The two of us grew up watching baseball in the 1970s and 1980s when it was a much different game than it is now. In fact, pretty much since baseball's origin, most managers would use the sacrifice bunt to get a runner from first base to second base with nobody out.
Where did this strategy originate? We're not sure, but our hypothesis lies in baseball's earliest days (pre‐1900). Equipment was less robust, and as a result, home runs were rare. Therefore, the possibility of scoring runs in “chunks” through home runs and extra base hits was low. Over time, the choice to bunt developed into conventional wisdom for baseball managers. It became the default, no‐thinking option. You just did it. And if you didn't do it, baseball writers would pick apart your decision, and your job would be in jeopardy.
The logic for bunting was that you got a runner into scoring position – second base – where a single could, in theory, allow the runner to score. If you gave up an out, but got the runner to second, you might be in a better position to score. This thinking was pervasive in baseball for most of its history, even in the midst of a fundamental shift in player ability and nature of the game. Eventually, power hitting increased, raising the opportunity cost of a bunt. And a growing emphasis on pitch count – working the number of pitches to force teams to go to their bullpen earlier in the game – ran counter to the reality that bunts are most effective when used early in the count. But still, teams were bunting.1
Then, Billy Beane and his team, the Oakland A's, decided to put into practice a concept originated by Bill James: a rejection of the notion that bunting was a good idea. Their logic was that outs were precious. You had only three outs every inning and to give one up – 33% of your capacity – for the chance that you might score only one run made little sense. They used statistical analyses to show that bunting would not probabilistically maximize the number of runs you might score. At the time, people panned this concept. But then it started to work and the A's started to win. The Michael Lewis book Moneyball has popularized this story; in the eponymous film, Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) used it as a metaphor for a bet paying off well.
Why, after 100 years, did a team decide to put this strategy into practice? As is often the case, necessity was the mother of invention. The A's had no money to sign proven players, and Beane realized that following the same strategy as other teams was a recipe for mediocrity at best. He had nothing to lose; nobody expected him to do well. So he had the necessary preconditions for thinking about the situation and asking, “So, why do we do it like this?” The answers he got back were various versions of, “This is what we've always done.”
When you hear someone say, “This is what we've always done,” you know that you're dealing with conventional wisdom – the thinking that governs a habitual decision or choice. People fail to question the logic for this behavior. It simply is the automatic choice – the safe choice. But the problem with actions that take on conventional wisdom arises as you become further and further removed from the original reason for the action, as happened with bunting in baseball during the better part of a century.
The people who make the decision – such as the manager calling the bunt – stop treating that action as a choice and instead treat it as a rule. But there's no rule in baseball that says you have to bunt when you get a runner on first base with no outs. Similarly, there's no rule in baseball that says you should use a closer in the ninth inning (very recently, some managers such as Terry Francona have begun using their “closers” earlier in the game when it appears the game is on the line). Baseball does have a clear set of rules, which, for the most part, have remained the same since the start of the game. A rule book outlines everything that is legal within the framework. Rules define what can and cannot be. All that falls within the rules is completely fair game to try for the purpose of gaining an advantage on your opponent to score more runs, which is the objective. Yet, over and over again, we find ourselves bunting – mindlessly falling into rote best practices.
Rules are the governing body for how you pursue your objective. In sports, the rule book defines the boundaries in which the players can compete. In many industries, regulations and laws broadly define what you can and cannot do, but for the most part, as in sports, businesses have a relatively broad mandate. Still, conventional wisdom gets in the way of creativity. Conventional wisdom is what we see as the right thing to do, often without deeply thinking about why we do it. It's what we've always done – the automatic, nonthinking choice.
This is a book about blowing up those best practices that saturate your business before it's too late. The primary purpose of Detonate is to help you begin to spot traditional business activities that need to be questioned because of changes in the world today – and then to help you find different ways of doing things. Some of the examples will appear as caricatures of commonplace situations, but we hope that, in painting them starkly – and sometimes comically – they will stand out in our readers' memories as they return to their daily lives.
Organizations spend countless hours debating how (not whether) they should implement best practices, and they then convince themselves that they can somehow win with their customers because they will have implemented all of them. Actually, the entire concept of best practices, by definition, means that you're doing the same thing as your competition.
The concept of best practice in and of itself does not offend our sensibilities, despite the title of our book. It's the lazy thinking that surrounds them that does. There are some best practices that may have been good when they were developed but are typically reapplied poorly as they travel. There are some best practices that were smart given the context, but when context changes (as it is now for many businesses), we need to abandon the practice because they've turned into a waste of time and money. And there are some practices that we thought were smart, but with experience we find they are not. The common thread is that we need to move from a world where best practices are the rule to one where best practices are one of several possible tools for solving a problem.
At one point, there was a good case for bunting – as there is for many best practices. The logic for why bunting made sense was unclear and unquestioned. Then it simply became “what we do” – it ossified into a rule, an orthodoxy that couldn't be questioned. (We'll have more to say about the idea of orthodoxy later in this chapter.) And very few managers went back and analyzed why this choice was so automatic. Those who didn't follow were “rule breakers.”
But, importantly, they weren't breaking “rules,” they were simply breaking with convention. And that can feel like a dangerous move. But that's exactly what we're here to do: to teach you how to find your best practices and blow them up. The corporate world of scaled business can reap tremendous benefits from our lessons, while start‐ups and entrepreneurs will also find great value as they learn what to avoid as they themselves scale.
