Friday March 04, 2005
Friday March 04, 2005 Moneyball, Statistics and Talent
Late one evening last October I went out to dinner with Hal Stern in Colorado, and, given the time of year, the subject of baseball came up. We were supposed to talk about OpenSolaris and the ramifications for Services, since Hal is the CTO for Sun's Services organization, but I knew that something was up when Hal asked to sit near the bar, so that he could look over my shoulder (not at me, mind you, but over my shoulder) to see the television coverage of Game 5 of the postseason Yankees Red Sox competition. I was happy to oblige, but couldn't help but ask why baseball mattered so much to him?
Well, we did talk about OpenSolaris and also about Providence and eating clubs and family and Fenway and about a
million other
things
that you talk about when you're having a good time. And along the
way, Hal had a book suggestion for me: Moneyball
by Michael
Lewis.The next morning, Hal sent me a follow-up email, not just to say thanks but to make sure I heeded his advice to read Moneyball. (This is one of the valuable lessons I've learned from Hal - even though he's incredibly busy, he always makes the time to follow-up and leave you with an idea or a question. Wonderful manners. Must be that east coast education at work.)
So, finally, long overdue, I read Moneyball. Wow. Of course, it's old news. It was published in 2003. It's been reviewed before. But as I asked around, I found a whole bunch of people who haven't read it yet. So, here is my emphatic recommendation. READ IT. The opening lines of Moneyball's Preface draw you right in:
"I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?"
For any of you who have wished that we used more statistical analysis in business - and asked better questions - you'll love this book. It's actually a woven collection of stories - about Billy Beane, Bill James, Paul DePodesta, Scott Hatteberg, Jeremy Brown, Chad Bradford and my favorite, the Greek god of walks. But mostly it's about a vision and a commitment to think about an old problem differently, to challenge conventional wisdom, to be willing to be laughed at, and to use science (statistics, in this case) to make decisions about staffing and talent. It's also a potent reminder that one should never use someone else's yardstick to measure talent. The A's found tremendous contributors where other teams saw only outcasts. From the chapter on "The Jeremy Brown Blue Plate Special" in Moneyball:
"They will make fun of what the A's are about to do; and there will be a lesson in that. The inability to envision a certain kind of person doing a certain kind of thing because you've never seen someone who looks like him do it before is not just a vice. It's a luxury. What begins as a failure of imagination ends as a market inefficiency: when you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job."
Michael Lewis has taken a sport that I had always considered Boring (the B intentionally capitalized) and made it absolutely, utterly fascinating. For any of you that know me really well, there's a line in the Scott Hatteberg chapter that resonates. Gold star to whoever finds it.
Finally, I loved the underlying commentary about community, and sharing of ideas, and internet as a town square for conversation and problem-solving. What Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta did with the Oakland A's would not have been possible without standing on the shoulders of giants, nor without the collaboration of different people spread across the country: From the "Anatomy of An Undervalued Pitcher" chapter in Moneyball:
"The Internet of course had consequences for the search for new baseball knowledge. One of the things the Internet was good for was gathering together people in different places who shared a common interest. Internet discussion groups, and Web sites like baseballprimer and baseballprospectus, spring up, created by young men who, as boys, had been seduced by the writings of Bill James."
I think the brilliant story told in Moneyball may just be a drop in the bucket, an early view of the kinds of "big steps forward" people will be able to take because of the internet and better access to information. In the meantime, it's a great read for a rainy, or a sunny, day. Rainy, here.
(2005-03-04 14:02:09.0) Permalink Comments [4]
Sunday February 13, 2005 Eyetools: What Do People Really Look At?
Greg Edwards, the CTO of Eyetools, just started the Eyetools Research Blog in early February. If you're interested in understanding more about how the human eye travels around web pages, and what is more likely to catch people's attention vs. what is more likely to be ignored, check it out. From Greg's first blog post:
"I love what I do and I believe that understanding visual interaction data (what people look at) can really help people design better websites... yet, other than talking directly with clients, I haven't had an opportunity to talk about all the really cool things that we discover — until now!
This weblog is going to be my vehicle to talk about surprising data I've seen, "rules-of-thumb" that we discover and interesting directions in the research." - Greg Edwards
I particularly like seeing the "I love what I do" sentiment.
Props to Steve Rubel's Micro
Persuasion for pointing me to Greg's blog.
In keeping with the old saying that a picture is worth
a thousand words, here is Greg Edwards' heatmap
of people reading one of their blogs. Cool. Now I just need
to put
these lessons to use in the formatting of my own blog pages...
If you want to know even more about this area, Martin Hardee (the
blogger behind "Sun.Com Usability, Design & Other Stuff") posted "Where
your eyes travel on web pages" last October; the blog includes a
link to the Poynter Institute's fascinating
writeup titled "The
Best of Eyetrack III: What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes."
It's all connected, too - the Poynter research was done in partnership
with Poynter, the folks at Eyetools
and the Estlow Center.
Technorati Tag: Eyetools
(2005-02-13 14:24:28.0)
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Wednesday February 09, 2005 Scoble, O'Grady and the Blogosphere
I'm also pleased to see that Robert has been watching blogs.sun.com. Which is great. I've been known to poke around Channel9 from time to time, where I particularly like the doctrine. From the Scobleizer blog:
"Sun's bloggers have made Sun much more interesting to watch lately. Don't you agree?"
The conversation goes a bit further. Andy sat next to Stephen O'Grady of RedMonk at a dinner last week. Somehow they ended up talking about blogging, and it turns out that Stephen had read my blog, too. Cool again. People are actually reading these humble testaments of passion and commitment.
