Success in business: the Moneyball approach 11:15am

What happens when you combine all the fashionable thought-provoking books and apply it to business?

The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Wikinomics and particularly Moneyball were never intended as books on management but that hasn’t stopped many firms developing their own interpretations. 

Specialists in all sorts of fields have read Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball” and taken something valuable away from it. Lewis himself suggests that people have interpreted Billy Beane’s methods as the Oakland A’s GM in ways he never intended. Moneyball is fast being forgotten as having anything to do with baseball, but an approach to ‘managing’ any group.

XO Communications, an IT company, have found their own slugging percentage to find out who were the Go To Guys in their companies by asking:

- Who do you go to for advice or information when assessing a difficult problem or discussing ideas?

- Who do you depend on to get your job done?

- Who do you communicate with most frequently? and

- Who is your most valued contact within XO IT Operations?

Like Beane, Steve Randle, Vice President of IT Operations for XO Communications wanted to find an objective way to understand his organization and how to make it more successful. Like many IT executives, Randle used metrics such as uptime, server statistics and project completions to illustrate his team’s achievements. While these metrics paint a useful picture, Randle realized that there was a more fundamental reason his organization was successful—because of employees’ knowledge and relationships—and he wanted to document it.

What else can we find to measure and improve?