Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

As those of you who follow my other feeds know, I’ve taken up playing ultimate frisbee again with the Manhattan Ultimate league. While the main benefit is getting back into shape after two years of class-induced neglect, I also really enjoy playing ultimate because of the philosophy baked into the rules of the game.

If you’re not familiar with ultimate, the rules are pretty simple. On a field with two end zones, two teams of seven line up, one on each end line. One team starts the point by throwing the disc to the other. The disc can only be advanced by throwing to a teammate – once you catch the disc, you can’t continue running, and must hold a pivot foot stationary. If a pass is not completed, the other team takes over going the other way. Score by catching a pass in the end zone.

These rules make ultimate a truly team-oriented sport. An individual player can’t take over the game single-handedly, the way they do in basketball or football or baseball, because every pass involves two players. The way for an individual player to excel is to make their teammates better. When they don’t have the disc, they can help their teammates by getting wide open, or by rescuing poorly thrown passes with great catches. Once they catch the disc, their teammates don’t have to get as open because a good thrower will put it right into their hands away from the defender.

The best teams use everybody on the field, creating spacing with different people going in different directions. For instance, because I’m tall and relatively fast, I often run downfield routes, where my teammates can just put the disc up high and expect me to either out-run or out-jump my defender. Other teammates who have more agility dart in and out with underneath routes. Players who have good throwing skills hang back to give their teammates an easy throw when they get in trouble. You need a good mix of skills on the field working together to achieve success.

What’s interesting to me is the management lessons that can be learned from ultimate frisbee. Different sports lend themselves to different management practices. Football is a typical hierarchy, with a coach and a quarterback leading the troops in precision maneuvers. Basketball is like a design firm, with individual superstars able to freelance their way to excellence. I think ultimate frisbee is a great model for understanding the distributed management style necessary for knowledge workers, where everybody has their own expertise to contribute.

Like the good ultimate player, good managers of knowledge workers make their employees and coworkers look good by setting things up to be easy for them. They know their coworkers’ strengths and weaknesses and find ways to accentuate the strengths and minimize the weaknesses (like me running deep in ultimate where I can use my height and speed, without worrying as much about my weaker throwing skills). They don’t need to take credit for themselves, because they know that the team being more successful is credit enough. Returning to my current non-zero-sum theme, they realize that “growing the pie” of success will reward them far more than trying to grab a bigger share of credit for the existing “pie”.

Bad managers, on the other hand, are playing the zero-sum game, trying to make themselves look good at the expense of their employees. They are the ones who take personal credit for anything their group does, but makes sure to blame mistakes on their employees. The ultimate frisbee equivalent would be prima donnas who, while having superior skills, yell at their teammates about making mistakes, and making them miserable. Soon enough, their teammates stop caring and stop running as hard, and the prima donna has created a self-fulfilling prophecy of bad teammates.

Another interesting parallel between ultimate and management is that it takes time for teams to jell. While it’s fun to play pickup games in ultimate where you choose sides and go, teams improve immeasurably by playing together and learning each other’s tendencies. You learn which routes people like to run, which throws your teammates have (which influences which routes you run when they have the disc), how to cover for each other on defense, etc. And each team and each combination of players is different – in this league, our team has actually been suffering from having too many subs for each game, as the team can’t quite settle into a rhythm because each point has a different combination of players.

A good manager needs the same sort of time to make their team most efficient. It takes time to learn how different team members think, how best to work with them and persuade them. Building a team is a long process, as each person needs to develop trust and respect for their teammates, and find a role for themselves within the team, a place where they can specialize in a way that plays to their strengths. Following Katzenbach’s formula, they must also develop a common group purpose and accountability, such that they believe in the team and will do what is necessary to make the team successful, rather than looking out for themselves in a zero-sum way.

As an aside, I just re-read the Katzenbach post and realized that good ultimate frisbee teams match up perfectly with his criteria for teams: small number (7 on the field), complementary skills (handlers, mids, and deeps), common purpose and performance goals (scoring and winning), common approach (teams that are successful work together in a coherent fashion), and mutual accountability (it’s almost funny how many people on an ultimate team try to take the blame after a close loss – everybody focuses on the mistakes they made that cost the team a couple points).

