It's in the mid-40s and raining outside as a I write this, but about 1,000 miles to the south and about 2,000 to the west, baseball is being played at spring training sites throughout Florida and Arizona. The start of the baseball season --
officially March 31 -- can't come soon enough for me.
To quench my thirst for baseball while I wait for that first real pitch to be thrown, I recently decided to reread one of my favorite baseball books, Michael Lewis' "
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game." The best-selling 2003 book, and later a great 2011 movie, turned Oakland A's General Manager Billy Beane and his associate Paul DePodesta into celebrities of sorts by focusing on the team's analytical, evidence-based,
sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team, despite Oakland's disadvantaged revenue situation.
In reading how Beane and DePodesta rethought how their system worked, it got me pondering about how I could change my thinking about how I do my job. A few quotes from the book really hit home with me:
- "If you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done."
- "The new, outsider's view of baseball was all about exposing the illusions created by the insiders on the field."
- "If we weren't already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?" (Truth be told, this quote isn't in the book or movie, but it's attributed to DePodesta, and I like it, so I'm using it.)
All three quotes encourage the reader to think differently. Granted, this is hardly a new concept. Apple's Steve Jobs wrote it as ”think different” (intentionally going with the grammatically incorrect version because it “sounded better”). But it's a concept rarely, if ever, found in a book about the national pastime.
The business lesson from the book is that even in an environment (baseball) steeped in tradition, Beane successfully disrupts the status quo and beat competitors that are much bigger and better funded. Additionally, he's not just innovative, he becomes the innovation champion and overcomes resistance.
My takeaway from the book was this: couldn't the same "out of the box thinking" (my apologies for the cliche) apply in other traditional environments, such as the New Jersey Society of CPAs or even the accounting profession.
I've been the NJSCPA's Communications & Marketing Director for more than eight years, so I most definitely have accumulated my fair share of "conventional wisdom". But I'm encouraging my very talented team of communicators and marketers to take a fresh look at everything that we do. A different perspective on a particular situation can be created by using imagination, intuition and creativity on top of accepted wisdom.
The NJSCPA isn't broken anymore than baseball was when Beane and DePodesta introduced sabermetrics, but there's no denying that the Society and other membership organizations are changing -- demographically, geographically and financially -- and we need to change with it. As Beane said in the movie, "Adapt or die."
How about you? What is the flaw (big or small) that you're seeing in the universe that you're trying to fix? Any favorite lines from Moneyball that you'd like to share?
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