Sports Ethics: Taking Care of Business

When Rick Pitino the coach of Louisville was asked how his team will prepare for the NCAA tournament, he responded, “Nothing to see here. We’re just taking care of business.” Most great coaches would respond in the same way. Besides being the name of a great Bachman Turner Overdrive song Takin Care of Business articulates a powerful way to approach challenges and high performance.

The concept links performance and business. I think of business as a group of people committed to a common task or mission. These can range from making a great product, providing a service, or achieving a goal like winning. The metaphor creates ethical obligations upon the person who has the job to master the skills of the job. It also evokes a mindset about how to approach work. In the song self-employed musicians

And start your slaving job to get your pay

If you ever get annoyed

Look at me I'm self-employed

I love to work at nothing all day

Most of us don’t have that luxury, but sports teams and high performing professionals develop a remarkable capacity to link satisfaction to performance and even connect “fun” to high performance as in the song. (other blog) The capacity for fulfillment and fun align with high performing professionals across huge ranges of jobs. The reasons lie in a way of thinking about business

First, business involves having a job or a task. That job or task is imbedded in a project to achieve a goal. Second, having a job revolves around having a role in the goal driven process. The role covers responsibilities, obligations and skills that a person is expected to master and perform with competence and consistency day in and day out. To master a job or rule requires consistent practice, learning and discipline to maintain constant performance and improve where needed. Third, businesses mean working with others. People know they are interdependent and rely upon each other—to achieve team members learn to trust and respect each other as they work together.

Taking care of business involves a mind set and character set for individuals. Successful business and successful jobs require strong work ethic. This work ethic grows from an attitude that the worker or player or professional gradually learns. Some people may bring a natural work ethic where they throw themselves passionately into work. Others may have to be cajoled, trained, motivated or even commanded into a strong work ethic.

The work ethics has to be learned but also tempered. Just having enthusiasm and throwing oneself into work is not enough in any successful enterprise. First, a player has to temper their effort to match the endurance of the task. They often have to build up endurance and conditioning both physically and mentally. Second, the cognitive and skill dimensions matter deeply. Just contributing effort and hard work does little unless the person masters the cognitive and skill and formal dimensions of a task.

This craft knowledge unites cognitive, physical and emotional dimensions. Third, the work ethic plus cognitive dimensions require the ability to learn and adapt. Many jobs seem not change, but all the best production processes work when workers constantly contribute to improving the process even in little ways. In sports and professional life innovation is the norm as well as competition. Players and professionals must be open to learn. They need a quality of mind and character that does not lock them into only one way of doing things when the environment or conditions or opponents change. Consistency is one thing, stubborn futility another.

The simple words “take care of business” involve complex challenges to individuals. The work ethic, mastery of skills and learning need to be packaged with a particular type of commitment and endurance.

To take care of business entails a process of preparation, training, testing and learning that builds a team culture and character as well as style of learning and adapting. It narrows the focus and training for the persons to give them the space to practice, perfect and achieve despite distractions and surprises. This permits teams to keep an even keel amid stresses of different environments. Alabama football coach Nick Saban links this approach to business,

“Eliminate the clutter and all the things that are going on outside and focus on the things that you can control with how you sort of go about and take care of your business. That’s something that’s ongoing, and it can never change.”

Fine players and professionals show up for work each day. They bring it each day. Taking care of business means men and women have gained a mature and durable emotional, cognitive and physical solution to the emotional roller coasters of competition as well as the nagging costs and thrills of winning and losing. Most professional life and sports combines deep capacity to prepare and husband energy for a marathon. But this deep reservoir is not enough.

Competitive and professional life also resembles a series of sprints under intense competitive pressure. The sprint requires total commitment for a period of time, then time to recoup, renew and then give maximum effort again. Football probably resembles this most, but most sports carry this rhythm, so having a workmanlike attitude.

This approach also permits players to approach high stakes games with focus and intensity and not get overwrought or panicked—they keep balance. At the same time to take care of business also means players and professionals never take things for granted. They understand there are no “gimmes” and that upsets can occur. Players show up for what may feel like lesser games and still play with focus, skill and appropriate intensity.

Player’s don’t “lose it” either under stress of high stakes or temptations of low stakes. Business-like teams possess a steady keel and durability across different levels of competition and different intensities of experience and challenge. They possess the preparation, work ethic, skill and willingness to learn and adapt.

And I'll be...

