Buy Bonds or Read Moneyball

Composed in Montreal, Quebec, Canada--

Now that Barry Bonds has done the deed, baseball afficionados can focus on something else for a while.  I'm not a big fan of the sport, but I played a lot shortstop and second base in my life, so I enjoy the game and certainly appreciate its finer points.

I thought I knew baseball pretty well until I read Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael M. Lewis.  Ultimately, this is a biography of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics.  Beane has almost single handedly changed how people think about baseball.

Beane taught the world to think about the process of winning rather than just the outcome.  Baseball brains used to care deeply about home runs.  Now they are enamored with on-base percentage (OBP).  Mathematically speaking, OBP is roughly three times more important than slugging percentage.  OBP is even more important than runs scored, if you can believe that.

Beane and company are big on research.  When the A's Assistant General Manager Paul DePodesta started bringing his laptop computer to meetings, coaches and scouts became extremely nervous.  Apparently, the computer  rarely lies and has become a dependable tool for making a variety of important decisions. 

For example, it almost never works out when a baseball player is signed right out of high school.  The kid has not matured physically, mentally, emotionally or psychologically so he can rarely deliver on the adults' expectations. 

My favorite quote from the book:  What begins as a failure of the imagination, ends as a marketing efficiency.  Also:  An explanation is where the mind comes to rest.

I deliver a lot of sales training and I see a corollary in the business world.  So many business owners and sales managers are more interested in the outcome of a sales campaign than the process.  Let's use a baseball analogy to drive home (drive home, get it?) my point.   

In business, we're interested in how many "runs are scored," but if we put our attention toward "moving men around the bases," we will "score runs."