“At Heart, I Am Still Just a Kid Trying to Make My Dad Proud”
– Savannah Banana’s CEO, Jesse Cole
VIM Executive Coaching draws its inspiration from a number of sources.
One of the cornerstones of mindfulness – and business coaching in general is encouraging an attitude of open-mindedness to all possibilities. With that in mind, today’s inspiration for our post is an exhibition baseball team that has swept the sport with its outlandish, fun, innovative approach to the game. The team is the Savannah Banana’s.
We are as serious as the most serious banana split.
No time for purists
There are, of course, hundreds of thousands, millions of purists who will decry this touring team from Georgia as not playing pure baseball. Then again, that has always been the critique against the Harlem Globetrotters and the sport of basketball, or if you prefer, the WWE and its roots in Greco-Roman Wrestling.
“But you’re not serious baseball players!” Purists might say. The “Bananas” are, in fact, quite serious, as are “the ‘Trotters.” The “Bananas” are serious about being innovative and breathing a little life into a sport that has often done everything it could to prevent itself from being adaptable to change.
To extend all these silly analogies a bit further, the team from Savannah, with its garish, banana-colored uniforms, are a sort of baseball bell cow. They attract disengaged fans to a sport that up until recently, could have games that lasted hours with interminable delays.
By the way, the Savannah Bananas were once a serious minor league team until its CEO Jesse Cole permitted his players to put on displays of antics that made people laugh and have fun. If, in his own way, Mr. Cole can encourage new or disenfranchised fans to also revisit “the real baseball product,” then he is doing the entire sport a tremendous service.
Mindfulness is courageous
For a long period, professional baseball was rigid and unresponsive to the needs of their more casual fan base. The purists did not want to change. They were destroying the sport they claimed to love.
Baseball finally realized that tastes had changed from 1905 or 1935 to 2023. Executives were made to be mindful that the core purists were dwindling and that most viewers could not or would not sit through a 5-hour game.
Let us be completely realistic in this discussion. VIM Executive Coaching has had the honor of business coaching some amazing executive leaders in professional sports. The concerns, pressures, expectations and financials behind the product at Yankee Stadium or Coors Field is not much different than what executive leaders face in pharmaceutical companies or fast-food chains.
Organizations that are resistant to change, to not addressing major issues, to clinging to its culture of a lack of mindfulness invariably fail. It is precisely why baseball went to a shortened format or why other types of organizations had no choice but to address bias or environmental issues or gender discrimination.
Being mindful is courageous. It is an admission that the status quo is no longer serving the organization. The executive who fails to address a human resources issue, for example, or turns a blind-eye to nepotism or bias will fail.
If it takes a fun exhibition team such as the Savannah Bananas to reignite a love for a game once seen as a national pastime, then it has served a serious purpose. Purists might mock the team in the banana-colored uniforms, but sometimes the tail must indeed wag the dog.
The great breakthroughs we experience in the shifting of organizational mindsets are usually breakthroughs of being receptive to necessary change and flexibility; being present in the moment. The mindful, no matter what the business are those who are effective in generating change or creating disruption.
The CEO of this silly baseball team likes to have fun and likes to generate an atmosphere of fun. The purists might loathe their attempts, but their attempts have garnered national attention and a huge following. Some might call their boldness silliness; we tend to see it as mindfulness in action.