It’s easy to lump the broad ideas of Jonah Keri’s The Extra 2% in under the vast shadow cast by Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. Published in 2003, Moneyball was at the same time a book for baseball geeks as well as a primer on how to run an efficient business and find the value in hidden assets. The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First, published in 2011, also focuses on the inner workings of a baseball team firmly entrenched in the “have-not” category in baseball’s hierarchy, but the most surprising revelations in the book come from how much effort was put into improving organizational morale and it’s affect on performance.
For those that don’t remember the initial era of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, summarizing the on-field results is pretty straightforward. The team lost over 90 games every season for a decade, locked up last place in the division and quickly became the laughingstock of the league. What was really surprising was the lengths that original ownership went to disenfranchise themselves from their community and fan base as well. Keri’s anecdotes are plentiful and colorful. When the team invited a local Boy Scout troop to sing the national anthem, they enraged the community by charging the troop admission to the ballpark. The owners were so frugal, they didn’t even provide internet access to employees.
After several years of floundering, the original owners sold to a group of young Wall Street whiz kids with no baseball experience who championed the idea of small, constant, incremental improvement in every facet of their business. This is where the book’s title came from. Although the book may be a little heavy on the intricacies of baseball at times, it was the stories of the management structure that I found most interesting. This new ownership group created a process and delegated responsibilities to employees all the way down the line, fostering a culture of trust and responsibility that hadn’t existed in the organization from its creation. By following the examples of their new leaders, the rest of the staff took pride in their new-found responsibility and completely bought in to the process.
Success on the field soon followed and 10 seasons after their creation (and 3 years after their sale to new ownership), the Rays finally had their first winning season. The Rays have now consistently been one of the most consistently competitive teams in all of baseball while their employees relish the challenge of battling the larger, wealthier franchises. For those looking for a change of pace in their typical assortment of management books, The Extra 2% is quick and worthwhile read.
