Life is like a game of cricket, you never know till the last ball is bowled!

Being an ardent cricket fan, a decent cricketer and also having seen a few good years in the IT industry, has made me look at life in a unique manner. When I was in my teens, life for me was just cricket and nothing else. I could not see or visualize anything beyond the game. Cricket is not just a first love or a passion for me, but like all Indians say, it’s like a religion.

Just like Mahendra Singh Dhoni famously says in an advertisement – Studying the pitch, ground conditions and analyzing the opposition team was more like studies & homework for me. Feeling the smell of wet grass on the ground early in the morning, warm up sessions with the coach, catching and fielding practice were all the things that used to start the day for me.

Interestingly though, even today, at 27, I see life in the same mode like a game of cricket. The last couple of years have helped me see life differently but in the same dimensions like cricket. Having been in the Sales & Marketing domain, I got a chance to closely see various facets of an organization and also got the privilege to interact with different people in an organization from varied departments and backgrounds. Being a part of numerous corporate cricket teams, where I had to wear different hats while analyzing different situations was challenging as well as exciting.

I began to study the game closely like never before and started understanding what managing a team means from a holistic perspective. For example, Visualizing a dream, envisioning it & percolating it to the players is the role of the Coach, just like the Board of Directors or CEO/Chief Strategy officers etc. The Role of a Manager is like the captain of the cricket team – Getting the best out of the available resources. Senior players’ mentoring the juniors is important to make them get accustomed to international pressures & expectations. Coaching is important to refine technical loopholes & understand the intricacies or nuances i.e. Training of Technical Experts/Subject matter experts in domain in orgs.

Planning and Strategy

Planning is important – the venue, the opposition, their team & strategy & our counterproductive strategies need to be analyzed. Similarly in the corporate scenario, having a plan for each business unit, service line, geography, competitor strategy, market dynamics and targets is imperative.

Team Selection Vs. Recruitment

The need for effective utilization of existing resources is critical in an organization which is similar to choosing the best combination (playing 11). Getting the best combination is a very important aspect in any form of cricket. A captain, selection committee and team management needs to make sure that they have the right kind of balance and combination of players with the right skills, expertise, talent and also other important factors like experience of being in particular situations before.

Horses for courses policy – Picking the right category of players for Twenty20, One Day Internationals and Test Matches. Twenty20 – Big hitting batsmen and utility cricketers thrive on this format. For e.g – Batsmen who can play cameos and hit big sixes at any given point in the match. A need to adapt to the fast nature of the game is important. One Day Cricket – Need for an all-rounder, specialist batsmen and bits and pieces cricketers who can contribute to the team in at least 2 of the 3 main dimensions of Batting, Bowling and Fielding. Test Cricket – A game for specialists. Extremely talented and skillful batsmen and bowlers are required who can withstand pressure and have the patience and the temperament to take the team through in tough situations.

In the same manner, it’s important for the management in a corporate scenario to understand and identify the best skill sets available from a given pool of resources for recruitment purposes. Recruitments and selection is an important element in any organization and hence the selection committee in this case which would be the HR and the Project Manager would play a crucial role. For example, at times an employee needs to have strong technical skills for hardcore technical projects and/or strong interpersonal and management skills for being a project manager/business analyst/account manager etc. Every resource has some unique skill set or the other which differentiates him/her from the rest.

Project Manager Vs. Captain

A Project Manager’s role can be compared to that of the Captain of a cricket team. A captain plays a huge role in managing a team and bringing in positive results. The captain’s major roles are people-management, honing his/her own skills and adapting to various situations thrown at them at any point of the game. A captain is as good as his team, but at the same time he/she needs to realize that they have to set an example for others to follow as a benchmark. They should set high standards and create the hunger amongst the players to succeed. Similarly, a project manager should thrive to set the highest standards of quality, delivery and customer interactions to ensure effectiveness and efficiency of the overall project. He/she should shield the team in times of adversity as well as give credit to the right people for their contributions to the team’s or project’s success.

Training & Development of talent

Another important aspect of the corporate world is Training & Development which is on similar lines as Net practice, Training camps, setting up cricket academies. No player or individual is born perfect, everyone has his/her own strengths and weaknesses. The team management needs to organize and execute proper training calendars for each individual players/group of players to learn and improve their skills. For e.g. setting up academies like the MRF pace foundation in Chennai, National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru, sending budding cricketers to India A tours in countries like Australia, South Africa etc.

Each player should be allocated a mentor/coach to be monitored on an individual level to analyze their progress in regular time intervals. Also, now-a-days teams appoint separate coaches for different departments like Batting, Bowling and Fielding making them a specialist’s job. This helps every team member to take each of those tasks seriously and contribute whatever they in those areas.

Similarly, in a corporate environment, we use terms like Training and Development where we have various kinds of trainings like On the Job Training, Technical Training, Soft Skills Training, Leadership training sessions etc.

Improvisation & Innovation

With the advent of the One day and T20 formats, cricket has seen many forms of improvisations and innovations in terms of tweaking the rules of the game, new shots (Like the reverse sweep, scoops over the keeper’s head etc) being perfected by batsmen, the recent launch of the Mongoose Bat in the IPL and also day night matches with colored clothing and white ball being a regular feature now. Similarly, the IT industry has seen a sea change in its outlook with an ocean of technological inventions and innovations over the last decade. Innovation has not only become the buzz word, but has also become the key for survival and sustenance in the market. First the Global Delivery Model, then BPO/KPO revolution, changes in pricing strategies in alignment with the SaaS framework (Pay-per-use model) and now the cloud computing era making news all over the industry. Interestingly, now sports and entertainment has become a separate niche vertical in itself for a lot of product based software vendors who create specialized softwares for cricket for gauging a team’s or player’s performance.

Employee lay off Vs. Players being dropped

Finally, there is one comparison which I did not wish to make, but I guess sometimes a few hard facts are a little difficult to digest. An employee being ‘Laid off’ or ‘Terminated’ from the workplace on performance grounds or due to bad weather prevailing in the industry can be related to a player being dropped for inconsistency or on disciplinary grounds. But nevertheless, every player or employee has to prove his caliber and get back on track!

There may be many more areas from which we can draw comparisons between the two worlds, but these were some of the prominent things that come to one’s mind while thinking about writing an article like this.

I hope you enjoyed reading it and visualizing the real life implications of it.