I’m not saying all managers should go out and take up ultimate frisbee (okay, that’d actually be kind of cool), but I did find it interesting that this mindset of non-zero-sum thinking about management had me seeing the same lessons so clearly on the ultimate frisbee field. This may just be another example of me taking a single perspective and seeing it everywhere, but I think that ultimate frisbee may be a good exemplar for truly distributed management techniques, the sort that would be appropriate in a knowledge worker economy.

I decided to try to find some ultimate frisbee this weekend. The weather’s been really nice, and I just wanted to get out in the sun and run around and have a good time. So I did a bunch of Google’ing and came up with a couple options.

Option 1 was an 11am game on Great Hill in Central Park. I rode my bike up there, and checked it out. Terrible. The field was small (there are no open fields in Central Park unless you get a permit apparently), and the players were just not very good – no stacking, no force, lots of traveling as they pivoted. I didn’t even bother getting my cleats out – I watched a few minutes, decided I wouldn’t enjoy it, and rode my bike once around the park loop instead (which was fun – a guy on a road bike decked out in a jersey and bike shorts whizzed by me on an uphill, which annoyed me, so I chased him down and sprinted with him in my t-shirt and shorts on my mountain bike about halfway around the park before I got bored (and tired)).

Option 2 was a Sunday afternoon game in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Not as convenient, but I was desperate. And, heck, I used to commute to Golden Gate Park from Oakland for good ultimate, and I can at least read on the subway here. I was much happier today. Small field (about a quarter the size of a normal field, half as wide, half as long), but they had dropped to 6′s to compensate. They stacked, they cut hard, people had decent forehands, there was a stall count. I was hooked. I wandered up to somebody, asked what the custom was (games to three, dynasty rules, so no team gets to stay on the field for more than two games even if they win). Hopped in the next game, and played on and off for the next three hours. I was a bit rusty and out of shape, but the small field meant nobody could get too far ahead of me, so it was all fun. And I even threw a hammer for a score!

The thing that interests me is that ultimate culture here is exactly the same as in the Bay Area. It’s the same terminology, the same phrases, even the same laid-back welcoming friendly folks. The heckling from the sidelines made me feel right at home: “Lay it!!” (as somebody didn’t dive for a catch), and the ubiquitous “Hammer or you’re nothing!” It’s all different people than the ones I played with in SF, but yet they’re all the same. There’s something deep or clever here about the transcendence of culture over space and time; Orson Scott Card’s story The Originist makes a similar point when his protagonist observes that the kids singing “Ring around the Rosy” are all the same kids, despite changing year after year. Card puts the emphasis on story telling as the separating factor, which I sometimes agree with. But it’s more than that.

Phil Agre once made the observation that graduate school is not about graduate students doing research. It is about turning graduate students into academics – teaching them the culture they need, teaching them the proper way of doing research in their community. And that’s true of any community – there is a time of indoctrination, of learning the secret codes and call signs that distinguish us from them. I’ve talked about the no-indoctrination communities, but most communities of value require taking the time and effort to learn their language.

And today was a great example. I had never seen these people before. But once I got on the field and I was yelling “Force home!” and “Up!” and “Clear!” and making good hard cuts, I had established myself as a member of the community and was welcomed as such. We were heckling each other, and having a good time. So, yay!

As yet another aside, I think one of my strengths is that I grok stuff pretty quickly. I’ve gotten much better at observing a community, figuring out the ground rules, and learning the catch phrases and responses that get me accepted. For instance, although I’m not ready to go to grad school in social informatics, I’ve done enough reading (as prompted by Jofish) to have some sense of what’s going on, and can quote a little bit of the relevant literature. I can certainly fake my way through most nerd culture communities, from programming to physics to Star Wars. This is part of being a generalist, being more interested in being part of lots of different communities than being a leader within one.

Anyway. The point is, I got to play ultimate. I found a new crowd, which I think I’ll enjoy hanging out with, even though they’re all way too young. And I got to run around in the sun for a couple hours. All good.

