From an enterprise perspective, I’ve always felt that true leadership is about Doing The Right Thing, and that the role of control functions is to make sure that Things Are Done The Right Way. Choosing the Right Thing is therefore of fundamental importance, and is often to do with principles and values rather than metrics and measurements. When you start thinking about being 57% right, that’s when you land up in Another Fine Mess.

Which is one of the reasons I was so glad to see this yesterday:

At that point it didn’t look like India had enough runs on the board, and Dhoni was the last recognised batsman. And the captain. Victory was not assured, and he could have stayed on. But he Does The Right Thing. He walks.

And talking about doing the right thing, I was glad to see that the ICC reversed its decision and awarded England the “Darrell Hair” match, as was the case originally. There were no grounds to call it a draw; worse, it was a very dangerous precedent to set. So I am glad to see that the original decision has been reinstated.

Why did it take this long? How come it happened at all? Or, as friend and erstwhile colleague Dom Sayers suggested, is this the last step in the rehabilitation of Hair? And the answer to all those questions is “I don’t know”.

What I do know is this. Doing the right thing is important. And doing the right thing is a key facet of leadership. So well done Dhoni.

Some wonderfully evocative phrases:

• allen bowling feeling bitter
• woodfull declining warners sympathy
• one side unplaying cricket ruining game
• time decent men get out game

So where is all this from?  Here’s the story:

Due to restrictions on commercial radio in the United Kingdom in the 1930s, radio stations were established on the continent to beam programs directly to the United Kingdom. The main station was situated in Paris. One of its advertisers was the Gillette Safety Razor Co. which sponsored reporting of the controversial 1932-33 cricket series played between Australia and England in Australia. These were the days before live radio and television broadcasts of international sporting events. Each day a reporter cabled very brief descriptions of play to Paris where they were transformed into full scripts which were then broadcast to the United Kingdom.

The State Library of New South Wales has seen fit to make the cables available to the world at large, a great and laudable gesture. You can read all about it here, and get to the original cables as well. How wonderful.

Looking at the cables reminded me, at least in part, of Twitter, in terms of the brevity of message, the use of abbreviated words, the terseness of communication. And I couldn’t help but smile at the “business model”, which, bluntly put, was “Typescript, commissioned by Gillette Safety Razor Company”. How long before I receive sponsored news on Twitter, with just a few tweaks on the 1930s model? One way becomes two way, the subscription process is democratic, the subjects covered are infinite, and the writers are global microbrands in HughSpeak?

My thanks to Lloyd Davis for tweeting me about it, and to CityofSound for covering it in the first place, where Lloyd saw it.

But in the meantime.

I was at dinner with my namesake MR Rangaswami (at a wonderful restaurant called Coi), and the subject of customer-driven innovation came up. MR reminded me of something Peter Drucker had said to him, which went along the lines of:

When you’re listening to your customers, remember to listen to the customers you don’t have, not just the ones you have. There are a lot more of them.

Listen to the customers you don’t have. I think that a lot of the focus of open innovation is about providing those customers a voice; that the tools of open innovation give them the ability to articulate what it would take to make them customers of yours; that the potential of open innovation is to attract and retain those customers.

Something to ponder about.

[Incidentally, today would have been Peter Drucker's 99th birthday.]

Now that’s a big number, it isn’t often that a team boasts a century of centuries. To put it in context, the current Australian team’s comparative number is 86. I went and looked at the team under Steve Waugh, at a time when it boasted Justin Langer, Mark Waugh, Matthew Hayden, Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist and Damien Martyn. When I look at the lifetime totals for that group (which also included Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath) the number exceeds 170. But when I try and find the highest total as an actual team in an actual Test, the best I can do is 91, in October 2002, versus Pakistan in Sharjah.  I think that’s the biggest, the others just didn’t score centuries quickly enough to afford the exits of the Waugh brothers.

Very unscientific, very anecdotal. But the number to beat is 110. As in the total number of Test centuries scored by a Test team as constituted in a real Test and only including efforts up to and including that Test.

Any offers? Enjoy your weekend trying to get to a Nelson or beyond.

An aside. Imagine what you would need from Cricinfo in terms of database access or web service or RSS feed, such that you could write a program that could work out the answer. Let me know your thoughts.

Over the last 10 years, the team batting first has scored less than 200 runs more often than not, 12 times out of 21. Eight different teams have managed to “achieve” this, and they lost 9 times out of 12. The Indian total of 146, therefore, does not represent as abject a collapse as it would appear on the surface, despite the magic and mystique wielded by the spin pair of Mendis and Muralitharan.

So I will follow the next game with bridled optimism, even though I hear Sehwag has gone and gotten himself injured.

There was a separate comment made about the “carrom ball”, where Mendis’s action has been compared to that of John Gleeson. I never saw Gleeson play; when he visited India with the Australians in 1969, he didn’t play in the Calcutta Test. With his unusual action, Mendis is sure difficult to read; sometimes I get the impression that even Mendis doesn’t know what the ball is going to do when it leaves his hand. But batsmen can take heart from the Australian tour of South Africa with Gleeson. Nobody could read Gleeson either…except for a young Barry Richards, who didn’t care, and who never became one of Gleeson’s victims.

