Team mgmt patterns in Moneyball (movie)
Recently, I watched Moneyball (IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes) again. Moneyball tells the story of Billy Bean (Brad Pitt), a baseball team general manager who has to put together a team with a tight budget. After unsuccessfully asking for more money, Billy and his assistant Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) pursue a very atypical management choice for baseball.
What convinced me to write this post is that in the movie I saw some team patterns that I apply, and encourage others to apply as well. This post is about these patterns.
Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the movie, consider stopping here. If you have, or don’t care, carry on.
Find your sidekick
Early in the movie, Billy goes into a meeting with the scouts. Together, they will have to decide which players to hire for the upcoming season. The previous meetings left Billy unhappy: he has, over time, come to question the extremely subjective (almost esoteric!) process used by the scouts for picking players.
Now, I imagine he would have known this specific meeting to be a tough one: he would have to explain (just order, actually) that the scouts’ choices would all be overridden by a computer algorithm.
Curiously, Billy brings Peter Brand with him to the meeting. This might have been accidental, but it shows how effective the presence of Peter can be to alter the perception of a revolutionary idea.
When all the scouts start raging at Billy, questioning the player choices but also the very idea of using an algorithm, all Billy has to do is to point at Peter. Peter and Billy address the questioning together.
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| Screen cap from Moneyball trailer, Yahoo Movies |
This gesture alone is, in my opinion, enough to psychologically break the mental image in the scouts that this notion of using an algorithm is unsound.
It’s “crazy” if one person believes in it, even if he happens to be the General Manager. But what is it when two people believe in it? It can be risky, revolutionary, dangerous maybe, but perhaps not that crazy anymore.
I recommend, when in similar situations, to use the same trick: find your Peter Brand who will back you up in meetings or discussions. Especially when trying to introduce significant change it is important to have someone who will back you up, someone you can refer to, and even confide.
Ultimately, it will be important for you too, to know that you are not alone and you do not have to carry this burden all by yourself. In the movie, Billy himself will question the algorithm, but thanks to Peter will overcome his doubts.
Team before individuals
I have never been a fan of those job ads that are looking for a ninja developer, or a rockstar engineer, and thankfully there seem to be less and less of those nowadays. This reflects in my attitude towards teams and my general preference for a good team over an individual.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s nice to have a great individual in the team, but only in the measure that this individual is willing to help and coach others.
Like the movie shows towards the end, a great individual can be invaluable when only a hat-trick will get you out of a corner. It is also true that this great individual was able to express their talent only because the whole team created that opportunity, together.
Hire with this, and your ideal team in mind.
Coach your players
This seems so obvious that it should not even be mentioned, but I thought I added it because this is something I strongly believe in.
When Billy runs the scouts through the players selected by the algorithm, the scouts point out, correctly, that some of these players don’t know how to play a certain position. The answer, cold but resolute, is: we’ll teach them.
In tech organizations it’s the same, actually it’s arguably worse! At least in baseball the rules are known and rarely change. There’s no snowflake baseball club with an exagonal field, or a custom ball, or bat. Tech orgs on the other hand are all snowflakes with their different procedures for creating, running, managing and changing products. Just think of the sheer number of programming languages and frameworks. Even if we restrict ourselves to one programming language, say JS, what are the odds that a JS developer would be familiar with your development setup? What if we include CI/CD? I’d bet they’re pretty low.
IMHO the only way out of this is looking for potential when hiring, and then commit to employment-long coaching, while at the same time lowering the barrier to entry by standardazing as much as possible.
Off the top of my head, cloud adoption, K8, and serverless are probably all great ways to lower the barrier to entry at least in traditional “backend” areas.
Leaders eat last
The coach (Philip Seymour Hoffman) initially refuses to play the team according to the algorithm. This leads to a series of bad losses, and confrontations between the coach and Billy. Ultimately, Billy is left with the only drastic option to fire or trade some players, coercing the coach to play by the algorithm selections.
After this, and much to everybody else’s surprise, the team soon starts a mind-blowing winning streak which culminates with achieving the all-time record for the number of consecutive wins. In this glorious moment, Billy deflects all praise to the coach, even though the coach had absolutely nothing to do with the newfound success.
The movie does not say it, but we can guess that this action rebuilds trust and the relationship between the two. Ultimately the coach will make the call that will allow the team to win the 20th game, setting the new record for consecutive wins.
Billy shows one of the qualities of a good leader: know when to attract direct blame like a lightning rod, and when to distribute praise. The result of this action is that the coach, your team, will pay you back in times of need with dedication, conscientious work, and support.
You work will be recognized.
Have a (good) vision
When Peter and Billy talk for the first time, Peter says something that must have shaken Billy core beliefs: baseball clubs are managed with the wrong goal in mind. Instead of buying players, club managers should buy wins, which ultimately means buying runs.
I’m sure most club managers would have retorted “but we are buying wins, by buying great players!”. Except they have an not even remotely objective way of measuring the talent of players.
In the meeting with the scouts this becomes painfully apparent when doubt is cast on a player skills, because he had…...an ugly girlfriend!
What are the scouts even trying to achieve by pondering these “qualities”? Wins, runs? To be honest I don’t see a connection.
And like those scouts, how many companies have an empty vision like: be the leader in <sector>? That vision is empty because you cannot use in your daily dealings. A vision should be an ideal, a north star that you can look at and understand if you are on the right path.
When we don’t have a vision we are like those scouts, grasping at straws, and left and right, instead of pursuing a coherent, long-term strategy.
Even a good vision needs to be repeated, and practiced. Here is perhaps Billy’s initial fault, in not including the coach into the vision. As we have seen this Billy was able, albeit in an unorthodox way that I would probably not recommend, to remediate to that, and then good things started happening.