P.S. As long as I’m doing a journal-type post, I might as well record the other events of the weekend. Friday night was First Fridays at the Guggenheim with some friends. Crazy. The line was about a block and a half long when we got there. Fortunately, it went faster than the de Young, so we got in pretty quickly, drank some wine, grooved to the DJ beats, talked about the art, and did lots of people watching. Fun!

Saturday night, I stopped by the Look and Listen festival, mostly because eighth blackbird was playing. I saw them a few years ago in SF, and they were fantastic live. Plus the idea of listening to contemporary classical music in a Chelsea art gallery appealed to me since I’d been feeling like I wasn’t doing enough cultural stuff. The concert was decent. I think the highlight for me was actually the first piece, Musique de Tables by Thierry DeMay, which is a piece for three people using amplified tables. They bang away in a variety of patterns – the program suggested it was a ballet for six hands, which is apt. Check out a brief video snippet somebody put up on MySpace.

I played ultimate yesterday in my typical league. Even though our team eventually lost 15-13, I think I scored something like 8 or 9 of our points. Some of them I sky-ed over my defender, jumping up and snatching the disc at the highest point of my leap. A few I got because of great throws by my teammates, putting it to the open part of the field as I ran to the disc.

And I made one catch where time slowed down, inspired, no doubt, by my incessant consumption of sports on TV, where the slow-motion replay is a key device. My teammate had the disc about 10 yards out of the end zone. I made a poor cut, so I didn’t have much separation from my defender, maybe a couple feet, but my teammate decided to try to force the disc in there anyway with a hammer throw. It gets away from him, and it’s well behind me. My defender jumps and tips it further away from me. I’ve stopped, and jumped backwards at this point. And as I jump, time slows down. I see the disc start to float down, I see my hand reach out slowly to snatch the disc up away from the ground as I’m drifting horizontally towards it, I realize I shouldn’t land with the disc first because I might drop it, so I twist in mid-air to land on my back with the disc thrust triumphantly upwards, and time speeds up again.

It was a somewhat surreal experience – everything just stopped, and there was nothing in the world but me, floating through the air, and the disc spinning ahead of me. I can only remember two other occasions on which I’ve had it happen, so I think that makes this catch one of my top three most spectacular catches ever. The first time I remember it happening was in a Palo Alto hat tournament where the throw was terrible, several feet out of my reach in the end zone, but I dove and reached out full length to sneak my hand under the disc inches above the grass to grab it for the score. The other time was another one where it was way out of reach, and I just went to full extension layout with my left hand, grabbing it and tumbling several times.

So that was pretty satisfying. Even though we lost. Grr. Next week.

I was checking the website of the league I play in today, and noticed a link to some pictures a photographer had taken of some league games. Intrigued, I went and glanced through them, and sure enough, there are a couple of me. Check out these action shots, one of me having been beat on defense, and another where I’ve caught up to my man and am marking up (seen at right, click for a larger view). I like the second one a lot, mostly because seeing how my leg muscles are straining, I feel less pathetic that my legs are always completely dead after playing a game.

I’m beat. Despite having several ideas I want to turn into blog posts, I think I’m going to get some sleep instead. Another time.

This evening was the first spring game of the ultimate frisbee league I play in. I was out of shape, of course. Despite saying I would stay in shape over the winter, I just didn’t. I’m not terribly out of shape – I biked up to Skyline Boulevard yesterday without stopping, which is about 50 minutes straight of relatively steep climbing. But even that level of cardiovascular fitness is nowhere near ultimate shape. The right thing to do is to be running regularly, and be doing intervals while running. I’m nowhere near disciplined enough to do that, alas.

Fortunately, we had subs this evening. So I could take a break when I needed one. I basically played one awesome point, my first one, where I broke free consistently against their fast guy, caught the disc, and delivered some accurate throws (although I threw them too hard and they went off the hands of my receivers, but it was windy so I could either throw it hard and have it go where I wanted, or I could throw soft and have it blown away). After that first point, I was out of gas, and was getting consistently beat on defense. At least by their fast guy. Oh well. At least my forehand is more consistent now. I’ll go running later this week, maybe make it out to the pickup game on Saturday, and next week will be better.

