111–120 of 178 posts
Moneyball and Six Thinking Hats are excellent approaches to for people and roles. But they aren't enough. The key driver of top-tier teams is excellent ongoing safe communication. To build communications, use team goals (e.g. OKRs & KPIs), team ways of working (e.g. TEAM FOCUS), and team positions (e.g. scorecards). My notes about these are open source: https://joelparkerhenderson.github.io/ Edit to explain abbreviat…
My model for ideal hiring are the Spurs. They consistently hire for talent and potential, provide the proper mentoring and conditions for the potential to fully materialise. "As you sow, so shall you reap". But few have the patience to sow nowadays. We rather buy ready-made in the grocery store.
Most companies cannot have their employees sign multi-year contracts. Outside of sports, there is a much bigger risk of your competitors poaching people after they've developed.
Put another way, you'll spend less money overall if you can identify, hire, and retain undervalued talent. If you build an exceptional workplace (and pay well) most will want to stay. And if you've done that, it'll be far easier to attract talent in the future.
Another way to look at it is: What causes projects to succeed or fail? I've seen my share of failed projects throughout my career (as a participant and as a co-worker watching it happen). By a huge margin, most of the failed project did not fail because the engineering team was weak, or because they didn't hire "rockstar" programmers, or because the engineers didn't go to Stanford. They failed because of things like…
There is an interesting anecdote that I love. Some number of years ago there used to be a show called EcoChallenge. It was made by Marc Burnett but before Survivor. It was simply an adventure race but no politics and no contrived voting. Each team of 4 must be co-ed. There is a starting point, there is a stopping point and there are way stations along the way. Simply go from start to end hitting the way stations. Everything else was left up to the teams. The one big twist is that you can't win unless ALL of the team hits each way point. Teams are allowed to race 24x7.
One of the last years it was on tv, a team of navy seals bombed out and a team of 3 playboy playmates went further then they did. The team that won (from NZ) had a sick teammate and spent two days nursing their teammate into passable health. They loaded up all that person's gear split 1.3x, 1.3x, 1.3x, 0x and set off. They rocketed past all of the other teams and won by over a day.
This is what real success looks like. A determined team laser focused on the exact same goal and doing whatever it takes to get there.
I think we need to be critical of the Moneyball narrative - and not just because Oakland hasn't actually performed that well under the MB regime ... The understood narrative is that dummies were choosing players based on broken heuristics and that proper, sober heuristics would uncover hidden value. Put another way: If you remove human decision-making and replace it with algorithms you will achieve better results. I…
That can't be used as any form of argument. The ideas behind Moneyball revolutionized baseball. However the financial challenges that Oakland had in the book are still exactly the same today. The reason for their lack of ultimate success is that they gave away their first mover advantage by allowing that book to be written. Now every other team has adopted the Moneyball mindset and Oakland is back to being a cash strapped team with little competitive advantage. Even considering that, they have still been one of the more successful teams when compared to their financial peers.
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Agreed. It's also worth observing for those who might not really be baseball fans that baseball is really less of a team sport than most major sports. Yes, team dynamics can reach toxic levels and sometimes teams seem to outperform their individual roster members. But other than some degree of matching players with positions (pitchers in particular), you mostly want players who would be best/best value on key stats u…
The entire offensive side of the game pretty clearly violates the notion of independence. In particular, the value of a batter with particular stats is dependent on the batters that come before and after him. This is the reasoning behind stacking people with high on base percentages in front of sluggers. If it were not a team sport, you'd see no clear patterns in line-up. This applies at the team selection level as w…
That being said... one win can be the difference between a playoff spot or not, so it clearly does matter. I'm just trying to emphasize that the teamwork aspect of the offense is minimal, as a lineup of hitters with solid statistics is more important than the order in which they bat.
However, the defensive side of things is much more tricky to measure. Baseball statistics still have a difficult time calculating the value (for better or worse) of a player's defense and nobody is arguing that it doesn't significantly affect a team's performance.
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The entire offensive side of the game pretty clearly violates the notion of independence. In particular, the value of a batter with particular stats is dependent on the batters that come before and after him. This is the reasoning behind stacking people with high on base percentages in front of sluggers. If it were not a team sport, you'd see no clear patterns in line-up. This applies at the team selection level as w…
That's fair enough. Although I'd argue that it's more a case of assembling an appropriate portfolio than it is a "team" in the way that people normally use that term. (I'd also argue that overall offensive ability trumps a lot of optimization around base stealing or the type of hits.) ADDED: i.e. I'd argue that if populating a roster with about a half dozen All Star sluggers were financially viable, I'd argue that wo…
The actual approach was to get a bunch of people who worked to extend the inning by not getting out.. aka getting on base safely. You don't need many big hits when you can get singles and doubles consistently.
A couple years ago, I met a small scale angel investment group that complained "we haven't had a unicorn" but when we chatted more, I found out 60% of their investments were acquired in under five years with them making ~5x each time.
Not as sexy but sounds like a good strategy to me.
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Well the US Olympic Basketball Dream Team did crush it.
Even that team was fielded based on position. They didn't have 12 centers.
Isiah Thomas was deserving, and Laettner was picked over Shaq. At the time, both were tossups. Johnson was older and so was Bird, but I assume they had high salaries per the topic.
[0] http://www.basketball-reference.com/olympics/teams/USA/1992/
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How do you measure and quantify a team's quality when joining? Especially if you are moving from a different company, I feel like it is probably impossible to know as you may only meet a small subset of the team you work with, if you even get to meet anyone on your future team at all.
You can't measure it before you join, just as they can't measure your effectiveness before you join. The best you can do is hit the eject button after 6 months after you've assessed what's really going on. Same goes for the employer's side.
You can generate heuristic data though. This really should be a priority for you during the interview process. They have the right to ask you very difficult questions, and you have the right to ask them very difficult questions as well.
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On the other hand, a star quarterback or goalie has a disproportionate positive effect on the team's winning chances, and chances to win championships.
This is probably true of a quarterback, but it's not generally true of hockey goalies. You'd much rather build your team around Sidney Crosby than any goalie to ever play the game.