When Steve Jobs was forced to step down from Apple as CEO , Apple didn’t lose a coder or a good administrator or a good man manager . Apple lost it soul, it’s ideas, it’s direction , it’s vision .
Our course is about people . As an instructor, as a manager as an entrepreneur you and the people who work with you are your most important resource and usually your biggest investment .
What has all this got to do with training , let me explain , to do that we are going to share a story from the much maligned world of professional sports …..
The talent scouts inside baseball had become complacent, institutionalised incapable of exceeding expectations .
Billy Beane the then GM of the Oakland A’s , genius, to see untapped potential, where others only saw misfits and castoffs . In the early 2000 Beane was able to assemble a championship winning side with a budget a quarter of the size of his rivals .
In 2003 Michael Lewis the financial journalist author of liars poker and the big short published Moneyball the Art of Winning An unfair Game to critical acclaim .
In 2011 Moneyball the film was released and became an instant Hollywood blockbuster reaching a mass audience .Due to the way I am wired deep understanding starts with the film .
According to Lewis in his later book the Undoing Project even he misunderstood the true message behind Moneyball . This was not a story about just big data or better analytics . Moneyball was fundamentally about BIAS. A few years earlier cognitive bias was the basis for a Nobel prize for economics which gave birth to the field of behavioural economics .
Moneyball = new knowledge inside a 160 year old industry . The talent had always existed but it had been misunderstood , misallocated and mismanaged. The back office of the Oakland A were able to leverage the new knowledge to run rings around much better resourced organisations .