One of the best explanations of strategic thinking I stumbled on is about cricket. You see, a bad cricket captain sends a fielder where the last delivery was hit by the batter. A good captain, on the other hand, places his field according to his understanding of the batter’s weaknesses, the pitch and conditions, and his own bowler’s strengths. This captain won’t be rattled into changing the field placement after every ball.
I liked the analogy so much I have been thinking of peddling it as my own. But I was a little unsure. I mean, why drag cricket analogy into business and economy writing?
But now I feel emboldened.
Towards the end of last month, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said a lot of people likened foreign policy to chess. But it was, in reality, more like cricket. “And it is like cricket because, first, there are many players. Two, the playing conditions keep varying. Playing at home and playing abroad are very different. You are at the umpire’s whims at times. There are many formats.”
The minister was speaking at the release of a book by Mohinder Amarnath, who played a stellar role in India’s first Cricket World Cup triumph in 1983. But the cricket analogy is not always restricted by context.
Writing in this newspaper on Wednesday, Abhishek Anand, Josh Felman, and Arvind Subramanian said: “…the exchange rate has since 2022 become as flat as the pitch at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) in Australia — without the bounce of the green turf there.” The authors were talking about exchange rate management by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
They should be applauded for using a cricketing analogy. The RBI is no stranger to it. Shaktikanta Das, whose term as governor ended earlier this month, frequently took recourse to it.
Also read: From Tolstoy to cricketing analogy – how RBI governor is trying to demystify central banking
In a fireside chat at the Business Standard BFSI summit in early November, Das said: “Every catch is as serious and as important as the previous catch. Sometimes you drop what looks to be an easy catch… sometimes you take difficult catches.” He was speaking about the challenges he faced as the RBI governor.
At last year’s edition of the same summit, Das had exhorted banking and financial sector people to “play long term, play like Rahul Dravid.”
It is not only regulators and ministers and economists who are fond of cricketing analogy. In March this year, Gautam Adani used it to explain how his eponymous group had made an impact on infrastructure development. “The Adani Group has influenced the infrastructure sector in the same way as T20 has affected Test cricket,” he said.
And it is not only Indians who are fond of cricketing analogy. Campbell Wilson, the chief executive officer and managing director of Air India, said the airline’s transformation under the Tata Group was a Test match and not a T20. “…we are at about lunch on Day 3,” said the New Zealand-born Wilson, who joined Air India in 2022 after 26 years with Singapore Airlines.
Other sports in other countries, too, contribute to business conversations. But they are not quite as pervasive as cricket: One begins to run out of ammunition after “hitting one out of the park”, “self goal”, and “stepping up to the plate”.
Cricket, on the other hand, is rich with imagery. You can find dozens of instances where people connected with business and economy use cricket lingo. Some of the most used phrases are “bowling a googly”, “playing it safe”, “hitting a six”, “sticky wicket”, “on the back foot”, “on the front foot”, “the wrong ‘un”, “getting on the scoreboard”, “dropped catch”, “non-striker”, and “second innings”.
It may be so because cricket, of all sports, has the most uncertainty. In other games, nothing might happen for long passages of time. In cricket, every delivery is an event: It may be any of several kinds of deliveries (good, bad, short, long, wide, on the wicket, swinging, spinning…) and it can produce any of several different possible results (single, couple, three, four, five, six, catch, bowled, caught and bowled, run out, stumped…). Curiously, if it is a no-ball, it is an even bigger event (the batting team gets a free run, and a free hit).
In cricket, it does not matter how good a player you are or how you performed in the previous game. Your performance today begins afresh and can take you anywhere. What is more, you can be good in one format and suck at another — cricket is the only game with three international formats, two of which have their own World Cups. Chess has different formats, but nothing close to having one in which a match is wrapped up in three hours and another that can go up to five days.
Uncertainty is integral to all businesses. The other thing businessmen swear by is strategy, which is integral to cricket. Beyond the concept of strategic thinking described at the beginning of this column, several people make their living by analysing the game, going down to ball-by-ball data.
Coaches do their own analyses. Yet, once play begins, the captain’s role becomes crucial, more so than that of all the coaches and analysts. So, right there, a CEO might identify with having to take crucial calls in an environment of overwhelming uncertainty. It is heroic.
Mr Jaishankar gets this. “…at the end of the day, a lot of it is about psychology, trying to outthink the other team, trying to get into their heads,” he said at the book release.
Cricket is not going away from business anytime soon, certainly not from Mint Road. Das is no longer the RBI governor, but his successor, Sanjay Malhotra, is not loath to cricketing lingo. “This is my first stint here,” the new governor said at his first press conference, “and if I start playing my shots from Day 1, ball 1 — it won’t be appropriate on my part.”
Suveen Sinha is a journalist and author. He tweets @suveensinha. Views are personal.