The Turning Track: On what Cricket’s Retreat from the All-Rounder Teaches the Business School
All through my school years I played competitive cricket, and I understood myself, without much ambiguity, as a batsman who could bowl medium pace if the team needed it. Batting was the forte. Bowling and fielding were what I fell back on whenever batting deserted me, which it did on a fairly regular basis, as anyone who has played competitive cricket at any level will acknowledge without needing the details filled in.
A batting rut has a particular texture once you have lived through a few of them. The best-timed shots find a fielder who has no business standing where he is standing. Innings turn into hours of scratching for a run that will not come. At some point, at what felt internally like my best touch for the day, I would manufacture a way to get out anyway, unable to trust that the touch was real.
In the first year of my bachelor’s degree, I went through one of the longest such runs. Batting had deserted me for a stretch I remember now only by feel, not by length. I fell back on my bowling through that period and bowled the fastest and best I ever have, beating batsmen for pace, wanting to do a great deal more of exactly that. I never developed it into anything. Bowling was never going to become a serious pursuit, not because the form was not there that season. Just that I had already decided, years before, what I was — a batsman who bowls medium pace. The bowling was a passage, not a destination, however well it happened to be working.
The comparison does not extend far. A school-level batting rut is not the crucible Daryll Cullinan is writing about when he watches a batsman try to survive a genuinely hostile new-ball spell in three different formats inside the same month. But it taught me something about the distance between sustaining excellence in one skill in one format for a stretch of time and demonstrating it across several, at the pinnacle, on demand, regardless of which skill happens to be working that particular season.
Cullinan’s recent piece in Cricinfo makes the case at the level that actually matters. His argument, stripped of its specifics, is this: the modern game no longer produces cricketers who can walk from a Test match in Centurion to a T20 fixture in Chennai to a one-day game in Christchurch and play at the top of their craft in all three. What survives the attempt is a hybrid technique, a compromise built to travel, and that compromise collapses the moment it meets a genuinely hostile surface. His prescription is separation. Different players, different coaches, different pathways for each format, so that the fan who has paid for a Test match gets a Test match, and the fan who has paid for a T20 gets a T20, and neither is handed an imitation of the other.
I do not follow the professional game closely enough now to argue its selection politics. But I recognize Cullinan’s argument, because I have watched business schools build the same failure, more slowly, with less spectacle, across the careers of people I know well.
A school’s ranking and its accreditation are earned on the same aggregate logic that governs a cricket board’s revenue: research output, teaching quality, executive engagement, consulting impact, social contribution, all measured, all weighted, all reported upward. The mistake, repeated across enough institutions that it has stopped looking like a mistake, is to assume that the aggregate must be produced by individuals who are each, personally, good at everything the aggregate requires. A school does not need every faculty member to publish in a four-star journal, teach a room of restless executives into silence, and walk into a startup’s war room and diagnose its unit economics in forty minutes. It needs the aggregate. It has confused the aggregate with the individual, and built its selection, its appraisal, and its incentive structure around producing the individual anyway.
What that produces, translated into academic life, is exactly the hybrid stroke Cullinan describes. A researcher who has learned to speak in frameworks even when addressing a boardroom, because the appraisal form asked for consulting hours and the framework was the only tool at hand. A teacher who reaches for a published paper’s vocabulary in a session designed for people who have never read a paper and never will, because the same person is being scored on research productivity in the next column of the same spreadsheet. A consultant who arrives at a founder’s crisis with a case-study cadence of three neat acts and a clean resolution when the founder needed someone who could sit inside the mess without narrating it. Each of these is a hybrid stroke. It travels and survives most surfaces well enough that nobody notices the failure until the surface turns hostile: the top journal’s referee, the executive who has sat through worse decks than this one, the founder who can smell borrowed language in the first five minutes.
