The Business of Baseball

At Advantexe, we often explore business and leadership topics through things that happen in our everyday lives. Sports provide plenty of opportunities. There are decisions about strategy, talent, investments, customers, revenue, managing expenses, and growth. But this week, one decision has me scratching my head: scheduling the Phillies and Braves Wild Card games at 2:00 PM.

The series is now tied at 1–1, and I missed most of the first game and the entire second game. Not because I wasn’t interested. I was working. And I’m sure plenty of fans in Philadelphia and Atlanta have been in the same situation.

As a Phillies fan, that is frustrating. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about business acumen, it raises questions about the trade-offs behind the scheduling decision. I don’t have MLB’s financial models or audience research. Maybe the decision-makers have data that supports this approach. But does that analysis consider the full business impact, including the local engagement and spending lost when fans cannot watch?

Start with a simple question: Who can actually watch a game at 2:00 on a weekday? People are working, attending meetings, serving customers, and managing deadlines. Some will have it on in the background or check the score between calls. That was about all I could manage. Following a score is a very different experience from sitting down to watch your team compete in the playoffs.

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You have probably seen the Microsoft advertising about poor Hank’s pizzeria. The commercial features a struggling fictional pizzeria owner named Hank, whose business has slowed down, so he uses Microsoft Copilot in Excel to analyze his numbers, optimize his costs, and figure out how to bring back a legendary $1 pizza slice.

The ad depicts a fairy-tale scenario where AI instantly transforms a business model and solves all of Hank's operational math in one go, without him needing to deal with messy spreadsheets.

I’ve seen the ad too many times now, and I feel really bad for Hank and his lack of business acumen.

First of all, while Copilot and other AI agents are incredible, if you look closely, Hank’s data appears to be neatly structured in a clean table. Anyone who has worked on real-world projects with non-data people knows how rare that is.

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AI is changing jobs. But have we actually stopped to define what those jobs are becoming?

I have been thinking a lot about that question lately. As organizations rapidly adopt AI, there is tremendous focus on the technology, the tools, and getting employees to use them. But I think there is another issue that deserves just as much attention. If AI changes what people do every day, doesn't it also change what they need to be good at?

And if that's true, we may need to take another look at the competency models we use to hire, develop, evaluate, and prepare our people for what's next.

Consider a software developer. For years, a significant part of a developer's value came from the ability to write code. They understood programming languages, wrote thousands of lines of code, debugged problems, tested solutions, and ultimately turned an idea into a working product.

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One of the joys of speaking with dozens of business leaders every week while delivering our business acumen and business leadership programs is hearing all the new buzzwords being thrown around.

Some of it is corporate jargon and blather that will disappear in six months. But I try very hard to listen through the noise because every once in a while, what sounds like another buzzword is actually a weak signal that something important is changing.

Over the past several months, one of those signals has been getting louder: Scale.

Voices of Leadership

“We are making an investment so we can really scale this thing.”

“AI is the catalyst we have been waiting for to achieve massive scale.”

“The world is getting smaller, which gives us an incredible opportunity to scale.”

Scale certainly isn't a new concept. Business leaders have been obsessed with it for hundreds of years.

But I am beginning to think the definition is changing.

The Old Economics of Scale

What really got me thinking about this were the television advertisements for Starlink.

Internet virtually anywhere. Satellites orbiting the earth. Infrastructure being created at a level that would have sounded like science fiction not very long ago.

Whatever your opinion of Elon Musk, there is an interesting business principle connecting many of the businesses he has been involved with: the pursuit of usable scale. Electric vehicles aren't very interesting economically if you can manufacture only a few thousand of them. Space travel changes dramatically when rockets can be reused. Satellite internet becomes something entirely different when thousands of satellites can create a global network.

Amazon did something similar in a completely different way. What began as an online bookstore became an infrastructure capable of connecting millions of products, customers, sellers, warehouses, transactions, and eventually computing resources.

But none of this is really new.

The Industrial Revolution was fundamentally about scale.

Machines allowed companies to produce more goods with fewer hours of human labor. Railroads expanded reachable markets. Electricity enabled larger and more productive factories. Telecommunications allowed businesses to coordinate activities across increasingly large distances.

For most of business history, however, achieving scale required something very important: More.

More factories. More machines. More people. More capital. More inventory. More distribution. More infrastructure.

Yes, businesses became more efficient as they grew, creating the economies of scale we all learned about in Economics 101. But getting bigger generally required significant incremental resources.

That relationship is beginning to change.

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As a person who studies business acumen for a living and has been doing so for more than 50 years, I can sleep pretty well at night without worrying that AI is going to take over the world and kill all the humans.

Turn on the news, listen to a podcast, or spend ten minutes scrolling through your social media streams, and you might reach a different conclusion. Apparently, artificial general intelligence is coming, superintelligence is right behind it, millions of jobs are going to disappear, humans will become obsolete, and the machines will take over sometime around a week from next Thursday.

Maybe.

But I have a slightly more cynical, and much more boring, business acumen perspective.

Eventually, somebody has to pay for all of this. And that is where things get interesting.

A Little History Lesson

Over the past 150 years, we have seen versions of this movie before.

Banking became enormously powerful and complicated. Pharmaceuticals experienced explosive innovation and investment. Agriculture industrialized. Telecommunications transformed the world. The internet created entirely new industries. Software changed virtually every business process. Cryptocurrency arrived promising to reinvent money itself.

The technologies were different, but the business cycle often had some familiar characteristics.

An exciting new opportunity emerges. Capital pours in. Companies race to establish leadership. Investors reward growth. Competitors spend aggressively because nobody wants to be left behind. Infrastructure gets built. Talent becomes incredibly expensive. Expectations become enormous.

For a while, almost nobody wants to be the person in the room asking the boring questions.

How much is this costing us? Where is the return? When will this investment generate positive cash flow? What happens if demand doesn't grow as quickly as projected? What are the risks?

And perhaps the most important business acumen question of all: Is the next dollar we invest going to create more value than the last dollar we invested?

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