Taking care of business, every day

Taking care of business, every way

I've been taking care of business, it's all mine

Taking care of business and working overtime

Sports Ethics: Grind it Out

We all have bad days. I mean really bad days, you know, the ones where nothing goes right. Our normal smooth skills just do not seem to work; our reactions feel sluggish and the simplest actions we have done by rote for years take concentration and thought. It feels like forgetting how to ride a bike while careening down a hill.

Athletes have a term that all of us can draw upon—grind it out.

Athletes grind it out when their reliable skill sets flounder. Grinding it is the antithesis of being in the zone and requires a different kind of mental focus and discipline. Grinding it out draws upon experience and will power. Young athletes and professionals who are used to winning and performing at the highest level tend to freeze or panic when their reliable expertise set fails. Learning to grind it out requires learning how to keep calm and disciplined when facing adversity and really bad days.

It happens on those days when we are not at our best; we don’t have our A-game, heck we don’t even have our B—game. In life or sport, these are the days when we come to work and our reactions feel slow. We do not read the situation or the other people quickly or comfortably. We feel sluggish. Our dependable skills falter. When we deploy a skill, we execute it awkwardly or not well at all. These moments always arise, but when they happen in competition the player is exposed to the opponents who will jump on the struggling athlete and exploit their weakness.

On bad days a player loses flow or smooth efficiency on their skills. This can happen to doctors, lawyers, teachers, brick layers, carpenters. Our craft or profession does not matter, we all have really bad days.

A struggling baseball pitcher illustrates it clearly. The pitcher may lose their best pitch or maybe two pitchers. The pitch loses something, speed, movement, accuracy, maybe all threes. Batters know this and wait out the pitcher to sit on their troubles. The pitcher then loses close calls because the umpire will not give them the benefit on close calls. The pitcher then self consciously starts to aim the pitch and it best worse. Then they get frustrated by the bad pitches and bad calls and lose focus or turn on themselves in self-recrimination.

A good pitcher has to draw deep on his or her  experience and remember they can get through this. Don’t get angry at oneself or at one’s pitches. On the mound and with the catcher, the pitcher has to re-remember basic mechanics. Go through the motions and concentrate harder to get the pitch over. It takes conscious mental effort to recall and consciously pull up what is normally unconscious and flowing. You see it most in the pitcher because they are all alone out there and facing combat with each pitch and the slightest mistake the leads to hit. You can watch them struggle and overcome anger and doubt. But the pitcher like any of us cannot get in the habit of self-consciously aiming, it guarantees failure. So the pitcher has to balance just doing it, failing, letting go and then doing it again until some approximation of professional execution occurs.  Like a good professional, they simply concentrate on one pitch at a time and getting it done.

Good professionals and craftsman know how to grind it out.

When we grind we are must rely upon will and knowledge. Individuals re-envision in their minds the complex skills and mind-set called for and call them up. They have to force the right angles, the right words, the right attitude toward the fore. As important when we are struggling, panic and paralysis and giving up all tempt us and we have to hold them at bay. At the same if a person starts to overthink, their actions can stagger and lose smooth efficiency. 

The metaphor tells us a lot. Gears grind when they are slightly misaligned. The parts don’t integrate well or smoothly. Grinding increases friction and slows down reaction time. Each action takes more work and harder focus to get it right or offset the misalignment. The scraping surfaces not only increase friction and inefficiency, they produce unpredictability as actions stagger and lurch. The task at hand devolves into a grind, drudgery where any fun or joy leaks from the work. In another take on grinding, a person needs to grind in play and practice to recover the edge of their skill and focus.

Grinding takes away the fun and the smooth naturalness of flow. We have to work at everything, and I mean work hard. We have to recall and will what comes naturally on a good day. We have to force our mind to work and our perception to focus and remember the skills that seem to have abandoned us.

Like the struggling pitcher, athletes look at other pitches, other skills. They compensate and find replacements actions. They find other ways to stay contribute in the game and help the team. A team member passes better or a scorer steps up their defense or passing. They rely on other members to cover for their limits and use the team rather than fight themselves. They rely on teammates to support and encourage them as well as position better or play better defense or offense. Nothing brings out our interdependency then having to grind it out.

People and athletes who know how to grind it out never accept “it’s just one of those days.” It may not be fun. Everything comes hard. Your best skills abandon you. Nothing comes easy. Everything takes more effort and outcomes feel random.

Good athletes and professionals grind it out.