Afterwards, I hit the regular post-game bar, and participated in my first “boat race”, a wacky ultimate tradition wherein the two teams line up facing each other, each member with a half-pint of beer, and they race to see who can chug the fastest. The team has to drink in order, each person not starting until the person before them has finished their beer, and turned it upside down on their head. It’s a pretty stupid tradition, but, hey, I’d never done it, and I’m trying to be more open to new experience. And our team won. Woo!

Yes, even though I haven’t updated in two weeks, I am not dead. Really. I’ve just been pretty busy. And distracted.

What have I been doing? I bought a dining room table off of craigslist over Thanksgiving weekend, which I was able to move with Christy’s help. I had a games day, where we played Strange Synergy, Carcassonne, and, after a dinner of Christy-provided Thanksgiving leftovers, Trivial Pursuit. Fortunately, I was able to back up my Trivial Pursuit trash talk (back in my high school Scholastic Bowl days (check it out – Wheaton Central, runner-up in 1988, my sophomore year), I had memorized a large portion of the Trivial Pursuit deck, and once won Trivial Pursuit in something like three turns and 15 minutes) and pull out a victory, although that was partially getting lucky, because Christy had a couple shots to win before I snuck in. Wow. Christy shows up a lot in that paragraph. Hi Christy!

Oh, and my laptop is finally coming tomorrow. I think. It’s allegedly in Oakland tonight, according to internet tracking. I’m still pretty mad at HP, but they agreed to refund the extra charges, and if I wanted a laptop before the holidays, I was pretty much stuck. The computer got delayed a few extra days even beyond the initial delay, but there was really nothing I could do at that point. But it’ll finally be here tomorrow. And the wireless router I bought from buy.com arrived yesterday, so I should be wireless-enabled after this weekend. Yay! Oh, hp did offer me a $50 coupon to hpshopping.com for my troubles. I may use it in a couple months to get an extra battery or something. Even though their prices are outrageously high. I’m also somewhat tempted to get a new calculator with the coupon.

What else? I played in an ultimate frisbee hat tournament last Saturday, which was a lot of fun (hat tournament just means that the teams are randomly drawn, e.g. drawn out of a hat, so you get to play with and meet some new people), but it wore me out – four hours of running around. And I’m out of shape. Again. Blah. Since I hadn’t played in two weeks, I played pretty poorly the first game, but got better as the afternoon went on. Three highlights of the day:

• I was being covered by Jeff, a guy who was on my first team in this league last fall, and who’d taken me under his wing a bit and helped me get better. We’re in the end zone. I use one of the moves he taught me – fake one way, take two steps hard the other way, and then stop and go the first way. Experienced defenders recognize the first fake, accelerate to catch up with you going the other way, and blow right by you when you stop and go back. It worked beautifully. I got wide open. So wide open that another defender in front of me called “Switch!” telling Jeff to switch and defend his guy running the other way. Jeff didn’t hear him, I ended up double-covered, and the other guy on my team was wide open for the score. It’s kinda funny – I didn’t get the score, but it was probably one of my best plays all day.
• Another time down the field. The disc is dropped by the other team. I take off down the field. I look back, see that one of our best throwers, Apu, is picking up the disc. I see that my defender is also looking back to see what’s going on. I make eye contact with Apu, point to one corner of the endzone. My defender is pretty much right on top of me, but when I make the sharp cut to the corner, the disc is already in the air, and I catch it before my defender had a chance to catch up. Afterwards, one of the guys on the sideline complimented me on the cut, saying that my guy was right on me, and there was only one moment when I could have cut and gotten free and I’d nailed it. So that felt pretty good.
• End of the day. We have game point. I was lined up on a guy that I knew was a bit slower than me. Again, I’m heading downfield when I see Apu get the disc. I accelerate towards the end zone. Apu puts up a high floating throw. I’m in good position for it, especially since I know I can outjump my guy. I jump…too soon. I have that awful sinking feeling when the disc floats a couple inches over my outstretched hand. My defender jumps as well, and barely tips it, deflecting it. Fortunately, he deflected it towards me. I catch it as we both fall to the ground. I turn out not to be in the end zone, but I toss it to a teammate running by for the score. I should have grabbed it the first time in the air, but at least I stayed with the play and was able to recover.

