The Toronto Blue Jays face what CEO Mark Shapiro describes as a fundamentally uneven playing field. The team plays in what he calls “the best division of all of baseball” and operates under a revenue-sharing system he characterizes as “disproportionately weighted” — significant structural constraints for any organization.
And yet, the Blue Jays also have a unique advantage. Shapiro says the team’s national broadcasts reach one of the largest audiences in Major League Baseball, spanning across the entire country rather than a single metro area. The Jays truly are Canada’s national team. I live in Montreal, the 2nd largest city, and we too are pumped, and family and friends out West and in the Maritimes tell me the same.
The following insights are drawn from Shapiro’s remarks during a guest lecture in my undergraduate Strategy and Organization class at McGill University. The day after the Blue Jays clinched a playoff berth, Shapiro joined via Zoom — our third conversation since my first interview with him back in 2017. For almost an hour, he discussed the unique pressures of leading an organization where every decision plays out in real time before millions of fans.
Getting Better Every Day
When asked about the Blue Jays’ strategy, Shapiro’s answer surprised students expecting to hear about championships first.
“Our mission is to bring World Championships to Canada,” Shapiro told students. But more than trophies, he said, the Blue Jays focus on “getting better every day” — a learning culture where incremental improvement spans every department, from analytics to accounting.
While the goal is still a World Series win, Shapiro was candid about how unpredictable the playoffs can be.
“A more realistic goal for us as an organization is to leave spring training each year with the objective reality that we have a chance to contend for a world championship and to get in the playoffs more years than not.”
It’s a philosophy that acknowledges reality while maintaining ambition: focusing on what the organization can control rather than the unpredictable swings of a short playoff series.
How Data and Analytics Shape the Blue Jays’ Leadership Philosophy
Baseball has long led other major sports in analytics, and Shapiro emphasized this as a core competitive advantage. Most of us remember the 2011 movie Money Ball with Brad Pitt based on the 2003 book by the same name. Interestingly, Shapiro appears in the movie, played by Hollywood actor Reed Diamond. Baseball was early to the game. Today the Montreal Canadiens are big, big users of data, and one of my former students runs that area for them.
“Baseball uses modeling to make almost all of our decisions from the draft,” says Shapiro. “Hockey, football, basketball are still scout-driven, anecdotal, gut-based decision-making. We’re probabilistic: models that are created by an R&D or decision sciences department.”
Why the heavy reliance on models? To systematically eliminate human bias.
“Biases exist, and they affect sports more than anything because our decisions, unlike other businesses, are played out in the public forum,” Shapiro said.
Referencing Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, he explained that common biases — like focusing too much on recent results or being swayed by context — influence everyone, even those who believe they’re completely objective.
The models factor in thousands of data points to deploy players in ways that make collective talent outperform individual analysis. It’s not about replacing human judgment entirely, but about creating systems that help humans make better decisions under pressure.
Leading Without Hierarchy
Perhaps the most striking leadership insight was Shapiro’s rejection of traditional top-down models. When asked about aligning different departments such as scouting, analytics, coaching, and business operations, he brings up Stanley McChrystal’s concept of “shared consciousness.”
The term comes from retired General Stanley McChrystal’s 2015 book Team of Teams, which describes how he transformed Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq by creating “extreme, participatory transparency” across the organization. McChrystal argued that hierarchical command structures couldn’t match the adaptability of networked enemies, requiring instead what he called “a yin-and-yang symmetry of shared consciousness” and “empowered execution.”
Rather than hiding the Blue Jays’ structural challenges, Shapiro shares them openly with the entire organization — the foreign exchange tax, the AL East gauntlet, and what he sees as revenue disadvantages.
Under MLB’s current collective bargaining agreement, teams pool 48% of local revenues and split them equally among all 30 franchises — a system that favors large-market American teams over a Canadian franchise dealing with currency exchange.
“We’re not focused on hierarchical leadership,” he said. “We’re focused on people coming in and making us better regardless of the role they’re in. That ‘get better every day’ piece is the open-mindedness you need to think about how can I be better today — whether it’s the CEO or an entry-level analyst.”
This approach serves a dual purpose. It contextualizes why excellence matters (the Blue Jays can’t outspend their problems), while empowering every employee to contribute solutions.
“No one leader, no one person, no one department can drive that,” Shapiro emphasized. “It’s gonna take everyone to overcome those overarching challenges.”
The Psychology of 162 Games
Managing the emotional roller coaster of a baseball season requires its own discipline. Even elite teams lose 60 games per year, and Shapiro noted an interesting pattern.
“Players handle wins and losses far better than the staff,” he says.
The explanation is practical. Players must compete again the next day, leaving no time to dwell on defeats, while the organization doesn’t take victories for granted either.
“We celebrate every win, literally celebrate every win. We’ve got a button in the clubhouse that lights up, fog comes in, and they do a toast.”
“How you process, handle, then detach and move forward is really important, just like it would be for any executive in any business,” Shapiro continues.
Short-Term Pressure, Long-Term Vision
Balancing immediate performance demands with long-term strategy is “probably the single biggest challenge that I face on a daily basis,” Shapiro admits.
Operating in a fishbowl where fans offer unsolicited advice everywhere — “when I go get coffee in the morning, when I get a haircut, when I go out to eat” — requires exceptional discipline. The temptation to make reactive changes based on small sample sizes is constant.
“I want to wait until enough of the short-term information is actually indicative of real challenges,” he said. “Is the feedback meaningful, or just a disproportionate emotional reaction to being a sports fan?”
The takeaway is clear: decisions driven by emotion or short-term momentum rarely lead to good outcomes.
Business Realities: The Financial Side of Blue Jays Leadership
Shapiro also offered rare transparency about profitability.
“Profitability would certainly be one [KPI], and we’re not very good in that category right now,” he says.
With player payroll exceeding 50% of expenses, there are periods when costs outpace revenue.
“You’re kind of making a bet that this is it — we’re in the height of competitiveness right now,” he explained. “But we are still a business, and we’re still looking to make more money than we spend, or at least break even over the long haul.”
Shapiro outlined the Blue Jays’ revenue mix — primarily media rights, ticket sales, and corporate partnerships, with league revenue sharing and fan spending rounding out the rest. The Blue Jays generated 387 million in revenue in 2024, placing them in the middle tier of MLB franchises.
Depending on the team’s competitiveness, between 600,000 and one million Canadians watch Blue Jays games nightly.
Lessons Beyond Baseball
As the virtual session wrapped up, Shapiro’s advice clearly applied far beyond baseball. His five principles offer a guide for building strong, high-performing organizations:
- Create learning cultures where improvement happens at every level.
- Use data to reduce cognitive biases in high-stakes decisions.
- Empower employees by sharing challenges openly rather than hiding them.
- Resist short-term pressure by waiting for meaningful data before making strategic pivots.
- Be honest about business realities — even the uncomfortable ones.
Heading into the playoffs, the Blue Jays rely on these principles not as concepts on paper, but as daily practices that sustain performance under pressure. For leaders in any field, Mark Shapiro’s Blue Jays leadership philosophy offers a powerful reminder that sustainable success depends on learning faster, deciding smarter, and leading with transparency — even when the scoreboard updates every day.