Comments on: Winning by the numbers: In praise of Moneyball and data analytics

By: Jeff Larche

Jeff Larche — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:52:49 +0000

You’re right of course, Chris and Daria. I shudder to use this shopworn phrase, but it’s about “Thinking outside the box.”

Okay, now that the nausea has passed, consider what the phrase really means. Look for answers in unexpected places, and from unexpected people.

The Oakland A’s decided not to go to the traditional baseball “oracles” — the scouts. Instead, they plowed through numbers, mostly from college baseball statistics.

But even before they chose what data set to examine, they had a revelation: If we do what everyone else is doing, we’ll lose. Especially if they have deeper pockets than us.

So let’s try something different.

They were led to data mining not because they were in love with the tactic, but because the tactic made sense.

In this way, the book is, more than anything, about new ways to do strategic thinking.

It’s why, for the right type of person, it can resonate far beyond marketing. But in marketing especially, it reminds us that we too are surrounded by data we can use, if we’d only open our eyes to it.

By: Daria Skliarova

Daria Skliarova — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:44:58 +0000

I venture to say that a link is being made between the power of statistics in ranking baseball teams much like within the marketing realm; you need the intricacy of all intermittent numerical factors to gage past, present and future progress? And sometimes bad numbers – accessed at the right time have a crucially different “meaning”…. And could in actuality signal rare success…

Insert bold supposition here: I believe this relates to everything in life and design, tools for creating the right (marketing/artistic) message are ever-present; they are context & syntax!

By: cg

cg — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:16:39 +0000

I’m right there with you in being inspired by this way of thinking. I’ve really tried to apply that thinking to almost everything I do since reading the book. For me it broke down into two categories.

The first was turning me into a value shopper. That doesn’t mean finding the cheapest thing – it means truly understanding what I value and therefore what I’m willing to pay more for. An easy example of this is the Sony LCD TV I just bought. I could have paid 2x for the top of the line version from Sony or the same amount for another brand that theoretically had better hardware. But through research I determined what was important to me and paid for that.

The second, obviously related way, was in trying to look at different ways to measure things. Metrics get jammed down your throat all the time, in all walks of life, but they aren’t necessarily the right metrics and tend to be sensationalist. A good example of this is the Ford Explorer being the most dangerous SUV on the road a few years ago. Did Explorers have the most instances of flipping over? Maybe, but there were also exponentially more Explorers on the road than any other SUV.

That doesn’t mean you should buy and Explorer – I just sold mine