The essay I'm about to share with you was published more than 20 years ago.

A few of the numbers have changed, but the core idea has not.

American football.

Indeed, the growing complexity of business makes many corporate managers shy away from baseball as a metaphor.

Baseball more than most other major sports is structured in ways that promote the emergence of

improbable heroes.

Many business leaders see their game as more like football, with its image of interdependent

players with multiple skills cooperating to move the ball down a long field 10 yards at a time.

Kaufman, 1999.

There seems to be unanimity among business writers and pundits that football, the U.S. version since soccer is called

football in most of the world, is the appropriate cultural metaphor for understanding

Americans and American business behavior.

Jeffrey Colvin, 2002, a fortune columnist,

analyzed the recent large number of American corporate scandals

by comparing the complex rules of football to the complex

accounting rules and laws that American executives are want to evade.

By comparison, devotees of European soccer are faced with a simpler game and only half of the number of rules,

most of which are stated as principles that the referees use to make calls, in a similar manner to the more general accounting

principles governing European business. Appropriately, Calvin titled his

article, Sick of Scandal,, blame football. In 2003, Calvin followed up with an article titled

For Touchdown, see Rule 3, Section 38, in which he reiterated his beliefs.

We Americans like the idea of a national pastime,

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