Has Boss Vader left his evil empire to play bingo in Boca Raton

Excerpt from David Kiley's blog post yesterday on Businessweek.com http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/brandnewday/archives/2007/10/steinbrenner_a.html

The Yankees lost their series to Cleveland. Lots of Yankee haters are happy. Yankee fans are disgusted. Whether or not the fans blame the pitching, Alex Rodriguez's quiet bat, Joe Torre or general manager Brian Cashman, one thing is certain. Yankee owner George Steinbrenner somewhere along the way totally lost sight of his own brand.

I'm not talking about the Yankee brand, but the Steinbrenner brand. Time was that "Big Stein," as he was known on Seinfeld, defined the image of an executive who was bold, risk-taking, brash, a doer.

Has the Boss, George Steinbrenner, finally lost his dramatic will and flair? Is the "CEO" of the most historic franchise in all of sports beginning to move away from his responsibilities and public appearances ?The next few days will play a large part in answering these question, as we await news on whether Joe Torre will avoid the guillotine and get invited back as the Yankee manager.

In the past, outspoken and outrageous George would have most certainly fired (and maybe re-hired once or twice) Torre at the end of one of the last few seasons which ended in failure, or at least early this season when the team was 15 games behind Boston. New old and withdrawn looking George of today gets convinced to keep Torre through early season disappointment and post-season-failure before issuing a meek-sounding "beat Cleveland or be gone" once the Yankees were already down two games in last week’s playoff series defeat.

Now, if I was CEO of a well established company, which had an unprecedented run of success in the late nineties under the leadership of a calming father-figure like senior manager (or COO, President), and then we came back towards the pack for the past several years, I would handle things a quite differently.

Instead of living by the edict of "World Series or failure" which determines the success or failure of the Steinbrenner/Yankees brand each year, I would instead use an even simpler concept to get my message through: EVOLVE OR DISSOLVE.

Simply put today's winning ways could be tomorrow's old news and therefore adaptation to your environment is the key to enduring success. So, though my company was successful in the nineties using a internet-research heavy approach to business, we would have needed to adjust our approach and expand our methods of operations in order to keep up our competitive advantage in today's internet savvy world.

Similarly, though no one can deny the success that: a) the Yankees had during their championship run, which was fueled by an "anyone-can-be-brought-in-at-any-cost" approach, and b) Joe Torre had with his "I'm your friend" attitude to coaching and management (reminiscent of Boston manager John McNamara leaving Bill Buckner, an tremendous defensive liability, at first base in the '86 World Series in order to "honor" the veteran leader by keeping him on the field for the imminent championship celebration), it seems evident from our more recent results that change is necessary and probably a few years overdue in order to bring back the World Series trophy to the Bronx.

Again, I would be rather uncomfortable if the brand I put my life into building up slowly crawled to mediocrity in this manner. it makes me wonder if Mr. Steinbrenner has simply lost the will or ability to continue fighting.