Chapter 5 – Importance of Team Roles
Watching young children play sport is a sport in itself. Once while watching primary school boys play five per side football, most kids would run after the ball in a pack-like a herd of sheep. There were two however, though less skilled foot-wise than most of the others, would work together by each running up the field on each side and would just pass the ball to each other whenever the heard of boys came close to the one controlling the ball. They always won. As the years moved on, each of the boys in the original heard learned that it’s better to pass than to always hold in order to get the team better results. The original two then, were unable to keep up.
“Across multi disciplinary measures, being able to remove assumptions, understand and focus on true statistics and clear results can allow you to create a better team.”
Assumptions are easy to make at any age. After hearing this childhood story, it’s easy to think “well I’ve grown up now, and I don’t make silly assumptions any more.” This is far from the truth, and I want to recap the story from Moneyball where Billie Bean has to fight against traditional assumptions in order to beat the status quo.
Though baseball has fewer variables than teams in the work place, it can still offer useful glimpses into what is possible, especially with utilizing math and an understanding of statistics rather than only social science studies.
Though the movie Moneyball makes it appear that this was a short experiment. Bean and his economics Harvard educated Paul DePodesta with strengths in mathematics and psychology actually had more than a decade of data and previously researched opinions to build upon. The book rather than the movie provides the full picture for those interested.
The issue began when a baseball fan Bill James began self publishing pamphlets in the 1970’s arguing that the stats which Major League Baseball (MLB) was keeping on fielding had no value at all when trying to assess the quality that the players gave to the team.
With DePodesta’s help, using statistics that were now becoming more readily available due to the internet, eventually they were able to narrow all assumptions of what a good player is for a team down to a single thing. How often can a player get on base, which is a direct correlation to how often they can hit or walk without striking out. Though many of the expensive big hitters could hit harder, faster, and further, they tended to strike out more often resulting in bringing down the average team runs.
When Bean was scouted in his teens, he was quickly brought into the Major League due to having better stats across all parameters required at the time. As a teen he never lost, but being placed so quickly with seasoned players, his fear of failing got the better of him and frustrated his performance on the field. As a manager, he saw that this was true of many players, and he continually makes it clear to his peers that people are who they are, and that personality matters when measuring performance.
Bean was finally vindicated when the Oakland A’s drew a crowd over 50,000 to watch them win their 20th game in a row, breaking the record while having the lowest budget in MLB.
However, despite the statistics both in developing the team, and their ability to win so often with such a low budget, most managers of other MLB teams continued to think that their science was bunk. Basically, they wanted to continue in their assumptions rather than look at the new data collated over the previous two decades. Some even continued in their traditional assumptions while losing money over their seasons.
We’re using this example of Moneyball for the reason that due to the low variations because of sports rules, it is easier to ascertain a truth. This is not true in a work place where there are more variations than can be calculated than chess for instance, due to requests and needs by multiple parties and then multiplied by differing personalities.
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