It should come as no surprise, then, that I feel lessons learned on the ball field are relevant in the IT workplace, particularly for network managers who supervise technical staff. It's all about strategy, planning, motivation, execution and measurement. Within your environment, what's the best strategy for leveraging network technologies to add value to the organization? How do you plan and organize in a manner that gets the most bang from available bucks? How do you motivate people to produce? When the pressure is on and you need to deliver a reliable service, can you do it? And last but certainly not least, how do you know if individual staff members and the organization as a whole have achieved the desired goals?

Strategy I played a lot of baseball while growing up, and though I never had the drive or the ability to play after high school, all that time on the field made me a fairly instinctive player. I never really needed to think about situations; I just reacted, trusting those instincts to help me make good split-second decisions. Sure, I made some mistakes by not taking the time to analyze every situation, but that was more than overshadowed by the plays that never would have been made if I had paused to reflect. Bang, bang--that's how the game is played.

Today, as a baseball coach and a network manager, I find it's not always so easy to operate on instincts--for many reasons. Most important, I don't always have the "game experience" to fall back on when making difficult judgment decisions. In baseball, the game is basically the same as it's always been, but as a coach, I'm relatively inexperienced. There have been many occasions when I've been outstrategized by the opposition's much more experienced coach.

As a network manager I have much more experience, having been in the business for more than 15 years. Unfortunately, the rules of the game keep changing. Just when I get comfortable with a particular strategy, some new technology is introduced that challenges both my knowledge and my instincts. More than once I've been accused of "weaseling out" on a particular decision, refusing to commit to implementing some technology that is full of promise but unproven in the real world. Nobody likes a coach who is waving the runner home with one hand and back to third with the other.

There are many situations we face every day as network managers that test our strategic thinking. For example, all of you managers of Novell servers have no doubt felt pressure to migrate to NT. The instincts that come from experience counsel you to stick with what works. But the suits, well-versed in the latest one-page briefing from the Gartner Group, are second-guessing you, sending you press clippings about the competition's abandonment of not-so-big Red. Call me risk-averse if you'd like, but I'd rather stick with Novell than take my chances on a NOS that can't hit under pressure.

Planning Instincts and strategy are essential, no doubt about it. But the best overall strategy can't be turned into runs if you're an ineffective planner. Many a baseball manager, and more than a few network managers, have great instincts for the game but don't seem to deliver on the bottom line. In many cases, they just don't have a knack for the planning and preparation required to turn sound strategy into successful implementation. Frankly, planning isn't all that interesting to the technical wizards who thrive on doing.