Management Wisdom From The New York Yankees Dynasty

Since the 1920’s, the New York Yankees have become the most successful sports franchise in history because of the way they manage their talent and their organization. So how do they do it? The Yankees’ sustained success can be traced to 14 core management principles, applicable to any business operating today. These principles embrace cultivation of home-grown talent, creation of a culture that demands excellence, pursuit and introduction of the most talented players from outside the organization, promotion of a diversified workforce, and utilization of a productive farm system as currency in making talent deals.

The first reference resource to bring both sports management and sports marketing all together in one place.

The New York Yankees were the strongest team in the majors from 1948 through 1960, capturing the American League Pennant 10 times and winning seven World Championships. The average fan, when asked who made the team so dominant, will mention Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford or Mickey Mantle. Some will insist manager Casey Stengel was the key. But pundits at the time, and respected historians today, consider the shy, often taciturn George Martin Weiss the real genius behind the Yankees' success. Weiss loved baseball but lacked the ability to play. He made up for it with the savvy to run a team better than his competitors. He spent more than 50 years in the game, including nearly 30 with the Yankees. Before becoming their general manager, he created their superlative farm system that supplied the club with talented players. When the Yankees retired him at 67, the newly franchised New York Mets immediately hired him to build their team. This book is the first definitive biography of Weiss, a Hall of Famer hailed for contributing "as much to baseball as any man the game could ever know."

In times of growing talent shortage, companies have to find new ways to fill their strategic positions from the outside. This book presents useful and competitive solutions for hiring talented and motivated employees. The author presents four concrete fields of action to achieve this and provides the reader with definitions of strategically relevant key and bottleneck functions. The book emphasizes the fact that employers must sell relevant functions just like they would as part of an employer branding strategy. Employers are moving towards active sourcing strategies beyond job ads and headhunting. They must maintain and manage relations with promising talent once they have been identified. Finally, employers must ensure a positive candidate experience. This book serves as a handy reference for HR managers and talent recruiters.

This book demonstrates, in detail, why annual performance appraisals might still work in hierarchical environments, but largely fail in agile ones. The annual performance appraisal is one of the world’s most widely used management tools. For many years, it was indeed seen as a pre-requisite for successful leadership and professional management. While most managers and employees have always been sceptical in this respect, those at a strategic level are now also realising it causes more harm than good, and a growing number of leading companies have similarly abolished this approach. One key reason lies in the changing working world, and the quest for greater organisational agility. Companies are moving away from rigid structuring. The arguments are presented objectively but with practical relevance, coherently illustrating the available alternatives for achieving what annual performance appraisals largely have not.

Before the feuding owners turned to Ed Barrow to be general manager in 1920, the Yankees had never won a pennant. They won their first in 1921 and during Barrow?s tenure went on to win thirteen more as well as ten World Series. This biography of the incomparable Barrow is also the story of how he built the most successful sports franchise in American history. øBarrow spent fifty years in baseball. He was in the middle of virtually every major conflict and held practically every job except player. Daniel R. Levitt describes Barrow?s pre-Yankees years, when he managed Babe Ruth and the Boston Red Sox to their last World Series Championship before the ?curse.? He then details how Barrow assembled a winning Yankees team both by purchasing players outright and by developing talent through a farm system. øThe story of the making of the great Yankees dynasty reveals Barrow?s genius for organizing, for recognizing baseball talent, and for exploiting the existing economic environment. Because Barrow was a player in so many of baseball?s key events, his biography gives a clear and eye-opening picture of how America?s sport was played in the twentieth century, on the field and off. A complex portrait of a larger-than-life character in the annals of baseball, this book is also an inside history of how the sport?s competitive environment evolved and how the Yankees came to dominate it.

The digitalization of businesses calls for new forms of leadership and collaboration, as traditional human resources strategies are reaching their limits. Personal responsibility, networking and diversity are increasingly recognized as key prerequisites for agility, adaptability and innovativeness. This book encourages HR managers who want to be pioneers of, or support, digital transformation to rethink their HR strategies. It begins with a clear illustration of the difference between stability and agility in leadership and organization. Building on this, it then guides the reader through a broad range of relevant HR topics and how they compare to the new strategic orientation. All major aspects of HR management are addressed, including recruitment, learning, talent management, remuneration, performance management, corporate training, executive development and change management. Providing a comprehensive, practical, differentiated and non-dogmatic alternative to traditional approaches, the book is a must-read for all those who are concerned with sustainable HR management in the era of digitalization.