Get machines to do the learning on your behalf
Irecently had my executive team over for homemade pizza, my culinary speciality, and while sitting around chatting, we ended up watching the Hollywood blockbuster, Moneyball.
Based on true events, the movie tells the story of two men who attempt to assemble a competitive baseball team without the budget to do so. Even though I’ve seen it dozens of times, there’s a line I never tire of hearing. It’s the moment when Peter Brand, a fresh graduate with an economics degree from Yale, confronts his boss, Billy Beane, about the way they hire players for their team.
The line goes like this: “There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening.”
He goes on to explain what he means: “People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players; your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. You’re trying to replace Johnny Damon.
“The Boston Red Sox see Johnny Damon and they see a star who is worth seven-and-half million dollars a year. When I see Johnny Damon, what I see is an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. The guy’s got a great glove.
“He’s a decent lead-off hitter. He can steal bases. But is he worth the seven-and-half million dollars a year that the Boston Red Sox are paying him? No. Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions.”
While the sport of baseball may not travel well around the world, what Peter Brand was trying to say, does. Relying on experience and intuition perpetuates the out-ofdate approaches that you’re holding onto as best practice.
What Brand said to Billy Beane, he would repeat if he were talking to you today. We live in a day when data with the power of machine learning can correct our failure to understand what’s really going on.
Just as the guys from Moneyball discovered in baseball, the current system of leadership and management is asking the wrong questions. Instead of hiring employees, you should be buying results. Hiring employees is buying time, but acquiring time isn’t the goal.
The question is, “What are the results you want?”
At this point I should confess, watching Moneyball during our pizza night was actually by design. I wanted us to discuss the variables that leaders should focus on, and what better way to do that than by presenting the example in the movie and figuring out the leadership equivalent of buying runs.
But we went further than watching and discussing the movie, we actually pulled out our laptops and began coding an elementary recommender engine to force us to think intensely about the role of empirical analysis in leadership. Given the vast availability of workplace data, it’s possible to generate recommendations on how to turn the minutes worked into measurable results. As Peter Brand pointed out, the data that can shift your thinking towards buying results instead of time, is sitting at your fingertips, yet you’re probably not taking advantage of it. Instead, you’re looking past it, ignoring it, or simply failing to incorporate it into your daily leadership.
How can I say this with confidence? Because I’ve experienced it first-hand. For me, the shock came when we started using data and machine learning in our Leadership Engine. Since we developed the engine, I’ve witnessed the reactions of countless CEOs, stunned by how much they can learn, measure and improve when they use data. I’m convinced that we are entering a workplace data revolution.
Leadership based upon experience and intuition is being replaced by data recommendations enabled by machine learning. Soon, we will be using the data collected every day to measure in-work activity. This may be a bold statement, but if you’re not really, and I emphasise really, using your data, then your head is stuck in the sand. It’s time to allow the machine to learn and the human to lead.
As Peter Brand pointed out, the data that can shift your thinking towards buying results instead of time, is sitting at your fingertips, yet you’re probably not taking advantage of it. Instead, you’re looking past it, ignoring it, or simply failing to incorporate it into your daily leadership.