Collaboration, Moneyball Style

In the field of sports writing, few names are more familiar than Michael Lewis. Though Lewis has written quite a few books, he’s best known as the brain behind Moneyball, which tracked a new way to create a successful baseball team without spending a whole lot of money. The poster child of the book and the broader movement is Billy Beane and his early 2000s Oakland A’s teams. According to Wikipedia:

Rigorous statistical analysis had demonstrated that on base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and the A’s became convinced that these qualities were cheaper to obtain on the open market than more historically valued qualities such as speed and contact. These observations often flew in the face of conventional baseball wisdom and the beliefs of many baseball scouts and executives.

Recently, Lewis wrote an article that basically called Shane Battier of the Houston Rockets of the NBA. This article argues that Battier, despite being “a marginal NBA athlete” and having a reputation as a “replaceable cog”, was perhaps the reason that the Rockets were a “championship caliber team” and not a “bubble playoff team”. For those interested in the complete argument, I highly recommend it. (And for football fans, one of my absolute favorite blogs, Smart Football, take a stab at Lewis’s latest article as well.

So what’s the point?

The business world loves sports metaphors. Everyone knows that. So how’s this for one: someone who’s good at collaborating can be a clear difference maker in an organization. This is not to say that people who are good at collaborating don’t have skills or value to contribute beyond being a good “collaborator” (a word that I don’t particularly like, but will use it…); rather, it’s that someone who is good at collaborating can really take a project to another level. A star performer who’s great at making those around him/her better is better than a star performer that doesn’t play well with others. The best of the best do both.

The catch-22 in business, as in basketball, is that it’s very difficult to understand exactly what it is about somebody who performs like Battier that makes them so valuable to a team. There’s no stat (other than wins and testimonials) that will highlight that value and there’s not an easy way to figure out who these performers are, except by reputation (or maybe social network analysis).

Moneyball Management

Moneyball was all about creating new ways to measure performance and value created by players. And these new measures were created because the old ones weren’t sufficient to tell the story. Collaboration is one of those other things, that if we can measure an individual’s ability to collaborate, could revolutionize the way we evaluate the creation of value. After all, guys who win (even if they don’t have any one great thing they do) will have a job until they choose not to.