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ager, offered Russell Rules: Eleven Fessons on Leadership from the Twen- tieth Century's Greatest Winner. His former coach, Red Auerbach, au- thored MBA: Management by Auerbach: Management Tips from the Leader of One of America's Most Successful Organizations. This list could go on and on. In fact, the acceptance of coach-as-management-expert has become so widespread that the Harvard Business Review chose (then) retired NFL coach Bill Parceiis to write the first article for a new department where coaches, religious leaders, or scientists could publish ideas pertinent for business executives. His article, "The Hard Work of Turning Around a Team," does not exactly equate football with business but finds many sim- ilarities. He says, "My guess is that the challenges I've faced are not all that different from the ones that executives deal with every day. I'm not saying that business is like football. I am saying that people are people, and that the keys to motivating them and getting them to perform to their full po- tential are pretty much the same whether they're playing on a football field or working in an office."2 The quotation from Bill Parceiis runs parallel to the theme of this book. Whatever the title—chief executive officer, plant manager, district supervi- sor, coach, general manager, or other—the similarities between managing a sports team and managing any other business run wide and deep. The success of managers in most any endeavor depends on their ability to ac- quire and use resources, adjust to changing market conditions, gauge the actions and reactions of rivals, develop or imitate new methods of pro- duction, and hire, motivate, and empower people. At least so far as these common aspects are concerned, management is management whether the decisions are made in a corporate suite overlooking New York City, in a manufacturing plant in Bowling Green Kentucky, on a practice field at Red- skins Park in Northern Virginia, on the court at Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium, on the "frozen tundra" of Lambeau Field in Green Bay, or in front of the centerfield monuments of Yankee Stadium. LEARNING THE RIGHT LESSONS Casey Stengel, a longtime baseball manager known for great one-liners said, "Good pitching will always stop good hitting, and vice-versa." No doubt, the inconsistency in Stengel's proverb was there to obtain a laugh, but it happens to express a big question mark in the study of management whether in athletics or business. How can the lessons of successful man- agement be determined whether the focus is on business in general or in sports managing and coaching? 3