Golf, Baseball and LaserShip

Making an ever-closer approach to optimal performance

    Tiger Woods may never dominate golf again.  Not because of his personal problems or because he has finally been supplanted as the top ranking golf professional:  The reason Tiger will not dominate golf again like he did from 1999 to 2001 and again from 2005 through 2008 is that the level of play in the game has been raised—everybody else is playing better.  

   There is a natural and inevitable advancement that occurs in golf and many other similar systems.  There is scientific theorizing to this phenomenon:  The late scientist Stephen Jay Gould, a baseball fan, theorized on this very topic using baseball as his example.  He asked why there were no more .400 hitters—the last professional baseball player to bat over .400 (hitting 40% of the time) was Ted Williams in 1941.  In answering his own question, the Harvard professor theorized that this was not due to the lack of good players, but to everything else in the game getting better.  Gould’s assessment was that over time, in a more or less stable universe like baseball or golf, the overall quality of performance advances inexorably, making outlier performances like a very low percentage hitter and .400 average hitter all less likely. 

   .400 hitters haven't disappeared because of cosmetic changes in the game or that the heroes of the past were supermen, but rather as the natural consequence of an increasing level of play that comes closer to the maximum of human ability coupled with stabilization of the game itself. These factors tend to decrease the differences between average and stellar performers.  The best players are always there, but everyone is so much better now that the average has moved right next to them.  In other words, the disappearance of 400 hitting paradoxically is measuring the general improvement of play overall and not the exact opposite--the absence of great players. 

   As golf and baseball teach us, overtime, in stable systems, all elements within will make an ever-closer approach to optimal performance. 

The Spread of Excellence

  Can we expect the same in LaserShip?  As we develop our distribution systems—processes and procedures—and standardize them across our entire company, we should see the benefit of a stable system moving us in the inevitable direction toward optimal performance.  When we are successful in developing universal, across the board, consistent systems, and if the theorizing of Gould was correct, we should see increasing, consistent performance by all players and teams; the spread of excellence.