Barry Bonds just made the number. It was a big number, one of baseball's great records: the most home runs ever hit by a human being. In general, this would be big news. Almost every pursuit of a major baseball record like this has commanded rapt national attention.
Yet surprisingly, for most of us, our feelings toward Bonds' milestone achievement range from indifference through ambivalence to disgust. These curious reactions speaks volumes to the way the world has changed in the last few years and tells us a lot about what the 21st century holds in store for sports, business, and life.
"Sports is tribal," Fox TV impresario David Hill was fond of saying. Since man first organized himself into formal society, we have held up our athletes as proxies for what man-as-physical-being can achieve. We adore, celebrate, even idolize our athletes because they epitomize our striving for perfection and our dreams of the physical body's highest achievements. We come together to cheer these gladiators because they transcend our differences. They bring us together because they embody a journey to which we all aspire.
But there is more to our worship and appreciation of athletes than just their physical accomplishments. A record is just a number -- WHAT he did -- and we don't really invest ourselves in WHATs. The home run record is just a number that stands in proxy for hundreds of at-bats, many long summer nights of trial, effort, and achievement, and perseverance over time. Our indifference or antipathy to Barry Bonds has nothing to do with his WHAT -- the number he is about to post -- but rather our disappointment with his HOW.
Whether his omnipresent scowl, rampant disregard for the desire of his fans to understand and connect with him, shunning of the popular press (the storytellers charged with connecting him to the public), or the widespread accusations that he used illegal performance enhancing drugs to gain an edge, what disappoints us most about Bonds is HOW he has pursued his goals.
Barry Bonds came of age, so to speak, in the Just Do It world. Things seemed to be moving so fast that short term results were everything. Bosses -- whether sports team owners, executives in major corporations, or small businesspeople just trying to stay afloat -- would tell us, "Just get it done. I don't care how. Don't break the law but get it done now." The push was on to "make the numbers," whether that meant quarterly earnings targets, fan attendance stats, or more home runs. "Greed is good," as Michael Douglas said as Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street.
So people made choices, choices they thought would get them ahead. They Just Did It, but they didn't always Just Do It Right.
At the same time, rapid advances in communications technology were having a remarkable transformative effect on society. Information, so easy to control and spin in the Just Do It era, was suddenly like a toddler: it went everywhere, got into everything, and couldn't be controlled. It became cheap and easy to see the inner workings of how people accomplished things, how businesses conducted themselves, and how government conducted the affairs of state.
And we cared. Making a great athletic shoe didn't mean as much when people found out you exploited child labor to do so.
Suddenly, in sports, business, and life, things long kept secret were exposed for all to see. Businesses taking shortcuts, athletes using performance-enhancing drugs, leaders lying about their resumes, governments distorting the truth, all for their own short-term self-interest. Scandals were everywhere. Corporations fell. Athletes were exposed as doped-up frauds. CEOs were dismissed for transgressions of personal conduct.
And because we can see more, we look more. Empowered by the speed and ubiquity of the Internet, the transparency of the blogosphere, and the proliferation of ways to share and disseminate information, we now pay far more attention to HOW things get done.
In many ways, we have become a world of HOW. In our purchasing habits, employment decisions, business strategies, voting patterns, even the team we choose to root for, we are now profoundly influenced by our feelings about how people do what they do.
Throughout sports, business, government, and even everyday life, there is growing realization that the winners in the 21st century will be those companies and individuals who embrace these new realities and find ways to turn the specific conditions of a hyperconnected and hypertransparent world to their advantage. In a connected world, those who make the most powerful connections win. That means building trust with your customers, colleagues, and fans; being actively transparent with the marketplace and your friends; and realizing the currency value of your reputation in a world where anyone can Google you or check your MySpace page to discover who you really are.
I grew up as a Giants fan. I went to Candlestick Park to watch Barry's father, Bobby Bonds, and Willie McCovey play. Now, as I watch on television, Barry splashes impossibly small objects improbable distances into what is known as "McCovey Cove" in the bay past the right field wall. I'm reminded that reputation is like a lifetime batting average that is hard to move up or down more than a few points once you've reached a certain moment in your life. You can, as Barry has just done, make some numbers in your life, but in the long run, reputation is the number that counts most.
Now that Bonds has surpassed Aaron as the most prolific home run hitter of all time, most of us will turn and walk away, not from his achievement, but from the journey it represents -- one which does not embody our highest aspirations nor our dreams of physical perfection, but, in fact, one that betrays those very ideals. Hopefully we will take with us the clear realization that in a world where we can easily see past the numbers, it is no longer WHAT you do, but HOW you do what you do that now matters most.
This post first appeared on How Blogazine.