With October right around the corner, the baseball postseason is officially underway, and for me, it is easily my favorite time of the year. There is nothing quite like playoff baseball in the crisp autumn air and as always, Go Sox!
In professional baseball, few moments are more telling than a batter watching strike three cross the plate without ever uncoiling their hands. A swinging strikeout carries disappointment, but it also reflects commitment, intent, and an aggressive posture toward shaping the outcome. A called strike three represents something far more passive. It signals a choice to surrender control to external variables, allowing the umpire, the pitcher, and circumstance to decide the outcome.
Baseball legend Hank Aaron captured this fundamental truth simply and powerfully when he quoted:
“You can’t get no hits with the bat on your shoulder.”
He understood that every record set, every milestone achieved, and every breakthrough in a storied career required stepping into the batter’s box and taking the cut. The box score cannot record a single hit until someone commits to the swing.
In enterprise leadership, the parallel is both striking and widespread. The greatest threat to organizational momentum is rarely an aggressive initiative that misses its mark. Instead, it is the creeping inertia of analysis paralysis, where decision makers spend quarters agonizing over theoretical scenarios instead of validating reality. Waiting for the impossible arrival of absolute certainty drains energy, demoralizes teams, and hands competitive advantage directly to more decisive peers. If leaders want their organizations to grow, adapt, and succeed in volatile landscapes, they must realize that standing still is the most hazardous choice available.
Core Leadership Practices for Decisive Action
Cultivating an organization that routinely steps up to take calculated swings does not happen accidentally. It requires intentional architectural changes in how decisions are made, how risk is managed, and how operational learning is measured across every tier of the business. When executives build an environment that equates contemplation with safety, teams inevitably freeze and when leaders deliberately lower the friction around sensible action, the entire enterprise gains velocity.
Here are five disciplined practices to help teams take the bat off their shoulder and drive meaningful execution:
- Adopt the 70%+ Information Rule: Waiting for complete data certainty almost always guarantees you arrive late to the opportunity. Encourage teams to identify two-way door decisions that can be reversed or adjusted quickly, and empower them to pull the trigger once they possess roughly 70%+ of the necessary insight. Reserve exhaustive diligence exclusively for rare, existential bets where the cost of reversal is catastrophic.
- Reward the Quality of the Swing, Not Just the Hit: In complex environments, sound strategic choices occasionally produce unfavorable short-term results because of macroeconomic shifts or unforeseen market forces outside your control. If your culture only celebrates home runs and penalizes well-reasoned swings that result in an out, employees will naturally freeze at the plate. Focus reviews on the rigor of the decision-making process rather than purely on the scoreboard.
- Shorten the Feedback Loop Through Pilots: When testing emerging technologies, operational revisions, or customer-facing enhancements, favor agile, localized trials over massive enterprise rollouts. A targeted single into shallow right field provides real telemetry on practical viability, generating operational momentum far more effectively than a multi-year roadmap trapped in a slide deck.
- Systematically Eliminate Bureaucratic Friction: Scrutinize the governance and approval gates required for teams to test and validate ideas. When an initiative requires five layers of committee sign-off simply to run a controlled proof of concept or field test, you are actively conditioning the organization to hesitate. Streamline decision rights so ownership sits closest to where the work is performed.
- Define the Explicit Cost of Inaction: Business cases almost universally examine the financial and operational risks of doing something new, yet they rarely quantify the cost of maintaining the status quo. Make it a standard practice to evaluate the revenue lost, technical debt accrued, and competitive ground surrendered by waiting another quarter. Highlighting the true price of standing still creates the urgency needed to move forward.
Establishing these habits fundamentally transforms the daily rhythm of an enterprise. It shifts the operational center of gravity from theoretical debate to empirical evidence, teaching teams that progress is iterative rather than instantaneous.
When people realize that thoughtful attempts are genuinely welcomed and supported, their hesitation gives way to curiosity and speed. Decisiveness becomes a collective muscle, strengthening every time an organization steps into the box and commits to the play.
A Personal Reflection
Throughout my years in leadership roles, some of the most enduring breakthroughs I have witnessed did not stem from pristine, perfectly orchestrated roadmaps. They came from teams willing to step into the batter’s box and test a hypothesis live in the field before every single question had a polished answer.
Early in any transformational program, the natural gravitational pull of an organization is toward delay. Stakeholders often want one more study, one more scenario plan, or one more steering committee review. There is an understandable instinct to search for bulletproof assurance, especially when modernizing core transactional infrastructure, deploying guest facing digital touch points, or piloting emerging architectures.
Yet clarity is rarely discovered in an executive briefing room. It is forged through execution.
When we placed real solutions directly into operating restaurants and stores, we uncovered insights that no slide deck could have predicted. We learned precisely where guest behavior differed from our assumptions, where store level friction emerged, and how our support infrastructure needed to pivot. Had we kept the bat on our shoulder waiting for an infallible plan, the market window would have closed and the momentum would have vanished. Motion creates clarity far faster than contemplation ever can.
Final Thoughts
No championship was ever won from the dugout, and no enterprise ever secured its future by admiring pitches as they flew past the strike zone. Organizations do not transform through the brilliance of their passive roadmaps, rather they evolve through the courage of their daily execution.
True leadership demands that we accept a degree of discomfort. It asks us to look past the illusion of complete certainty, trust the preparation of our people, and step forward with conviction. When we encourage our teams to swing at good opportunities rather than wait endlessly for flawless ones, we unleash the real creative and operational potential of our companies.
At the end of the day, legacy is built on the swings you were bold enough to take, not the safe innings spent watching from the sidelines. The organizations that thrive through disruption are those that foster the confidence to lean in, adjust on the fly, and swing with purpose every single time they step up to the plate.
📚Book Recommendation of the Week
The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik
While traditional sports books often celebrate instinct alone, Lindbergh and Sawchik dive deep into the revolution transforming how teams build greatness from within. The MVP Machine chronicles how forward-thinking franchises and players rejected century-old assumptions to embrace rapid feedback loops, biomechanical tracking, and continuous operational experimentation.
For leaders, the book offers an extraordinary case study in continuous improvement and agile execution. It reinforces that taking the bat off your shoulder does not mean swinging blindly in the dark, rather it means building a culture where teams are empowered with the right telemetry to test new ideas, fail fast, and systematically develop breakthrough capabilities.