![]() Grant repeated the experiment with other groups and saw greater results each time. A month later, the workers had spent 142 percent more time on the phone and brought in 171 percent more money. (Grant) invited one of the scholarship recipients to visit the call center and briefly tell the workers how the scholarship had affected his life and how much he appreciated what they were doing. All of those ideas tanked.īut Adam Grant, an organizational psychology professor at the Wharton School at Penn, had researched motivation in the workplace. The group had hit a collective slump, so bosses tried all kinds of things to boost productivity: pay increases, promotions, recognition, food and breaks. ![]() It’s a sports book, but some of the most riveting scenes take place at mundane places like a university call center where students had part-time jobs calling alumni for donations. Ryan interviewed athletes and front-office executives, yes, but also CEOs, business leaders, sociologists and neuroscientists in her quest to gain, she writes, “some insight into how we perform better or worse based on who we are around.” Ryan writes almost directly to chemistry skeptics and, as with “Moneyball,’’ the result is a book that could just as well be taught in business school. Mercifully - for the sake of Mays, Kent, Leyland and the reader - this is not 264 pages about the power of halftime speeches or players bonding around a campfire. (Ryan dedicated the book to Mike Krukow, whose voice in these pages helps recount several memorable behind-the-scenes clashes involving successful Giants teams of the late-’80s.) What exactly is team chemistry? It’s a question Ryan had considered since covering a 1989 Giants team that reached the World Series with a collection of divergent personalities that would have made sense nowhere else on earth. Plenty of polite teams finished last (like Leo Durocher said). Did it actually matter? Plenty of infighting teams won big (like the Swinging A’s). Ryan does essentially the same thing here with team chemistry, looking for evidence - yes, evidence - that the age-old saws about the importance of unity and playing together are true. In his early days, James used to listen to baseball broadcasters spouting trusty axioms over the airwaves and wonder, “Is that actually true?” Then he spent his nightshifts as a security guard at the Stokely-Van Camp’s pork-and-beans cannery unearthing the data that flouted conventional wisdom. The book is called “Intangibles: Unlocking the Science and Soul of Team Chemistry” and, improbably, this dive into a squishy-soft concept like togetherness most resembles the best works about the statistical revolution, like Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball” and Bill James’ magnificent “Baseball Abstracts.” That’s the point of this whole enterprise, to sort through the fact and fiction of what locker-room camaraderie - or lack thereof - might mean to a team’s overall performance. Ryan, a nationally award-winning journalist who is now a media consultant with the Giants, welcomes the skepticism. ![]() … I had teams that’d go to chapel together every Sunday and couldn’t win a game. “To me chemistry was a subject you took in school. Jim Leyland takes another puff from his cigarette.
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