Читать книгу Inclusion, Inc. - Sara Sanford - Страница 38

In the Athletics' year of Moneyball fame, Billy Beane made a $44 million ball club competitive with the $125 million New York Yankees. The key to Beane's success? He saw the value in players that the market had traditionally undervalued, and he brought complementary players together to bring out one another's strengths.

For decades, baseball franchises had been relying on a narrow set of metrics—stolen bases, home run averages, and batting averages—for scouting valuable players. Beane decided to widen the scope of what could be considered valuable. He and his scouts searched for players who performed well against metrics that typically go unnoticed, such as on-base percentage and slugging percentage (the number of bases a player gains each time he's at bat). These methods of player evaluation flew in the face of conventional scouting wisdom, but Beane's strategy proved successful.

Having players with higher on-base percentages meant that when a home run hitter came to bat, the odds were greater that another player would already be on base. This meant that hitting a home run would knock in two runs instead of one. Players with high slugging percentages were more likely to be on second base, rather than first, increasing the odds that they would make it home if the next batter hit a single.

The underestimated strengths that these players brought to the team amplified the benefits of more traditionally valued players. If you evaluated the team as an average of the players' metrics, it didn't look good, but the players' complementary strengths reinforced each other, creating a team that was greater than the sum of its affordable parts.

Beane fielded a team with a diversity of skills that was as powerful, collectively, as teams that were spending three times as much on traditional all-star players. This once controversial approach has now become widespread; historically undervalued metrics, such as on-base percentage, are now accepted as statistically strong indicators of a team's overall offensive success. These undervalued talents just needed to be given a chance.

Any business leader would jump at the opportunity to unlock the same rewards as their competition at a third of the price. But does this method translate? Carnegie Mellon Organizational Psychology Professor Anita Williams Woolley wanted to find out.