There's a common affliction suffered by baseball pitchers and corporate managers alike, a tendency that derails many careers, perversely, just when things couldn't be going any better. It's called "pitching too fine" in baseball, and if you're a fan, you know how heartbreaking it can be.

What happens is that a pitcher begins a game with good stuff. As the innings progress, he discovers that his control has never been better, his mood never more serene and implacable. Wherever he wants the ball to go, whatever the speed, makes no difference; it obeys him as if it were an extension of his thoughts.

Soon, a sense of overwhelming well-being overtakes him. Afterward, a baffled and stunned pitcher will talk as if he had experienced rapture of the deep, that fatal intoxication that strikes scuba divers when they descend beyond a safe depth. "I was in complete control," he will say. "I don't know what happened."

What happened ought to be familiar to any manager who allowed a new product to miss its shipping date in order to let Design do a final debugging, or Marketing do one last focus group, or Fulfillment implement that new inventory system. Suddenly, those balls that obeyed you like little white genies turn unruly. Suddenly, you get phone calls from sales managers in Lansing and Long Beach and London, irate because they have back orders to fill and nothing to tell their customers. Suddenly, they're hitting your pitches out of the park.

The Greeks had a word for this: They called it hubris. We all forget, in the exalted moments when we've achieved that rare state athletes call being "in the zone," that what comes up must go down. We assumed that if we dodged a bullet by pulling an all-nighter in college, we can do the equivalent in business. We calculate our quarterly profit based on our best week, best day, best hour . . . heck, why not our best five minutes? We micro-manage our employees and watch productivity soar, forgetting that people who are told exactly what to do eventually lose all initiative and stop working when you aren't there to look over their shoulders.

Every one of these scenarios has a common genesis: The person in charge becomes so enamored with his or her talent that she falls in love with the process, not the product. If you're a manager who can get inside an employee's head and really, really make him perform, why should you care that employees are fleeing your department in droves? Who cares what the score is when you can throw four different pitches to eight different locations? Who cares if nobody can buy your product so long as it's the best product it can possibly be?

In this imperfect world of ours, this kind of obsession with perfection yields some unattractive results. As Yogi Berra might have said about the pitcher, "The bum was too interested in being an artist when he shoulda been a bum."

The tricky, sometimes tragic, thing about hubris is that it comes about at the end of a spectrum of perfectly acceptable, even commendable behavior. The manager who is conscientious to a fault -- what CEO wouldn't want to encourage her? The human resources person who always has a new idea for enriching the lives of employees -- isn't that how a company makes one of those "Best Places to Work For" lists? Meanwhile, the business magazines and pop culture gurus keep telling people to do what they love, do the "right" thing without thought of consequences, to focus on the process and let the end result take care of itself. All unobjectionable aims, to be sure, unless your aim is to lose weight (in which case, eating may be something you love but must control), run a business (when the "right" thing changes depending on whether you choose short-term or long-term goals), and so forth.

That's why the last lesson any of us learns, the ultimate nugget of self-knowledge, is that there are situations when we must be wise enough not to choose the best. I know this may seem to fly in the face of everything business preaches -- but it's a bedrock truth about human beings and our nature.

The novelist Leo Tolstoy was once asked, at the height of his acclaim, why he didn't leave his rural plantation, come to Moscow, and consort with the aristocracy into which he was born. His answer -- "Every novelist must have a bit of the peasant in him" -- is a reminder not to refine ourselves so much that we lose touch with what works. That's sage advice for anybody, no matter if you're a manager, a pitcher, a novelist, or a CEO.