Projectball: PM Lessons from America's Game (Part 3)

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

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If you asked a baseball scout what were the most important criteria in selecting a player, they would generally point to the physical attributes of the player--his speed between bases, his agility in the field to run down a ball, his hitting power at home plate. These were his tools. And you needed the tools to get the job done, the job of winning baseball games.

But you also needed to have the right attitude--the right mental composure--to make the tools work for you. So they would also look for strength in psychological attributes such as leadership, conscientiousness and competitive drive. And then to complete their evaluation, they would look at the player’s statistics (hits, runs, walks, strikes, outs, etc.), his record of what he had achieved on the field. But the most important thing in arriving at a judgment was what the scouts could see with their own eyes. Anything else was just numbers.

This was the prevailing bias in selecting baseball players that Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, had to overcome in order to make his plan work. As we saw in Part 2, coaching players to become something that they did not know they could become turned conventional scouting wisdom on its head.

The numbers--when used in the right way--could show you much more of what a player really contributed to wins than what the naked eye could see on …

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