Moneyball teams

This caveat should have been put up front.

Since "Best" is a vague loaded term it's more accurate to understand the problem that you're trying to solve.

If you are creating a new web-standard or industry shifting technology then you absolutely need the best. If you are creating a new web based CRM for firefighters, then you need someone who is good, but probably doesn't do vector algebra in their head or [insert favorite discriminator for something hard.]

Obviously election (selecting people from a group) is hit-or-miss anyway...so maybe reverse-election (eliminating people from a group) could help.

> and was won against with teams spending over $100 million

What does that mean? They spent less on their teams, and they lost? So they should spend more!

> Once upon a time the ambitions of your company were exceeding the throughput capacity of your development teams. This is the ultimate goal of hiring...

This sentence ends with the ultimate goal, but "this" seems to be referring to the previous sentence, when it really isn't.

> If ambition growth constant

I'm guessing they mean "is" constant?

Buuut, then the author starts talking about some corporate-bs mumbo-jumbo "skills matrix". Moneyball is about "black swans" as Nassim Taleb would put it: unexpected outcomes that defy the current knowledge base. In other words, a conclusion that we could not have reached via deduction (but only perhaps abduction).

But that goes completely against the "skills matrix" concept. The whole point of Moneyball is that the Oakland players were flawed given standard metrics -- in fact, most were (very calculated) gambles.

>The final touch is to match these against levels of mastery. A lower level of skill may be someone who is largely uninformed of the subject, a middle level may be someone who can constantly use that skill well, and a high level is someone who is a mentor and thought-leader.

Oh god, he really did miss the point.

>With your new chart you are well prepared to decide where to make an investment. Should you hire for a specific weakness? Which team members get what training? Can we run peer mentorship? Do I have unchallenged experts who have no room to grow? Your answers are straight-forward now.

Yep. Whoosh. The whole idea of a strategy like Moneyball is that answers are not straightforward. Moneyball is all about intuition vs. evidence. In the case of the A's, intuition seemed to trump evidence, but the author keeps telling us to collect more evidence (in the form of matrices, skill trees, or whatever else). Not only is that the categorically wrong approach, it's also not how you build good teams.