I spent a morning this week down at Citizens Bank Park for the Business at the Ballpark event hosted by Independence Blue Cross, because Brie has our insurance policy with them through Beer-A-Rama, and I get to ride the coat-tails! It was one of those mornings where you leave with a lot more than you expected.
Brett Mayfield, Dr. Richard L. Snyder, Mike Zangrilli, and Chris Fanning put together a hell of a morning for the local business community. The breakfast was great, the networking was solid, and the whole thing was a good reminder of what a health plan can actually do for its business members when there’s a real focus on delivering value instead of just putting on another corporate event.
What I liked most was that the sessions were actually useful. There wasn’t a lot of the usual dry corporate fluff where everyone talks about innovation, leadership, and the future of work without giving you anything you can actually use on Monday morning.
Anna Greenwald from On the Goga talked about using AI for emotionally intelligent leadership and communication. That’s an interesting conversation right now because everyone is trying to figure out where AI fits into their business, but the human side of it doesn’t magically disappear just because you’ve got better technology. If anything, figuring out how to communicate, lead, and understand people becomes even more important.
Dave Stefanski from Heart to Beat followed that up with the ALGEE framework for mental health first aid in the workplace. Again, it was practical. The kind of information you can take back to your team and actually use instead of something you listen to, nod along with, and forget before you get back to the office.
Then came the pure nostalgia bomb.
We got to sit in on a Q&A with Scott Palmer and Cole Hamels, and if you grew up around Philly, 2008 still feels like it happened yesterday and 100 years ago at the same time.
Hearing Cole talk about high performance was probably my favorite part of the day. He made a point about what it means to be a team member in Philadelphia that stuck with me: playing here means radical accountability.
There’s no hiding.
When you drop the ball, you own it. When you execute, this city has your back forever.
That’s a pretty good description of Philadelphia, but it’s also a pretty damn good description of building a business.
Especially if you’re running a business or an agency here, you don’t get to fake results forever. You can have a great pitch, a slick website, a strong personal brand, and all the right things to say in a meeting, but eventually you have to deliver.
And the same thing applies to the people you bring onto your team.
You want people you can trust. You want people who execute. You want people who can take responsibility when something goes sideways instead of immediately looking for someone else to blame.
That’s what accountability actually looks like.
It’s not about never screwing up. Everybody screws up. It’s about what happens after.
Do you own it? Do you fix it? Do you learn from it? Do you make sure the same thing doesn’t happen again?
That’s how good teams get built.
There’s also something uniquely Philly about the relationship between accountability and loyalty. This is a city that will absolutely let you know when you screw something up, but it’ll also remember when you showed up when it mattered.
That’s true in sports and it’s true in business.
If you consistently do what you say you’re going to do, people notice. If you take care of your clients, take care of your team, and stand behind your work, people remember that too.
And that’s really what high performance comes down to. It’s not just having talented people in the room. It’s having people who understand that they’re part of something bigger than themselves.
The best teams I’ve been around aren’t the ones where nothing ever goes wrong. They’re the ones where people trust each other enough to be honest when something does go wrong. Nobody spends three days trying to figure out whose fault it was. They figure out what happened, fix it, and keep moving.
That mindset is worth a lot more than another motivational speech.
We finished out the day with a full tour of the Phillies clubhouse, the dugout, and the press room. And yes, I got to sit at the podium with the headset on, which was pretty damn cool.
There’s something about being in those spaces that makes you think differently about teams. You start thinking about all the work that happens behind the scenes before anyone ever sees the result. The preparation, the repetition, the trust between teammates, the coaching, the pressure, and then eventually the moment where you have to perform.
Business isn’t all that different.
You build the team. You give people the tools they need. You establish trust. You communicate. You hold people accountable. Then eventually, somebody has to step up and deliver when it counts.
Huge thanks to the IBX team for putting together such a great morning and bringing together real business strategy, networking, leadership, mental health, AI, and a pretty awesome piece of Philly sports history.
I walked away from the day thinking less about baseball and more about what makes a great team work.
Talent helps.
Experience helps.
Technology helps.
But at the end of the day, I’d take a team full of people who trust each other, execute, communicate, and own their outcomes over a room full of superstars who point fingers when things go wrong.
That’s true whether you’re playing baseball in Philadelphia or building a business here.
And Philly has a pretty good way of reminding you of that.
