What I am Reading Over the Spring Break

The first book I took on over spring break is Moneyball by Michael Lewis. At first blush Moneyball is about baseball, but it has much broader business lessons. Moneyball is a engrossing tale about the 2002 Oakland Athletics. The books premise is to experience a year in the life of a team that is consistently accomplishing as much in Major League Baseball as teams with 3x the payroll. What it delivers is a lesson of how an organization can use detailed metrics to find opportunities that its competitors overlook from either ignorance or arrogance.

Moneyball is incredibly well written. It communicates the statistics in terms that anyone can understand and paints the issues in very human terms. Oakland has subscribed to the theory originated from a group of statistically inclined fans that the most baseball experts rely on biased stats and overlook the unbiased ones to form their judgments about baseball (On base percentage matters alot more that batting average). Also, if you do the analysis strategies that we think work in baseball, such as sacrifice but or fly, actually are harmful; you should just play to get on base every time. What is amazing is that these objective conclusions are contrary to everything our gut and what the experienced players believe is true about baseball.

In my opinion, the message of the book is that if baseball, with all of the rich statistical data available, is full of misconceptions about what works and who is valuable, then how flawed are our perceptions in our everyday lives. If baseball execs cannot truly value players with all of that information about their performance, how can we value our employees with less perfect information. The premise is frightening, yet ripe with opportunity for those who are willing to commit to tracking objective performance data and perform proper analysis.

Great book! Great read! Great study in performance analysis!