So that got me thinking. Surely that must be a record in 50-over cricket? Then I read on, and found the answer.

Apparently, Yuvraj does not hold the record. Last year, Namibia’s Gary Snyman hit 17 sixes against UAE.

Now how did I miss that? I wonder. UAE. Namibia. First-class cricket. I wonder.

Twenty20. The IPL. Darrell Hair. Sreesanth, Harbhajan, Collingwood, de Villiers. The Ponting bat. Jelly babies. The Pietersen stroke. Difficult times for cricket lovers? Not really. Aficionados know that the ideals of the game never change: they know what’s cricket and what’s not cricket. Humans are fallible, especially under pressure. Cricket is bigger than that.

One of the things that cricket is about is statistics. The more esoteric and offbeat the better. In cricket, when the going gets tough, it’s time for the tough to get going on completely useless statistics. So here’s one for you.

Test number 1869. West Indies versus Sri Lanka. Providence Stadium, Guyana, 22-26 March 2008. A match famous for this sequence: MG BSM KC DPMD TT TM HAPW WPUJC MTT HMRKB M.

M? Yup, he’s the one who lets the side down. Good old Muttiah Muralitharan, Test cricket’s highest ever wicket taker, has no other initial but that solitary M.

Otherwise Test number 1869 may prove very hard to beat, with the Sri Lankan team average of 3 initials per player.

Any improvements?

Now cricket people tend to know very little about baseball. If you asked a budding Bill Frindall what Tinker to Evers to Chance meant to him, you’d probably be met with a blank look. Baseball’s Sad Lexicon is not part of the traditional cricket aficionado’s vocabulary.

There are some things, however, that don’t need such lexical power for their enjoyment. Things like Abbott and Costello’s Who’s On First routine. I’d heard of it a long time ago, even read the script, but for some reason never actually heard it. Then, at reboot this year, Dan Gillmor made sure I didn’t miss out. [Thanks, Dan!].

Coincidentally, Tom Raftery made a passing tweet about the same thing today, as a result of which I found a video version.

If comedy routines were chillies, this one would be a naga jolokia.

If you’re a cricket fan, see how the other side laugh. If you’re a baseball fan, get your own back. If you’re neither, sit back and relax anyway. One way or the other, watch it. It’s too good to miss.

And if you’ve seen it before, I can’t see you not seeing it again….can you?

The years haven’t been short of controversy. The first I can remember was the D’Oliviera incident in 1968, when the South African tour was cancelled after Basil was included in the touring squad. Then there was the World Series Cricket breakaway, the Packer controversy as it was called. We’ve had questions about Tony Greig’s fielding position, Murali’s double-jointedness (leading to his exceeding the elbow extension and flexion limits that most cricketers have never heard of) , Paul Adams’s Frog in a Blender action, Lever’s use of vaseline.

We’ve had Ponting’s bat, Dravid’s ball, Brearley’s helmet (see Q517), all kinds of weird and wonderful things. We’ve even had the Trevor Chappell underarm incident.

We’ve had the limited-overs game introduced and then get more and more limited, as 60 became 50 and now we have 20.

In all that time, I have never seen a more stupid controversy than this one:

Kevin Pietersen has introduced a new stroke into cricket lore. He faces a bowler right-handed, and then, as the ball is released, switches stance and grip to become a left-hander, then sweeps the ball into oblivion past the boundary ropes, for six.

I watched him do this today, twice, as England played New Zealand. Absolutely amazing strokes, great talent, great timing, great strength. And then I heard about the controversy. [While I had read about it briefly over the last year or so, I had dismissed the arguments].

What is the controversy? That Pietersen starts with a right-hand-grip on the bat and then switches to a left-hand grip, and that this places the bowler at a disadvantage.

Pfui, as Nero Wolfe was wont to say. Double Pfui.

Here’s why:

1. The stroke of the reverse sweep has been around for a very long time. Hanif Mohammed is credited with having “invented” it, though some people say it was his brother Mushtaq. Hanif is known to have used the stroke in January 1958, over 50 years ago, in an “away” Test match, against one of the best teams in the world, the West Indies.

2. The “disadvantage” the bowler is placed under is apparently all to do with field placements. Law 41.5, The Fielder deals with onside limitations and potential no-balls. Law 36, the LBW rule, is focused on the definition of the offside.

3. The controversy is apparently around the use of the phrase “striker’s stance at the moment the ball comes into play for that delivery” in the LBW law, and in the phrase “at the instant of the bowler’s delivery” in the Fielder rule

Pfui again. The reverse sweep has been around for 50 years, and it was in use for a very long time before anyone had the talent and power and timing to use it for a boundary, much less a six. Pietersen has moved the standards even higher by having the sheer effrontery (and magical ability) to change his grip and not just his stance.

The two Laws being cited are laws that apparently came into place to correct other weaknesses in the aftermath of controversy, such as the Bodyline tour. If we have to change the law to state that the batsman is considered RHB or LHB based on what he declares himself to be as he takes up his initial stance at the start of his innings, then so be it.

