon walks. During those turbulent years of hard-won civil rights and compounding economic expansion, you might have dreamed about growing up to be the next Mick Jagger, but it is equally possible you aspired to have The Right Stuff and be the next Neil Armstrong.

The Space Race captured our imaginations. We watched in awe as the first boot imprint and an American flag were planted in the Sea of Tranquility. We lost sleep with the good people at Houston who had “a problem” bringing home Apollo 13. It was all so captivating, the science in our textbooks was made real, technology was cool, and the Warp Factors of Star Trek seemed someday plausible. I’m glad I got to experience that as a child—it made childhood more childlike and less childish. The Little Prince would have been proud.

Much has been written about the fall off in public enthusiasm for the space program after the tapering Apollo missions and the less grandiose but still near miraculous Space Shuttle missions. As we left The Cold War behind with the collapse of the Soviet Union, we came to worry less about controlling our Solar System. Satellites became our path to better television and radio entertainment, not so much a magic portal to the future as a manufactured bridge to enhanced convenience. It all became ordinary, and then expensive, a difficult pair to keep at the high-end of federal funding without public enthusiasm. We moved on, to the information age, to the PC revolution, to the wildly lucrative internet. NASA was scaled back year after year, and although we knew that wasn’t optimal, we were largely okay with it.

Too often we forget all the ancillary learning that occurred as part of space exploration—not just the nifty consumer products like cordless power tools and vastly improved athletic shoes, but the processes of working together in high function teams. Getting tonnage into and out of space safely has never been a job for individual heroes as much as it sets the tone for working together in groups, combining scientific work methods that emphasize cooperation, breaking down gigantic projects into manageable tasks. Engineering is a profession of shared ideas, where the accuracy of each single contribution matters immensely, but the compiled knowledge of all participants matters even more. We take so much of that kind of process for granted now when we bite off big chunks. I wonder if we take appropriate time to digest just what the process of doing the incredible really means.

As we took a brief intermission from the Games of the 30th Olympiad these past few weeks to observe the otherworldly, never before tried jet-softened hard landing on Mars, I was left pondering if perhaps we were being a bit too casual about the successful parachuting of the Curiosity Rover. No, there were no astronauts on board, and yes, we had landed on Mars before—but not this way, and not with a nuclear powered craft of such immense size and scale. I think everything that involves operating with precision at distances of this magnitude is astonishing, and no matter how clear the physics, we should celebrate with the geniuses at JPL and NASA anytime they pull off the near impossible. Getting to Mars and sending back data to Earth is not a little thing no matter how many times we do it.

This one left me thinking even further. In the midst of a floundering economy and awful recession, precisely the opposite of the Apollo climate, our national tech teams did more with less and made us proud. What were the business lessons, I wondered—more ancillary byproducts of this adventure in science—from which we can additionally benefit in learning by example? I am sure there are many, but three leap out for me:

Difficult is Good. Paraphrasing President Kennedy’s challenge to set an arbitrary deadline without a known roadmap, the Curiosity team chose their path not because it was easy, but because it was hard. This was wide-eyed enthusiasm for a mission about something other than personal gain. Want people to rally around a task? Give them something where they need each other, where failure is acceptable in concept, but not in approach. Big problems are always worth solving.
Resilience is Rebound. Here was a team that had just put the Shuttle in mothballs, experienced colossal layoffs, and had no choice but to accept for the immediate future that our astronauts would have to hitchhike across the galaxy in the form of renting seats from former competitors. They put this behind them by committing to the project at hand.
Sharing Triumph is Personal. How do you get a team fired up and motivated? Bypassing cynicism is a decent route. This mission was about proving what was possible, about intrinsic meaning as much as the survival of equipment. The Curiosity team built pride because they did something together they will forever share, advancing progress, continuing exploration. Often you forget the details of a project, but you don’t forget people who matter. This is where emotion has a clear role in that which is otherwise objective.

I hope enough people at home were paying attention, partly because the landing was worthy of our attention, but more because when you think about it in the abstract, there is more application than meets the eye. Getting out of this recession is no small task, and it won’t be our government who gets the job done. It will be teamwork, commitment, creativity, motivation, and entrepreneurial spirit. Our move forward will be economic, but satisfaction has come from more than that. It will be of the human spirit, with celebration in the process of innovation as well as getting some problems solved.

I like that they named the rover Curiosity. It’s a good, real world metaphor. It sings aspiration. It’s worthy of our attention, a form of pedagogy that really does come from another planet.