"We are card counters at the blackjack table"
Billy Beane – The Oakland Athletics

Five years ago I read a book called Moneyball , and as long as I live I will never forget the core message, in fact it’s one we should all try to take to heart. The book is about forty something baseball team General Manager Billy Beane, who’s dream is to win the last baseball game of the year – the World Series.

They made it into a movie with Brad Pitt and in the opening scene, having just lost his best players, Billy sits around the table with his talent scouts discussing who they should approach for the next season’s team. He listens to the same tired clichés being trotted out about who they should pick, "this guy is great looking, and this guy has a great build, what about him he’s really muscular…", and on it goes. But the GM has had enough, he looks the head of the scouting team right in the eye and says the immortal words "you’re thinking about the player attributes in the wrong way, all that matters is the numbers." Later on in the movie the head scout screams at Billy that he is "A stupid *******, there’s more to baseball than the numbers".

But Billy persists and hires an economics major to help him pick the team. He chooses players for very specific skills: one is chosen for his ability to get on base, another for his ability to pitch – even though no other team will touch him because his pitching style is weird.

The scouting team and the management of the club then fight him every step of the way. They go behind his back to play the team in a way that it should not be played (think of it like hiring Lionel Messi for your fantasy football team and putting him in goal). For the first nine games the team get creamed, and everyone laughs at Billy. By this point he’s had enough and decides to take matters into his own hands and puts the team back in the positions for which they were hired.

And guess what happens? The Oakland Athletics win 20 straight games in a row, the longest winning streak in history. Eventually in the last game of the season they get beaten. But the team that won that year had spent an average of 1.2 million dollars per game to win; Bill’s team had spent an average of just 237,000 dollars per game. The owner of the Boston Redsocks then approaches Billy and offers him 12.5 million dollars to run his team.

The events of both the book and the movie are based on real life and Bill’s strategy persisted in getting high league performance for low running costs. And if you think about it the Redsocks owner wasn’t really trying to buy Billy’s skills, he was paying for Billy’s system, a system that worked. But the question for me as I read the book was this, "why did so many people fight the new system?" and I don’t think there is one answer but I believe that it lies in frightened people’s desire to maintain the status quo, to make sure that we they keep their job, that they don’t have to do any more than the minimum and that they don’t break from the herd; even though what they’re doing clearly doesn’t work.

Yet all Billy was doing was running the numbers, finding the players with the best numbers in the different disciplines and putting them together in a team. Sounds simple really, meanwhile other managers were choosing players on the strength of their jawline. But remember it only sounds ridiculous if you can stand outside the game and see in, from the inside – and when everyone else around you is doing it, it sounds sane.

And I bet if you took the same bunch of baseball managers and told them that we use targets based on no scientific rational, that we put customers with different needs through the same standardised process and that we functionalise services, they would be able to see the inefficiency of it with the clear eyes of the outsider and laugh their heads off. But like them some of us keep on doing the same thing year after year hoping somehow for a different result.

However the Billy Beanes of the business world are growing, and they’re delivering winning streaks week after week. And just like Billy they put their secret sauce out there for everyone to see – despite resistance they look at the world through the eyes of the customer, they use measures in the right way, they differentiate between value work and waste, they see the folly of IVR machines and workflow systems, they vilify service standards and they crush the idea of the front office back office split. Because they too understand the core message in the book – think differently. And their willingness to look at their system from the outside and change it works. As their peers struggle on the innovators are getting promoted faster, earning more money and getting more respect… funny old word isn’t it?

Stuart

Bookmark It

Hide Sites