So that was a lot of fun. Even though I was totally beat up, and ended up lying pathetic on the couch for a couple hours after getting back before getting up to do some stuff.

On Sunday morning was my normal league game. I figured I’d take it easy, sit on the sidelines a bunch. I get to Golden Gate Park. It’s bitterly cold. Like 45 degrees with a 20 mph wind. I’m in sweats, sweatshirt, jacket, and a hat, and I’m still jumping up and down trying to stay warm. It’s also the 9am game, so everybody’s late. By 9:30, we’re told we have to start playing. At this point, the other team has 12 or 13 players there. We have 6. You need 7 on the field. Rather than forfeit, we agree to play 6 on 7. Again, remember than I’m exhausted because I’d played 4 hours the day before. As had the other two guys who were there from my team. And the other team had lots and lots of subs, so they could run all they want, and then take a break. We were hosed.

We actually did okay for about 45 minutes. At that point, it was 6-4 them. And we weren’t cold any more, given how much running we were doing. We’d done a good job of switching on defense, mixing things up on offense, and generally not letting them take advantage of their extra player. But then I think we all hit the wall. They ended up scoring the next 9 points to win 15-4. Sheer exhaustion. I’ve mentioned before how being tired affects even simple skills like catching the disc. On one point, I think I ended up dropping four throws in the end zone. Any of them would have been a score, stopped their run, and given our team some life. And every one I dropped. Admittedly, none of them were easy catches. One I was double-covered, and, again, mis-timed my jump. One was a race to the disc, and my defender just out-ran me and was able to knock it away. One was a couple inches off the ground and I wasn’t able to dig it out. It was incredibly frustrating – I lost my temper after blowing that last one and just screamed. I went to the other team after they eventually scored and apologized. But, man, it sucked.

Anyway. Playing 6 on 7 with no subs for an hour and a half is incredibly tiring. After I’d worn myself out the day before, it was even worse. I got back to my place, collapsed all afternoon, and then had to do run some errands. This week? More work. Plus a chorus rehearsal on Tuesday.

But I’m finally caught up, at least for a day, so I’m going to take this opportunity to write some. Whee!

The college national championships of ultimate frisbee were televised this year on the College Sports TV network. Unfortunately, that’s not one I get – I think it’s on deep cable someplace, or maybe only satellite. But they kindly have decided to post the video to several of the games online (they are archived down the right side). I’ve watched the first couple this weekend, and it’s actually kind of fun to watch it with a couple different camera angles and expert commentary. The other thing that struck me was how the offense has such a huge advantage at the highest levels. It really is like volleyball in that the side that receives scores the vast majority of the time. Of course, to get to that level requires everybody on the team to have great throws, great cuts, and be in incredible shape. I’ll be there any day now. Yeah. Right.

So I’ve been playing in this ultimate frisbee league this month. And that first week was great for my confidence. The second week I slipped a little, didn’t play quite as well. The third week I missed entirely due to that trip to Toronto. So I got to the fourth week after not having done any sort of exercise for two weeks. And it showed. I was out of breath after a single point. My legs weren’t working well. Either night.

The interesting thing to me, though, was that it affected aspects of my game that I would think would be unrelated. Things like catching the disc. You’d think a simple pancake catch (catching the disc with one hand horizontally above, and one horizontally below) would be trivial. But on that Monday night back, I dropped the first four throws sent my way. Even when they were right to me, I had both hands on it, and just dropped it. And I’m convinced that it was due to my bad conditioning from having taken a couple weeks off. I was tired enough from running around that my concentration wasn’t there even to make an easy catch.

