“Take me out to the ball game. take me out with the crowd. Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks, I don’t care … for it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out at the ol’ ball game.”
Baseball gets criticized as being too slow: none of hard-hitting dynamics of football, little of the athleticism of basketball, and a shadow of the endurance of soccer. Those critics do not understand baseball. Baseball is a game of nuances: the rotation, the distribution of the outfield, the depth of the infield, the double-play, lefty-lefty, righty-righty, the breaking ball, the fast ball, the change up, the distraction of the man on base, the steal, the sacrifice, the bunt, the bullpen, the closer, and so on. You don’t watch baseball like you watch football. Baseball is more akin to a poker game.
In baseball, the home run batter is the hero, but the pitcher determines who wins the game. Rarely can the swinging bat overcome the flailing arm. The statistics kept on pitchers can make you a better technologist. Here’s how.
A starting pitcher has to pitch at least five innings of the game for the baseball governing board to label him the winning or the losing pitcher. Suppose a top-notch pitcher pitches five innings and his team is winning big time. The relief pitcher comes on and the team subsequently loses the game. What statistic is given to the starting pitcher who was way ahead when he was called out of the game, perhaps through no fault of his own? He is not called the winning pitcher; he is given a no-decision by the governing board. He does not get credited with a win unless his team wins, no matter how far ahead they may have been when the starter left the game. Baseball statistics are strongly tied to teamwork.
Learn a valuable lesson here and realize that technologists are forced to play by the same rules. A win is a win. A no-decision is a loss. If you do not get the decision makers to agree to your technology recommendations, you lose.
Making a successful technology presentation is all about getting the decision makers to enable and enact your recommendations. As I emphasize all the time, spin, duplicity, and deception are not even to be considered. My emphasis is that many excellent and profitable ideas are canned, not because the ideas lacked sufficient merit, but because the technologists lacked sufficient preparation or failed to understand what the audience of decision makers required. If the decision makers decide to not enact or to not enable your recommendations, they may not say so directly. They may just label it a no-decision. For the technologist who needs to move forward with the research, staffing, or garnering of capital equipment, that is tantamount to a loss.
Most technologists are part of a team. You may do extremely well with your individual part, but if the team fails to convince the decision makers, everyone loses. What should you do about it? Here is how to turn a no-decision into a win.
Start by avoiding the technologist’s tendency to isolation. Be open with your own work. Learn what your associates are doing and how their work and yours fit together in the overall plan. Look for areas that might be weak and then work as a team to shore up those deficiencies. If you see where the work of others can be improved, learn how to instruct them in a positive manner. Be receptive to having your own work critiqued, challenged, and changed by others. Anticipate and be prepared for skepticism by the decision makers. Be prepared to address any perceived shortcomings in a factual (usually natural for a technologist) and succinct (usually unnatural for a technologist) way. Think about budgets, cost, profit, and schedule. These are important to the decision makers. Make them important to you, in your decisions and in your presentations.
Bring out the best in your team and you will convert those no-decisions into forceful wins. You will be the persuasive wizard.