Branch Rickey as a Public Manager: Fulfilling the Eight Responsibilities of Public Management

What is the job of the public manager? How does it differ from the work of the private-sector manager? The author argues that public managers have eight different responsibilities, the first of which is to seek to achieve an important public purpose. This responsibility not only distinguishes the kind of objectives that public and private managers pursue-having an important public purpose also affects why and how the manager approaches the other seven responsibilities. But a public manager need not, suggests the author, work for a public agency. Rather, it is the nature of the manager's responsibilities, not the individual's position or title, that determines if he or she is engaged in public management. Thus, the author continues, Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers who devised the strategy for integrating majorleague baseball, was a public manager. Rickey was seeking to achieve a most important public purpose; thus, to be successful, he had to fulfill all eight responsibilities of public management. Branch Rickey was a public manager. Admittedly, he never was appointed to head a public agency. Nor was he ever elected to public office (though he was offered the Republican nominations for both governor and senator of Missouri). On paper, Branch Rickey was a business maanager-a very successful business manager. He invented baseball's farm system and a number of innovative instructional techniques. He helped create the position of general manager and developed a cadre of managerial proteges (Frick 1973, 169-71). His teams won pennants in St. Louis, Brooklyn, and Pittsburgh.' 'Historian Ronald Oakley writes that Rickey's "influence on the game, some experts think, was second only to that of Alexander Cartwright and Babe Ruth" (1994, 25). J-PART 7(1997): 1:1-33 1IJournal of Public Administration Research and Theory This content downloaded from 157.55.39.105 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 04:30:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Branch Rickey as a Public Manager But Branch Rickey is most remembered as the president and general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who broke the color line in baseball. And to do that, Branch Rickey had to be not only a manager but a public manager-an excellent public manager. It was Jackie Robinson, of course, not Branch Rickey, who actually broke the color barrier. It was Robinson, not Rickey, who had to learn to hit the major-league curveball, who had to learn to go to his right on a ground ball, who had to cope with the beanballs and the spikings, who suffered the humiliations and received the death threats.2 It took Robinson, not Rickey, to implement Rickey's scheme for integrating major-league baseball. Robinson was essential, but so was Rickey. If Robinson had not been such a superior-and intelligent-athlete, if he had not been capable of dealing with psychological pressures and personal burdens that few of us can even imagine, it might have been many years before baseball was integrated on the field. But ifRickey had not conceived and implemented his plan so intelligently and carefully the same would have been true. Before moving to Brooklyn, Branch Rickey served as vice president of the St. Louis Cardinals for over two decades. In 1942, Rickey's Cardinals won 106 games to capture the National League pennant and then defeated the New York Yankees in the World Series. Branch Rickey never got a hit for that team, never pitched a ball, never played. Yet Rickey and his system created that winning team. The Cardinals won the pennant again in 1943 and in 1944 won both the pennant and the World Series; by then, however, Rickey had left St. Louis for Brooklyn. And yet, the Cardinals' success in 1943 and 1944 can be directly attributed to Rickey. The Brooklyn Dodgers won pennants-and even a World Series-after Rickey left Brooklyn, and the Pittsburgh Pirates won the World Series in 1960, after Rickey had built that team and again left town. Rickey was essential to the success achieved by those teams in St. Louis, Brooklyn, and Pittsburgh. Similarly, Branch Rickey was essential to the integration of baseball.3 How long after 1947 would it have taken if Rickey had not assumed the initiative-and done it well? That question, of course, is impossible to answer definitively. Historian Carl Prince concludes, however, that Rickey "was singlehandedly responsible for moving African Americans into organized white ball a full decade earlier than it might otherwise have occurred had he not forced the issue with both wisdom and political acuity" (1996, 34).4 "The credit for banishing Jim Crow from baseball belongs solely to Branch Rickey and the strategy that he 2Certainly, as Oakley writes, "Robinson had the most difficult rookie season of any player in the history of the game" (1994, 53). 'Robinson himself has written, "that it was Mr. Rickey's drama and that I was only a principal actor" (1995, xxii), though that certainly underplays Robinson's role. 41n April 1947, the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper that had crusaded for years for the integration of the majors, observed: "If Robinson fails to make the grade, it will be many years before a Negro makes the grade. This is IT!" (Ribowsky 1995, 6). 21J-PART, January 1997 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.105 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 04:30:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Branch Rickey as a Public Manager pursued must be judged overwhelmingly effective," concludes historian Jules Tygiel. Nevertheless, Tygiel thinks the integration of baseball could have happened-and soon-without Rickey: "With public pressure mounting, particularly in the New York area, it seems likely that political events would have forced the issue within the next few years" (1983, 207). Yet, even if outside politics had indeed forced baseball's hierarchy to attend to the issue, would the fractious process of integrating the sport (or of integrating anything) have been as successful without the thoughtful guidance of someone like Rickey? Branch Rickey was a mediocre baseball player. In four seasons with the St. Louis Browns and New York Highlanders (who became the Yankees), he batted .239 in just 119 games (Wolf 1990, 1378); as a catcher, he established a major-league record by allowing thirteen stolen bases in one game (Ward and Burns 1994, 129). As a field manager, he was not much better, winning less than half of his games over ten years with the St. Louis Browns and Cardinals (Wolf 1990, 602). But as a front-office manager (what today is called the general manager) Rickey excelled. He was a master at strategy and teaching.5 He was a master at identifying talent and creating winning teams. He was a master at making money-both for himself and for his teams' owners. And he was a master at orchestrating social change. Branch Rickey was a master manager-a master public manager. THE EIGHT RESPONSIBILITIES OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT What did Branch Rickey do that made him a public manager? What did he do-actually do-that means he was more than a very successful baseball executive, more than just another successful business manager? To be effective-to accomplish significant public purposespublic managers have to fulfill eight different responsibilities. Excellent public managers must * seek to achieve an important public purpose; * possess a clear definition of success, including benchmarks along the way; * have an overall strategy for achieving their purpose; * be analytical about everything; * pay attention to the details of implemenitation; 5"'Branch Rickey made me a major-league hitter with a series of lessons that bordered on genius," recalled Duke Snider. He was the person "most responsible for my being in the Hall of Fame" (1988, 41, 88). 3/J-PART, January 1997 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.105 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 04:30:24 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Branch Rickey as a Public Manager * influence people by building coalitions, motivating individuals and teams, and creating a favorable climate of public opinion; * recognize and exploit their luck and, when they are not lucky, keep focused on their public purpose and grope their way toward it; and * leave the organization better than they found it. Excellent business managers do many of these things. It might even be argued that they do all of these things-at least all of these things except seek to achieve an important public purpose. But that first responsibility does more than simply define what the manager is attempting to accomplish; it does more than establish why the manager undertakes these other tasks. The important public purpose also shapes how the public manager approaches each responsibility. For example, the managers of a business enterprise need to influencethe behavior of others. If the business is to obtain the necessary land-use permits or get important regulatory changes through the legislature, it needs to influence the behavior of many others. But to achieve its basic purpose-be that to sell ten million boxes of breakfast cereal or to double its share of the market in blue jeans-it does not need to affect the behavior of anyone other than those who buy breakfast cereal or blue jeans. In fact, it does not even have to influence the behavior of all the customers for cereal or jeans. It is quite possible to convince a lot of people to buy millions of boxes of a cereal that a lot of other noncustomers find literally distasteful. Unlike public managers, most business managers can ignore the behavior and views of most people most of the time. Indeed, how managers approach each of these eight responsibilities depends-pivotallyon whether they are attempting to achieve a private or a public