So that was frustrating. But I played both Monday and Tuesday evening last week and that helped. And I went for a two hour bike ride on Saturday up to Skyline Blvd, which is basically an hour straight of climbing from my place. And, sure enough, tonight, all aspects of my game were much better. My cuts were cleaner. And I was catching everything in reach. Even ones where I was jumping over people, reaching with one hand. The score was tied 9-9 when the 10 minute horn blew. We ended up scoring the next three points, with a hard zone D forcing some turnovers. And when I say we, I mean me – I caught all three scores, one on a breakdown in coverage, one where I had to bull through to catch the disc after my defender accidentally tripped me, and finished it off by skying over their best jumper to ice the game after the final horn blew. Overall, I think I caught half of our 12 points. So that felt pretty good. And I really think it’s all conditioning.

Of course, before I get too cocky, I should point out that I also managed to throw the disc away every single time I caught the disc not in the end zone. I threw it long and over people’s heads. I threw it short into the ground. I threw it straight at defenders. I even missed the dump once where I only had to throw it five feet to my teammate. Come to think of it, I did connect on one score, but even that one was an adventure – my teammate was wide open in the end zone, but I threw it over his head, and he had to run to the deep corner and lay out to catch it. Oops. Anyway.

It’s all conditioning. Now that this league is ending, I’ll have to find other ways to exercise during the week. It’s especially important for me, I think, because the other thing that happens when I’m tired, besides me losing concentration and dropping easy throws, is that I get injured. The time I sprained my ankle this spring was during a really long point. I was completely winded, and tried to make one more sharp cut, and the ankle just buckled. And I’m convinced it’s poor conditioning. I have a theory which says that in normal operation, the muscles take up the stresses associated with sharp cuts and changes in direction. But when you’re tired, the muscles don’t take any of that stress and it’s all transmitted straight to the joint connective tissue and that’s where you get sprains and strains. And since I’m a big guy, this is a particular danger for me, because changing the direction of a 210 pound mass travelling at high speeds places a lot of stress on those joints and muscles. And it’s just not as easy as it once was to stay in shape. Durn this getting old thing. Alas.

So after playing in that tournament in Seattle over the July 4th weekend, I was kind of discouraged about playing ultimate. I mean, it was an eye-opening experience, seeing 100 ultimate frisbee teams out on a set of 40 fields. Discs as far as the eye could see. Three straight days of ultimate. Crazy stuff. Lots of fun. But still a bit discouraging. I was one of the worse players on a team that ended the weekend ranked about 90th out of those 100 teams. A bad player on a bad team. I mean, I knew the level would be a big step up, but, wow, it showed me how far I have to go. I need to work on my disc skills, my throws, my field sense, getting my cuts cleaner on offense, etc. I need to work a _lot_ on my defense. Basically, I need to work on everything. So I didn’t actually play much in July because I was kind of bummed.

But when the beginner-friendly league started up again in August, I decided to play. I figured it would be good for me to run around a bit, and be able to work on my skills a bit in a low pressure setting. It’s been good. I’m playing in both the Monday and Tuesday night leagues. Last night, on Monday, my team was really good, and we ended up winning 15-4. Plus, I played pretty well – I think I scored about 6 or 7 of the 15 points, and even threw a score, which I rarely do because of my less-than-stellar throws. It reminded me that when in a setting of people that aren’t, well, really good, I’m at least a decent player. Tonight, in the Tuesday league (different team), we were matched up against a team where I knew that several of their players were pretty good. So I was apprehensive. And then we went down by three or four points. But we fought back. And when the final horn blew, the score was tied at 10-10. Last point wins. I made a decent cut, got open, caught the disc. Turned, looked into the endzone. Half my team was swarming towards one corner. One woman caught my eye and pointed to the other corner. I didn’t hesitate, and just threw the forehand into the wind to that corner, curving it outside-in, so it went around all of the defenders before settling into her hands. Point, and game. One of the best throws I’ve ever made in a game. Rock on.

It’s just nice to know that I’m making progress. At the tournament, it didn’t feel that way. But against this known level of competition (I first started playing non-pickup ultimate in this league last fall), I’m definitely improving. My cuts are cleaner, I’m getting open consistently, I can handle the disc adequately, and I even got several sweet Ds tonight, skying over my guy to knock the disc out of the air. Of course, I still got burned a few times, but I’m working on it. Progress. And, since, well, I’ve got nobody else to tell about this, I’m blogging it. Whee!