Old Dogs, New Swings

This season, the New York Yankees are making headlines—not just for their hits, but for what they’re hitting with.

This season, the 27-time World Series champs started using the “torpedo” bat, a cutting-edge new baseball bat designed to optimize swing speed and sweet-spot connection based on specific player analytics. The bat, developed by Aaron Leanhardt, an MIT-trained physicist, is thicker in the middle than standard sluggers to maximize energy transfer on contact.

While innovation rarely yields overnight results, the Yankees’ investment in the torpedo bat appears to be paying off early. In the second game of their season-opening series, they hit nine home runs, a franchise single-game record and one shy of the MLB record. The team also hit the most homers ever in the first eight games of a season—25 in total.

In baseball, tradition runs deep. So when the most storied franchise in the game embraces innovation, it sends a powerful message: No organization is too old to learn some new tricks.

Yet how many organizations assume otherwise?

Innovation is rarely immediate. And it’s never accidental.

In many workplaces, innovation is seen as the domain of the young, the new, and the digital-first. Startups get the spotlight, while legacy institutions are viewed as too risk-averse or bureaucratic to evolve. But that’s a myth—one that organizations must stop believing if they want to stay relevant.

The Yankees didn’t stumble onto the torpedo bat overnight. As with most meaningful innovations, the team needed years of research, quiet experimentation, and openness to change. In that sense, this bat isn’t just a story about sports; it’s a case study in what real organizational innovation looks like.

The secret to sustainable innovation lies in four key levers: leadership, people, infrastructure, and culture. As Korn Ferry Institute’s research shows, when these elements align with purpose, strategy, and the broader business context, innovation becomes a way of operating.

But here’s the problem: Many companies treat innovation like a lightning bolt. They expect one bold idea to strike and change everything overnight.

That’s not how it works.

True innovation, whether it’s a torpedo bat or a next-gen operating model, is evolutionary—not revolutionary. It emerges when leaders create psychological safety for experimentation, teams are empowered to try and fail, and infrastructure is built to support collaboration over silos. Most importantly, innovation thrives in cultures that embrace purpose over perfection.

That’s what makes the Yankees’ example so compelling. They didn’t adopt these bats out of desperation. They did so because they understood that staying on top requires continuous learning, even after a century of dominance.

Legacy isn’t the enemy of innovation. Complacency is.

Companies with deep roots can innovate by combining existing knowledge with new insights—what is known as absorptive capacity. Our research on innovation shows that absorptive capacity helps organizations to identify, take in, and apply new information effectively. The Yankees used decades of swing data, biomechanics analysis, and coaching wisdom. The torpedo bat wasn’t a break from tradition, but rather the next logical step in its evolution.

Despite some early controversy, the bats were quickly cleared by MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, who praised their potential to make the game more exciting. Within days, all 30 MLB teams had placed orders, including the Milwaukee Brewers, who lost to the Yankees in that record-setting game at Yankee Stadium. (Even Brewers first baseman Rhys Hoskins said he was eager to use it.)

In the same way, business leaders should stop asking how they can emulate start-ups and start asking, “How can we get better by building on what we already know?”

This might mean restructuring how innovation is funded or rethinking who gets to lead innovation efforts (hint: it’s not always the top of the organizational chart). This might even mean unlearning old assumptions—like who’s allowed to take a swing at change.

After all, the latest swing forward in baseball history came from the oldest team in the league.

So let the New York Yankees serve as a reminder: Innovation is about attitude, not age. It’s about systems and signals. It’s about creating the conditions in which new ideas can take root, even if they look nothing like what came before.

Organizations don’t need to be born yesterday to evolve. They just need the courage to pick up the bat.