Of course, I had to return the favor and find out more about Stephen O'Grady. That's when I discovered this gem in his tecosystems blog. Check it out:
"Looking to Court Developers? Try Giving Them What They Want"
Good stuff. All part of the conversation.
(2005-02-09 15:37:28.0) Permalink
Monday January 31, 2005 Open Source and Winston Churchill
- "We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give."
Of course, I didn't remember the exact quote when I returned to work
later that day (and I wasn't in a position to write it down at the
chapel), so I turned to
the trusty google search engine, which took me to both the Quotations
page (which recently had its 10
year anniversary) and to the WikiQuote
page where I quickly found what I hope is the exact quote. I
didn't have such good luck finding the context for the quote, but I'm
pretty sure he was not
talking about open source at the time. Still, it is a good fit
for the philosophy behind open source and the benefits of giving to
a community...
(2005-01-31 00:47:30.0)
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Saturday January 29, 2005 A few weeks ago, Danese, Andy and I flew up to Oregon for a meeting. Contrary to usual habit, we flew out of the Oakland airport, which one of my friends used to call "his favorite toy airport." If you ever flew through Oakland in those days, you'd understand - it used to be so small!
I was so impressed with the new screens in the Oakland terminal that listed arriving and departing flights that I begged Danese to take a picture. Here it is. Alternating colors on the rows, recognizable logos that your eye is drawn to, use of color for cancelled flights... Edward Tufte might even be impressed, especially in comparison to the black and white monitors of years past, with line after line of flight information that looked the same to weary, travelling eyes. I found the old flight lists particularly frustrating when trying to make a connection with just minutes to spare - ugh!
For those of you unfamilar with Tufte, I recommend you check out Tufte's class on "Presenting Data and Information". If you live near Atlanta, Knoxville, Nashville, Boston or Arlington, Virginia, then you're in luck - Tufte will be teaching in those cities this spring. He is a charismatic teacher, and his beautiful books are included in the price of the class. I'm so enamored with this class that I encouraged 8 people on my team to attend the Palo Alto class last December. And even with all the hype I generated beforehand, they all came back with good things to say.
One more comment about the trip - the Portland airport now has free wifi in 70% of its terminal. Beautiful. Although it did contribute to some antisocial behavior over dinner as Andy, Danese and I tried to catch up quickly on everything we'd missed that day...
(2005-01-29 16:22:00.0) Permalink
Tuesday December 14, 2004 Cars, grandmothers, and the stories behind names
When I knew him, he had chalk white hair, a chunky figure and the already mentioned bow tie on his neck. He did not use first names; boys were called by their last name, and girls were given the respectful title of "Miss", followed by their last name. Every single Monday, without fail, he brought in clippings from the New York Times Sunday paper and spent a great deal of time discussing the items in the clipped articles that he found interesting - with the apparent hope that the stories would inspire us. Seats were assigned, and if he forgot your name on occasion, he would never, never forget your seat assignment, "Ah, yes, ahem, Miss, you're Row 4, Seat 2." He was the kind of teacher that you remember, years later, even when other parts of high school have become more of a blur.
Mr. Blanchard placed a tremendous emphasis on the etymology of words - and tried to spark curiousity in the minds of his students about the derivation of words and names. Every single day, we explored the stories behind words. For some teenagers, this fascination with words and names did not appeal - it had little to do with that weekend's football game, the next school dance, the upcoming alumni cross country race, or whether there was enough ice on the local ponds to support a game of hockey. For some, like me, he planted a seed that took time to germinate. There is a story behind every name. And, as evidenced by a paperback that kept me company on a recent flight to the Rocky Mountains, there is at least one story behind the making of dictionaries, too.
As one of my colleagues recently told me the story behind her name, she unknowingly reaffirmed that Doc Blanchard was right - there are rewards in paying attention to etymology. Her father's passion for race cars drove him to name his first-born child after a race car. As you can see, it is a beautiful car. I'm quite sure I didn't hear all of the story, though. Were other names considered? Did the expectant parents argue first about naming a lovely baby girl after a car? What did her mother think?
I was named after my paternal grandmother. I'm half-Greek, and it was traditional in my mother's family that children be named after their grandparents. As the second girl, there was no debate. It did cause a bit of confusion in high school, when my grandmother and I lived a block away from each other in "Live Free or Die" New Hampshire. I would call to cancel a haircut appointment, and my grandmother's appointment would get canceled by mistake. Better yet, my grandmother was asked out by more than one teenage boy by telephone (they must have been so nervous that they didn't notice the 50 year age difference in my supposed voice!)
What's the moral of this blog, you're now wondering? That there is a story behind every name. More later.
(2004-12-14 19:09:49.0) Permalink
Tuesday August 24, 2004 Easter eggs, google and mws...
No, I'm not talking about the end-of-lent kind of brightly colored red eggs, all ready for the traditional Greek egg fights that I remember from my childhood. I'm talking about the amusing and hidden surprises found on websites that add a little bit of humour to my day.
This romance with easter eggs means that I have been visiting Google every day during the Olympics, to see their next marriage of logo and art. Are these doodles easter eggs? I don't know. Does an egg need to be hidden to be an easter egg? Maybe - but I don't care. It's (often) a surprise, and it's charming.
If you've missed any of this fun, take a look at all of the 2004 olympic doodles (so far!) from the Athens games.
For the curious, there is an online museum of Google holiday logos. And even an article about the programmer/artist, Dennis Hwang.
Closer to home, I also got a chuckle out of Bryan's link to Mike Shapiro's blog. And Adam's, too. Neither is a good likeness of Mike, though. He's smart and talented, and, well, he doesn't have a beard.
There must be other such doodles or amusing eggs out there. Where are they? And am I the only one to care?
(2004-08-24 23:05:17.0) Permalink
