
Just in time for baseball’s post-season, the film version of the book Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt and Philip Seymour Hoffman, is due in theaters next month. Moneyball is based on the true story of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics and his attempt to use analytics to build a winning baseball team with limited resources.
If you are in HR, when you see the movie (and you will, it’s Brad Pitt), you won’t be able to get the comparisons to business world workforce planning and analytics out of your head. Moneyball, written by Michael Lewis, articulates the challenges faced by Oakland Athletics GM, Billy Bean:
- Through experimentation, find those factors that can be used to reliably predict success.
- With this new ability to predict success, go recruit/procure/develop those success factors in the most affordable way possible.
- Put the pieces together to form a winning team.
Aren’t these some of the same challenges we seek to solve in workforce planning and analytics? Of course they are!
Save some money for your company by skipping that leadership development course and take your team out for a movie and popcorn. What will they learn from Moneyball?
- Challenge established thinking. You can’t create a competitive advantage if you do things the same way everybody else does.
- Use the scientific method to test what works best. The time for gut-feel management has passed.
- If you are successful, others will copy you. But when you build your competitive advantage through people, it is much harder to copy.
I remember playing baseball as a kid and hearing teammates encourage a batter’s discretion by shouting “a walk is as good as a hit.” Well, no kid thinks getting a walk is as good as a hit. Individual players have always been measured on their ability to hit the ball and reach base safely (batting average). The point is that THE TEAM benefits as much from a walk as from a hit. The result is a runner on first base, either way you accomplish it. Billy Beane was one of the first to recognize and reward contributions to TEAM metrics above individual metrics in order to achieve team goals.
This is just another example of analytics changing the game. Enjoy the movie!
Cheers,
Andrew Courtois