As fate would have it, my National League champion Philadelphia Phillies have gotten off to a miserable 1-4 start to the season after my last baseball-related post, so let’s try this again!
After watching the Phillies give up 27 (!!!) runs in their first two games—with all the starpower, all the talent, and all the momentum in the world coming off of last season’s World Series run, I’ve become hyper-focused again on the idea of Moneyball metrics.
If you’re unfamiliar, Moneyball by Michael Lewis, is a book about baseball, but it happens to be one of my favorite business books of all time!
It’s a story about how the small-market Oakland Athletics became an annual World Series contender in the early 2000s despite losing several of their young star players to other big-market teams.
What’s so crazy (and why it was made into a book and a movie) is that they did it with a small fraction of the payroll of teams like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.
How?
Not to give away the plot, but they simply stopped following the crowd, and began focusing on key, yet underappreciated statistics that the other 29 teams were ignoring.
So why should this matter to you and your business? Here’s a video I made to explain:
Click Here to Watch John’s Video – Moneyball
I’ll say it again: outcomes, outcomes, outcomes.
Think about what you are measuring and why you are measuring them.
What outcome are you correlating your metrics to?
Are you using “industry standard” KPIs? Are you measuring what your competitors are measuring?
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with tracking basic metrics, but by not digging deeper to find that quirky stat or that weird metric that is unique to your company, you’re probably sacrificing a critical competitive advantage!
If you haven’t read Moneyball, or at least watched the movie, I highly recommend it.
And even if you’re not a baseball fan, Moneyball will teach you a ton about business, and how to maximize your output with minimal inputs
Cheers,
John
Founder of the align5 Companies, CEO of Scaling Up Coaches, and Serial Entrepreneur
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