But claim that he’s breaking the law, or that his stroke is illegal? Puh-leease. Nobody said it was illegal when Gatting failed to pull it off, with abysmal consequences, here.

What Pietersen is doing is playing cricket. Gloriously. If, as a result of KP trying the reverse sweep while changing hands, he is out LBW as a left-hander, then let’s have him given out. If, as a result of KP trying the reverse sweep while changing hands, he misses altogether, who is going to claim a no-ball? The umpire’s not going to call it. KP’s not going to ask for it. Maybe critics think that the bowler’s going to no-ball himself?

Enough of this guff.

]]> http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2008/06/15/not-cricket-of-course-it-is/feed/ 12 http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2008/06/14/musing-about-lazy-saturdays-and-ungoogleable-things/ http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2008/06/14/musing-about-lazy-saturdays-and-ungoogleable-things/#comments Sat, 14 Jun 2008 15:24:52 +0000 JP http://confusedofcalcutta.com/?p=1166 I grew up in a family where we were intense, almost obsessive, about many strange things. During my mid-to-late teens, I don’t think a day passed without there being a “session” at home. What do I mean by “session”? A gathering of people, numbering greater than 10, all focused on some activity or the other. What activities? They varied, in mini-seasons lasting a week or two, and included:

• Carroms (played in fours lying at odd angles on the floor)
• Table-tennis (on the dining table, using books to form the net
• Card games aplenty (from “56″ to Memorial Power, finding pairs, to Canasta, to TwoToTheLeft)
• Chess (not as many takers though
• Categories (which we called NamePlaceAnimalThing and played with real gusto).
• Scrabble (played with an incredible intensity)
• Board games in general, particularly Cluedo, but including Ludo, Chinese Checkers and Snakes & Ladders

That’s when it was too hot to play outside. Participant ages ranged from 6 to 60 (really) and everything was played with ferocious yet humorous spirit. Wonderful times. Usually half the people present were friends of one family member or the other, the rest were family or neighbours.

Sure we fought. It wasn’t always all sweetness and light. But in the main we played, played as close family and close friends, and we’ve stayed close ever since.

What I described above  was a daytime and weekend and holiday thing for the most part. Weekday evenings were all about hanging around together and listening to music; when it got late the scene shifted to playing duplicate bridge. And we read. We read by the shelf-load, by the truck-load. Draped in strange positions all over the place, usually munching on the food that would materialise by magic.

And one more thing. We were trivia freaks, but we didn’t call it trivia. We called it quizzing. It was perfectly normal for any one person to pull a dictionary, a book of quotations or a volume of an encyclopaedia off a shelf and then start asking passers-by questions. Calcutta had a brilliant quiz scene in those days, probably still has.

[Strangely enough, I don't remember seeing anyone study. Or do homework. I can't imagine where they could have, every room was packed with other, ultimately distracting, activity].

Anyway. As I was saying. We loved trivia. And we didn’t treat trivia so much as a test of knowledge but as a test of recall. More importantly, quizzing was a team sport and individual machismo was of no value.  Sure, “golden” answers were appreciated and respected, where you knew something that no one else on the team knew. But the important thing was the team.

These values made their way into the DNA of the quiz scene in Calcutta, particularly the “recall not knowledge” principle. Any fool could come up with a question that no one could answer. The challenge was to come up with a question that every team could answer, but not necessarily within 30 seconds while under competitive pressure.

It became a fine art, setting questions that danced teasingly on the tips of tongues. Those were the days Before Google. Nowadays it is actually quite hard to set a question that’s unGoogleable, and as a result the “recall versus knowledge” principle must be under severe attack. Particularly in today’s age of ubiquitous communication. I lost interest in the UK quiz scene once mobile phones with Web browsers and Shazam entered the scene; too many people resorted to, shall we say, alternate and assisted modes of recall.

Since then, just for fun, I’ve been quietly compiling lists of questions that can’t be Googled. Which means I look at many things with an unusual perspective. Take today for example. I was “watching” the cricket in Dhaka, and when I ran down the names of the Indian team, I noticed something:

The average surname-length of the team was below 6 letters, just 63 letters across the eleven people. Very unusual. [Incidentally, I also noticed that I have children older than half the team, a sure sign of my age].

So. Cricket fiends amongst you. What’s the shortest team you can come up with, the one that would trouble the scorers the least to put up. 63 is the target to beat. Sehwag Gambhir Sharma Singh Pathan Dhoni Raina Pathan Chawla Kumar Sharma. [I remember some Leicestershire and Northamptonshire teams in the early 1980s that had quite a few short-named players, must check].

Incidentally, the full name letter count could also be a record. 68 plus 63 makes 131. That’s low. That is very low … for a country that has had a President named Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, a singer called Madurai “MS” Subbulakshmi, a composer named Laxmikant Kudalkar;  and cricketers named Srinivasa Venkataraghavan and Bhagwat Chandrashekhar. [My own name and surname take up 21 letters].