We have to name what the hybrid stroke actually costs because the compromise is never announced as a compromise. It arrives disguised as a course, a paper, a mandate. A course gets built for engagement, because the participant feedback score is the number that travels fastest to the Dean’s desk, and engagement is easier to manufacture than substance is to teach. A paper gets written for the journal’s appetite, because impact is a decade-long uncertain bet and publication is a line item due every appraisal cycle, so the argument gets shaped to what a reviewer wants to see rather than what a practitioner needs to know. A consulting assignment gets taken because the client can pay for a semester’s worth of overload, not because the problem the client is carrying is the one this professor is best placed to solve. Each of these choices looks, from outside, like professionalism. From inside, it is a small, repeated act of choosing the form that will be measured over the substance that will not.
There are only three ways this ends, once the limited hours in a week are asked to cover conflicting priorities and the hybrid technique is not equal to the sum of them. Burnout, when the professor tries honestly to be excellent at all three and the body files the complaint the appraisal system will not. Fraud, quiet and unindictable, when the performance of research, teaching, and consulting substitutes for the doing of it, and nobody upstream has the incentive to check too closely because the aggregate numbers still add up. Or demonstrated incompetence, when a professor refuses the performance and simply falls short in the open, on the axis the institution happens to be measuring that year. None of these three serves the institution. All three are what the institution’s own arithmetic guarantees, term after term, to someone.
The instructive part is not that schools got here through malice. It is that they ran out of road.
The first lever was external: hire adjuncts for the MDPs, bring in practitioners for the consulting-heavy electives, let research-track faculty stay where they are most productive. That lever works until the accreditation frameworks catch up with it, because a school built entirely of specialists on separate tracks does not photograph well on a goal-mapping document that wants every faculty member’s contribution visible across every dimension at once.
The second lever was structural: differentiate faculty tracks formally, teaching-focused and research-focused and practice-focused, each with its own criteria. That lever also runs into a wall, because the promotion committee, the ranking submission, and the accreditation visit all want a single number for the institution, and a single number is easiest to produce by asking every unit of the institution to look the same. What is left, once both external levers are exhausted, is the only variable still fully within the school’s control: the individual faculty member’s job description. So it is adjusted. Quietly, one appraisal cycle at a time, until the criteria assume a person who researches like a specialist, teaches like a performer, and consults like an operator, and calls the result well-rounded.
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This is the part Cullinan’s cricketers would recognize immediately. The adjustment does not solve the problem the institution was trying to solve. It reconstructs it one level down, inside a single career instead of across a squad, where it is harder to see and much harder to fix. A board can drop a batsman who cannot cope with spin and pick a specialist instead. A university cannot drop a colleague mid-appraisal cycle for being merely excellent at one thing. It can only keep asking, term after term, for the hybrid stroke, and mark the shortfall as a developmental gap rather than a structural one.
I have sat in enough appraisal conversations, on both sides of the table, to know what this actually costs. It is not that the school fails to notice the strain. It notices the strain constantly, names it in exit interviews and engagement surveys and the quiet attrition of people who leave for institutions that let them do one thing well. What it has not yet learned to notice is that the strain is not a talent shortage. It is a structural bill the institution ran up and handed to the individual to pay, in installments, across an entire career, at a moment when a school that measured itself the way a good squad does, an ensemble of specialists rather than a lineup of identical all-rounders, would have simply put the researcher in the library, the teacher in the room that needs performance, and the operator in front of the founder who is drowning, and called that the institution’s competence, not any one person’s.
There is a way out of this, and it does not require choosing between Cullinan’s separation and the aggregate a ranking body will keep demanding. It requires selection at the sweet spot: the narrow region where what an institution has decided to become intersects with what a particular scholar is genuinely pulled toward, not merely capable of delivering when the appraisal form asks for it. A researcher drawn to a field, rather than merely qualified for its journals, produces work that survives a hostile referee. A teacher drawn to a room, rather than assigned to it because someone had to be, reads the room instead of performing at it. Recruitment built this way selects for fit first. Coverage follows fit. It is never the other way around.
