Success Quote by Tommy Lasorda

Managing, Lasorda implies, is a contact sport played with a soft touch. The dove image does two jobs at once: it flatters the people being managed (living, delicate, capable of flight) while warning the manager that power is inherently clumsy. Squeeze too hard and you get compliance without life - players who tighten up, staff who stop telling you the truth, a clubhouse that performs fear instead of confidence. Hold too loosely and you get drift - the slow leak of standards, the private freelancing that turns a team into a collection of contracts.

The line lands because it smuggles a hard truth inside a gentle metaphor: control is always a tradeoff, and the cost is borne by the controlled. Lasorda, a famously intense baseball lifer, isn’t renouncing authority; he’s defining it as restraint under pressure. That subtext matters coming from a coach, a role mythologized as pure command-and-motivation. He’s admitting that the manager’s biggest opponent is often his own impulse to over-manage, to turn every slump into a sermon, every error into a referendum.

In the context of baseball - a long season, public failure, fragile confidence - the dove becomes a proxy for morale. You can’t bark a hitter into seeing the ball, or micromanage a pitcher into trusting his stuff. The best managing is calibrating grip: present, demanding, and deliberately incomplete. Leadership as practiced humility, not performative dominance.