Ichiro: Farewell to a Master of the Craft

After 11 magnificent years Ichiro Suzuki asked to be traded from the Seattle Mariners. The Mariners obliged as only the Mariners can. They traded him to the New York Yankees on the very day they played the Yanks. Ichiro started against the team he had symbolized for a decade and got a hit: of course the Yankees won.

For ten years Ichiro has often been the only good thing about the Mariners. Cliff Lee passed through, and Felix Hernandez blossomed. But the team remained mired at the bottom of the league in offense and piled up ninety loss seasons, all the while Ichiro plied his game and the game of baseball with smooth well crafted excellence.

His batting skills had declined over the last three years as he passed into Bill James' statistical decline territory of the late thirties, and recently the Seattle media and baseball pundits have turned on him with a vengeance, forgetting the years of service, excellence and unflinching professionalism.They attacked his salary and aloofness and lowered production for the salary. I remembered once again why athletes must develop an internal composure and confidence because they cannot rely upon fans. I experienced this decline, but on a team bound to lose 90 plus games forever, he remained its best hitter. But I choose to recall his years of excellence. I believe he exemplifies a particular approach to sport and sport ethics. Ichiro Suzuki epitomized an athlete as a master of a craft.

At the heart of all professional achievement beats an ethic of craftsmanship. Each craft aims at a goal that requires mastery of small exquisite actions that are integrated into a whole addressing a challenge. Eye-hand coordination aligns with cognitive recognition and combines with deploying sensory and mental skills to remove an appendix, deliver a lecture, build a chair or hit a 2.7 inch ball breaking into you at 96 miles per hour.

I remember the quiet week Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners became the first person in history to have nine 200 hit seasons. He added this to eight gold gloves and single season record of 268 hits in 2004. His exemplary historical accomplishments illustrate the moral core of athletics craft mastery.

Each craft possess a vision of success and rules of skill that a person must learn to achieve that vision. The rules and skills are only the beginning. People can be indifferent or competent at what they do. Real mastery requires more. Mediocre and just so craftsmen approach work as a job without commitment to grow and perfect the skill. They go through the motions getting to acceptable outcomes much like a cook can slavishly follow a cookbook and get an eatable meal. Too many people of talent end up acceptable because they will not pay the price of mastery. Others possess enough talent to succeed but never achieve greatness because they will not combine the talent+skill+commitment needed.

Modern research suggests it takes up to 7000 hours of hard focused work to master a complex craft. More research suggests that what separates people with similar talent is the amount of reflective practice they devote to learning and improving their performance. This thoughtful discipline integrates mind, body and decision in a unique style of execution.

This uniqueness stamps their approach and product. Ichiro always arrives very early and undertakes a ritual of physical and mental preparations. His supple stretch before each at bat captures this. Yet no one would start out teaching youngsters to hit with his a tight controlled sweep that dominates the field and uses the plate and infield like a canvas. You can recognize the swing of a master as an expression of relentlessly practiced consistency. He has learned each year to adapt to pitchers as they adapt to him. Despite the singular focus on him, he improves. His fielding represents a triumph of anticipation, feline grace and speed. Even in his decline his arm still paralyzes running games. Master craftsmanship reaches consistency and maintains consistency by improvement and adaptation. This is what it takes to get 200 hits for nine seasons in a succession, a record that held for 108 years.

George Wills’ elegant book Men at Work explores baseball as a perfect illustration of the intelligence, talent, diligence and constant learning required of excellence in sport or life. Craft masters possess healthy egos that motivate the time and discipline. But they never let the ego override their respect for the integrity of craft. They are humble before their craft and that humility enables them to learn and grow. Their ego does not distract their practice, focus and preparation.

When Ichiro was asked about the records, he answered as a craft master.  “I always want to feel satisfaction, but when I accomplish a record, I only feel relief." Earlier he expressed a good lesson for how to relate to the task at hand. He spoke of the need to avoid setting records as goals because they made the got in the way of his potential. A true craftsman and superb athlete, he never stops growing and learning. The country of Japan has a designation of "national treasure" it bestows upon living embodiments of mastery of a craft. Ichiro deserved such a title for baseball.

In his comments upon leaving the Mariners, Ichiro mentioned that he wanted to make room for the young Mariners that the team needed to develop. He expressed hope that his new team will give him new challenges--trust me the Yankees will--but above all he expressed his profound gratitude to the Seattle Mariners fans. I can only reciprocate.