This kind of recruitment presupposes something most schools do not yet have: a strategy, held clearly enough to recruit against it rather than merely to fill a vacancy that happens to sit inside it. A school that knows which two or three things it wants to be excellent at can go looking for the scholar whose actual appetite sits inside that answer, and wait for the right one to arrive. A school that does not know what it wants to be known for can only go looking for a body that will make the faculty-to-student ratio look acceptable to the next accreditation visit. The two searches produce identical job postings and entirely different hires. The first produces someone who was, in some sense, already looking for this institution before the institution knew to look for them. The second produces whoever answered the advertisement in time and could plausibly be trained into the hybrid stroke afterward.
Most recruitment in business schools today is the second kind. Not because Deans lack judgment. Because the ratio is measured every single year, by bodies with real power over the school’s standing, and the strategy, where one exists at all, is measured by no one.
The scoreboard will still read well next quarter. That is the part the school has not learned to read yet.
A Postscript, After Reading 'Range'
David Epstein would read Cullinan’s argument and nod at half of it.
The half he would nod at is the diagnosis. Epstein spends most of Range dismantling the ten-thousand-hours story, the Tiger Woods story, the idea that excellence is what happens when a child is pointed at one narrow skill early and kept there without deviation. He would recognize the hybrid stroke immediately. He has a name for what produces it: a kind learning environment mistaken for a wicked one. Golf is kind. The rules are stable, the feedback is immediate and honest, the same swing works today as it did yesterday. Tiger’s early, narrow repetition worked because golf let it work. Cullinan’s batsman facing a hostile new-ball spell is playing something close to a kind environment too. The ball either beats the bat or it does not. The feedback arrives in real time and does not lie.
Business schools are not that. This is the half Epstein would disagree. Most of what a scholar does lives in a wicked environment. The feedback on a paper takes years and arrives filtered through referees who disagree with each other. The feedback on a course arrives as a number that measures performance more than learning. The feedback on a consulting engagement arrives, if it arrives at all, long after the professor has moved to the next assignment and stopped watching. Epstein’s argument is that wicked environments reward exactly what kind environments punish: sampling widely before committing, carrying analogies in from distant fields, delaying specialization until the fit has actually declared itself rather than being assumed at eighteen. Federer, not Woods. The generalist’s late arrival at depth, not the specialist’s early committed march toward it.
Read that way, the essay above looks like it is arguing the wrong side. It asks for separation, for the researcher kept in the library and the teacher kept in the room built for performance, when Epstein’s whole case is that the wicked domains, the ones without clean feedback, are precisely where range pays off and narrowness quietly calcifies into brittleness.
But the argument was never against range. It was against a particular way of manufacturing it.
Epstein’s generalists chose their sampling. Nobody handed young Federer a squash racket, a basketball, a badminton set, and a ski slope on an appraisal form and asked him to be excellent at all four by the following March. He tried them because something in each one pulled at him, and the trying is what built the range that later made him formidable at one of them. The business school does something else entirely. It does not offer a scholar the chance to sample research, teaching, and consulting and discover which one the fit lives in. It assumes the fit already, in all three, on day one, and measures the shortfall as a personal failing when the assumption turns out to be wrong. That is not range. Range is chosen. This is imposed. The two produce opposite outcomes from what look, on an appraisal form, like the same three line items.
So the two arguments are not actually opposed. They share an enemy. Epstein’s enemy is the institution that forces a child into early, narrow, externally chosen specialization before the child has sampled enough to know where the fit lives. This essay’s enemy is the institution that forces an adult into permanent, externally imposed breadth after the fit has already declared itself, and calls the refusal to keep performing all three an incompetence rather than a decision already made. Early commitment narrowing in one case. Perpetual enforced widening in the other. Both are the institution choosing for the individual what only sampling, or only self-knowledge, should have been allowed to choose.
What Epstein would ask the business school to protect is not the professor’s right to specialize. It is the professor’s right to have arrived at the specialization honestly, the way Federer arrived at tennis, by trying the others first and being permitted to notice which one held.
Most schools offer neither kind of freedom. Not the early sampling Epstein wants for the child, not the eventual narrowing this essay wants for the adult. They offer a third thing, an appraisal form that assumes range without ever having permitted the sampling that makes range mean anything, and calls the professor who cannot sustain it merely gifted in the wrong direction.
The scoreboard, again, will read fine next quarter.
