Submitted by Joe Harder, May 18, 2007 13:16

Thanks for writing this article. I found it interesting both in terms of baseball and also with regard to implications for other businesses.

My Ph.D. is in organizational behavior, and I wrote my dissertation on pay and performance in professional baseball and basketball. Just today on the final day of an executive education program in which I was teaching four of the eight culminating group vignettes focused on attracting, retaining, and developing global talent. I think many organizations could learn from the practices of the best baseball organizations on these matters.

I think the key is to have your human asset strategy match your business strategy, available resources, labor conditions, and so on. Thus the Red Sox can afford to invest in organizational depth (but have to do so astutely) while the Athletics are forced to tap into the entire industry's labor pool, not just those they currently have under contract. Either way, we would expect those teams that have either filled their talent pipeline or are adept at maneuvering in the external labor market do better. And if they can recognize and exploit market anomalies or do a better job at discovering, evaluating, and enticing talent than their competitors that just adds to the success. There's some evidence that that is true for any company.

Thanks again for an informative read.

Note: Comments are screened, and in some cases edited, before posting. We reserve the right to reject anything we find objectionable.