Team players.

• Author: Wallace, Eric
• Position: Teamwork in business

Under the midnight sun, it's business against business. Strategy against strategy. Epic struggles for dominance. Heroic battles for victory.

These clashes are not for the weak. Nor are they for independent types. More than any other critical episodes in Alaska business, they call for teamwork.

Dusty. Bloody. Exhausting. It's triumph-and-tragedy time, when companies throw their weight, their best talent and their hand-stitched, crisply logo'ed uniforms into - yes - the brief but glorious Alaska softball season.

Businesses from South Tongass to North Barrow love to sponsor teams or, better yet, to stock them with their own mighty hitters, their own flighty fielders, their own rollicking cheerleaders.

Look! There's the purchasing officer pounding her mitt (or maybe a mosquito?) behind second.

There's the junior outside salesman racing down the foul line for a high fly. Oops!

And over there, the lowly file clerk, batting a holy .440, flexes a proud bat and for once gets to tell the district manager (batting .179) what to do.

It's amazing how on summer eves all over the state we find new energy and hasten from the office, the warehouse, the store, the plant to those remarkably lumpy, bumpy and mundane empty lots known as playing fields - most of them literally diamonds in the rough.

We tog up in our 1990s versions of 1890s garb, don our vital visored thinking caps, bend and stretch, toss and catch, then turn on the adrenaline and play away - new warriors in the jousting lanes, flashing the company colors in the dust.

A curious ritual, this. It can generate more energy and focus in one or two scant evening hours than business-as-usual generates during the entire working day.

There's much more going on here than dozens of athletic employees (plus the pudgypants, the klutzgloves, the clumsycleats, the runs-like-frigid-motoroils, the hurler-puffers) grandstanding in the heady Alaska air.

For one thing, the esprit de corps softball engenders can be quite remarkable (particularly if the team succeeds in actually winning now and then). Field enthusiasms carry back to the workplace, where diamond derringdo is excitedly replayed, and company morale stats soar.

For many businesses, the softball team also creates a major league interdepartmental melting pot. On the field you swing, slide, moan, groan, cheer and buddy with people you didn't normally interact with at work. Back on the job, you experience a new sort of connectedness. What's more, you learn to...