Why Your Company Isn't Like a Baseball Team

Why Your Company Isn’t Like a Baseball Team

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Recently, Chris shared an excellent post about the new World Series Champion Houston Astros. In short, it was a reminder of how data-driven thinking can have massive results.

But what does it take for an organization to achieve this? The first is leadership committed to a long term goal. It took the Astros 6 years of hard work and commitment to a new way of thinking to achieve their goals. The book/movie “Moneyball” does a good job illustrating all of the previous thinking that had to be overcome. After all, people had made life-long careers on that thinking, so why change? If your leadership isn’t committed to this long term, it simply won’t happen. However, it just takes one leader of a part of the organization to lead the way.

The second thing you need is data. The baseball world is full of passionate and focused score keepers. Pitch counts, speed, game time temperature, at bats vs lefties, etc. Google actually has a free baseball stats dataset: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/baseball. Unfortunately for most of us, there isn’t someone recording each and every movement we make at work (that may be a good thing for some of you). However, it does make it hard to be data driven if you don’t have data.

So how do you convince a leader to become data driven and how do you decide what data to capture? Business leaders care about results, so aligning to those will get their support. Those results are driven by actions taken by the organization, so the data that describes those actions is what needs captured. When you take this approach you may find that some of the actions aren’t being recorded at all, many don’t have enough information about them and all of them are difficult to pull together and understand. Even when those hurdles have been overcome, you then face the issue of how to get information back into the hands of the masses who can use it to change the result.

At Tectonic, we’ve combined world class salesforce implementation expertise with data science and analytics know how to drive innovative business results. We can help you navigate the above complexities so you can play better baseball.

Original url: https://www.gettectonic.com/single-post/2017/11/10/why-your-company-isnt-like-a-baseball-team