(Team) Chemistry is King

Chemistry is King…Or why Culture eats strategy for Breakfast

This past week, the World Series created a perfect convergence of sport, business lesson and effective teaching moments – if you missed it, lucky for you the TT didn’t.

Peter Drucker was once famously attributed to saying ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’

The Chemistry experiment that was The Houston Astros did not start so well. The oversight of leadership to nurture a people-centered culture that fostered winning under adverse and competitive circumstances in effect created an unintended consequence of turning people off.

Houston’s leadership relied almost entirely on data to navigate through a full-blown rebuild of the team. They amassed a leading-edge research department, filled with talent from the worlds of economics, physics, and engineering. They were early adopters of the infield shift and other data-driven strategies that were once looked at as a gimmick, but now is standard practice for most teams.

But for all of their bold ideas, the Astros too often forgot about one important aspect: their players. Houston was already the most analytically driven organization in Major League Baseball, but then it started paying attention to the team’s culture.

One of Houston’s star pitchers was quoted to say, “It was a disconnect. Every player was a number instead of a person.”

This winter, the players felt a change. Astro leadership, who seemed to care only about quantitative elements, appeared to put genuine effort into connecting with the athletes in the clubhouse.

That willingness to defy their reputation by embracing the value of chemistry and culture paid enormous dividends this year with the World Series victory. , Now, that same star pitcher says, “Every player is a person.”

It represented a subtle, but crucial shift in the Astros’ thinking. Though numbers remain their focus, the driving force that propelled them from the bottom of the standings to the pinnacle of the baseball universe, the learned a lesson along the way: To deny the significance of chemistry ignores a critical component of the equation that equals a championship roster.

That is a lesson I learned a long time ago. No matter how much I parse the organizational DNA through data, it is never lost on me that I am dealing with people and people matter.