"Management by Baseball", and how it's so much like TV news

Book #2 on my holiday reading list is "Management by Baseball", (Amazon link) by Jeff Angus, a corporate veteran and longtime baseball fan and student. Compared to the innovation-focused "Mavericks at Work" below, MBB is more a basic management primer using famous baseball players and managers (mostly the managers) as the filter through which the lessons are delivered. (There is a chapter at the end dedicated to managing through change, I might add.)

For someone like me who has lived and learned a great deal of management lessons over the past decade, not all of the instruction in MBB is new, but I knew that going in to my reading. At the very least, I thought I'd enjoy reading management legacies of several baseball greats I've heard of in all my years of following America's pastime. But there are many good lessons here for experienced, new or aspiring news managers.

Baseball managers and TV news directors have a lot in common.

1. We deal in the people business. Sure there's a product to manage -- a game and a newscast. But our job is to manage the people who play the game or put on the newscast.
   
2. More specifically, we deal in the talent business. Our talent has name-recognition and holds a position of distinction and influence in the community. Even though we're the boss, our top talent are paid much more than we are paid. We deal with very talented people, and some have enormous egos we have to caress and feed, once in a while.
   
3. We have to manage a wide variety of skill sets. Perhaps a football coach is a better comparison between of the physical and skill differences among all the positions on a football team. A TV newsroom has anchors, reporters, video editors, photographers, assignments editors, web producers, newscast producers, and managers. A football team has lineman (offensive, defensive), linebackers, running backs, wide receivers, defensive backs, kickers, punters and assistant coaches. As managers or coaches, we may have worked our way into management by mastering one of these positions, but we have to learn something about all of them to manage all the skilled people who are playing/working for our team.
   
4. We have to make quick decisions in crisis situations. A game is a series of crisis decisions. In news, we have breaking stories that regularly test our ability to improvise and overcome obstacles, which are always changing.
   
5. Our results are measurable (win/loss records vs Nielsen ratings), but they don't always tell the whole story as to a manager's effectiveness or success.
   
6. Update: Oh yeah! I almost forgot the most important one. When things aren't going well for the organization, it's easier to fire the baseball manager or the news director than it is to dump the starting lineup and the anchor team.

Jeff's website is similarly named: managementbybaseball.com. He writes a blog that's worth reading, and there's more of his thinking behind a login page that requires free* registration. (*You'll need to answer a question from the book, however, to register.)

Next up, "Good to Great by Jim Collins. Check back in a few days for another book report written for news managers.