Ted Williams Final at Bat – A Family Business Lesson

Hello, this is Wayne Rivers at The Family Business Institute. Thanks for tuning in. Please give us the benefit of your thinking
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This week, I want to talk about the great Ted Williams, his final at bat and how there's a lesson in that final at bat for us
that run small businesses. It's, I think a valuable lesson in not just ... Ted Williams career is a great lesson and not just
individual greatness, but what it takes to achieve more than that in effect, team greatness. So you know, if you're not a
baseball fan and you don't know who Ted Williams is, when he was a young man, he said his dream was to walk down the
street and have people say "there goes the greatest hitter that ever lived." He had this vision in his mind of what a great
hitter he was going to be and maybe he wasn't the greatest hitter of all time, but it's hard to argue against him.

He led the league in batting average six times. He led the league in home runs and RBI's four different times. He won the
Triple Crown twice. If you're not a baseball fan, just Google, Triple Crown baseball and you'll know what a practically
impossible task that is, especially to do it twice. That's just, that's just off the charts amazing. His greatest feat I suppose
considered by many, is he batted 406 in 1941. He was the last man to bat over 400 in the major leagues and even that's a
story because on the next to the last day of the season, his average was like 0.3995. It would have been rounded up to
400. If he sat out the double header on the last game of the season, he would have been credited with a 400 average. And
this is Ted Williams. He says, "heck no, I am not doing that."

And he played both sides a double header, got a bunch of hits, ended up raising his average six points to 406 in the final
day of the season. He was that kind of a guy. He missed three years of his career, his prime of his career, World War II as
a fighter pilot, and then two more years during the Korean conflict. And he was such a great pilot, in Korea his wing man
was John Glenn, who became one of America's most famous test pilots, ultimately an astronaut, and ultimately a US
Senator. He wasn't the leader of the squadron, Ted Williams was. That's what a pilot he was. Just a giant of a guy.

So, this little factoid came from a blog subscriber named Jim Shanahan and I just thought it made perfect sense. So Jim
pointed out on the last day of the season, on the last day of Ted William's storied career, in his final game, his final at bat,
his final appearance at Fenway park at age 42, in the eighth inning, he hit a home run off Jack Fisher of the Baltimore
Orioles; a 400 foot Homer at the age of 42, that's his last at bat.

And this is the greatest hitter of all time maybe, playing for his home team at his home stadium, the only team he ever
played for. And the History Channel said that he hit the home run in front of a nearly empty house. In other words, the
stands were mostly empty. I mean, think about this, the greatest hitter of all time, at home in his final game, never played
for another team anywhere, and there's virtually nobody in the stands to see it. Very few fans to cheer the great Ted
Williams in his last heroic feat in his last at bat of his career.

So how can that be? It just sounds so incongruous that this could happen in a city like Boston that's baseball crazy, and I'll
tell you why I think it is. The Red Sox weren't a very good team for most of Ted's career. They weren't a very good team
in 1960 that's for sure. They had a losing record. And my thought was if a player the caliber of Ted Williams can't lift his
team in a season to a winning record, if he could never lift his team to win a world series as great as he was as an individual,
what does that say about the rest of us regular old human beings? I mean, doesn't it make sense that we're going to be
so much stronger as individuals if we can build out great teams?

The greatness for most of us won't be measured by individual statistics. You know, I don't have anybody charting my atbats and hits and home runs and all that stuff and you don't either. Greatness for us, the measure of our capability, the
measure of our performance over our careers isn't going to be measured by individual statistics. It's going to be measured
by the teams we put together and the accomplishments we achieve together. I'd love to have your comments.

Don't forget bootcamp, April 15th, this is cohort Delta, and we look forward to hearing from you in the comment section
below. Thank you.