A number carried to three decimal places, quoted from memory by ordinary fans, and applied outside baseball to anything from hiring to sales calls. The unit of judgment is what actually happened, divided by how many times you tried.
sports
The scoreboard
American sports put the current result in the largest object in the building, visible from every seat, updated continuously. Nobody argues with it, and there is no separate record of who played better.
Moneyball
The Oakland Athletics, working with one of the smallest payrolls in baseball, used statistical analysis to identify undervalued players and won more games than teams spending several times as much.
The scouts hated it. The methods were unorthodox, the reasoning was unfamiliar, and it produced wins — which ended the argument.
Winning isn’t everything
The line is usually credited to Vince Lombardi, though it was first said by UCLA coach Red Sanders. Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
It is the more absolute version of an earlier, softer sentence, and it is the absolute version that stuck.
The referee
American sports distinguish rules from judgment calls, and commentators, fans and officials all use the distinction. Some things are reviewable and some are not, and the line between them is itself argued about constantly.
The dinner and the golf course
American business conducts a substantial amount of its work in settings chosen because they are not offices. The point is not the food or the round. It is the hours spent in a context where people are not performing their roles.
The vocabulary of encouragement
Great job. Nice work. Way to go. Crushing it. Killing it. You’re a rock star. Above and beyond. Home run. Knocked it out of the park.
American workplace praise is loud, frequent and borrowed largely from sport. The register is the same whether the achievement was substantial or routine — which is what makes the absence of it noticeable.
The playbook
An American football playbook is a compilation of what has worked, tested in practice and revised weekly. The word crossed into business intact. A playbook is not a manual derived from principle. It is a record of plays that succeeded.
Celebrity Endorsements
Celebrity endorsements help in the sale of many products in the United States. A famous person links themself personally to a specific product or service in an advertisement, explicitly or indirectly saying:
“I use this product. It is good. I like it. You will like it, too.” The hope is that potential customers will respond with “I like, respect, admire that celebrity. If it is good enough for them, it must be good enough for me. I‘ll buy.”
Golf champion Tiger Woods signed endorsement deals with General Motors, General Mills, American Express, Accenture and Nike. In 2000, Woods signed with Nike a 5-year, $105 million contract, which became the largest endorsement deal ever signed by an athlete at the time. Woods is frequently seen wearing Nike apparel during tournaments and has a building named after him at Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon.
A coach’s yes
In 2015, following the Penn State University wrestling team’s duel with the University of Minnesota, coach Cael Sanderson answered yes when asked if Jimmy Lawson instead of Jon Gingrich would be the Penn State heavyweight in the critical time nearing the end of the season.
When asked to comment on this, Lawson clearly took his coach’s yes as conditional, and responded: “In my mind it’s not really over. We’re both seniors, we both want to be the guy out there, we both want to do well at nationals, so I’ve just got to keep competing.”
As it turned out, Sanderson’s yes was conditional, and he later qualified his yes, saying “It can never be done . . . (the wrestlers) are always pushing and trying to get to the top. You want to help the team by being the best you can be and if that’s pushing the guy ahead of you or even taking the spot, that’s what you need.”