Moneyball

For those of you who haven’t read the book or seen the movie starring Jonah Hill (and some guy named Brad Pitt), Moneyball is a pretty endearing story about how Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane applied unorthodox statistical analyses (now known as Sabermetrics) to field winning teams. By assessing talent through seemingly obscure statistics such as Batting Average on Balls in Play, Ultimate Zone Rating and Value Over Replacement Player, Beane was able to uncover the proverbial diamonds in the rough. His success is indisputable: Oakland made the playoffs five times during the 2000’s despite a team payroll that was one eighth the size of the New York Yankees’.

So what relevance does this have to Forces@Work? I raise the Sabermetrics concept because Moneyball may hold value for talent management and acquisition professionals. What if HR leaders deduced and applied their own Sabermetric-like statistics when assessing talent? True, many companies use competency models, workforce analytics and other sophisticated assessments (e.g., Gallup, Hogan, etc.). Many other more progressive companies have tried to take it to another level (e.g., Google’s Project Oxygen, all the great I/O Pscyh work at P&G). However, it still seems like we’re still only the scratching the surface (valid and comprehensive HRIS data being a significant limiting factor).

If we suspend disbelief for a minute and envision a utopic world, potential HR Sabermetrics could consist of:

Business Impact: Revenue (or Productivity) Over Replacement Professional
Utility: Range Factor (a skill-based metric used to assess the number of functions/areas the individual can operate)
Leadership Communication: NERD (a statistic used to quantify players’ aesthetic value…could potentially be used as a proxy for charisma)
Contribution: win share (a statistic used to determine how much an individual contributed to a team’s success)

And the list goes on and on… Anyone interested in collaborating on this with me?