Moneyball is one of my favorite books. It combines many interests of mine – statistics, baseball, and management. I once used it to inspire a client to think about their business differently. This client was a newly-named President of a firm and had brought us in to conduct some consumer market research. New management teams often like to bring in new research suppliers and shed their old ones, and in this case we were the beneficiaries.

In our initial meeting, I asked some basic marketing questions about how they decide to price their products or how much to spend on advertising. Each time his response was “this is how we have always done it” rather than a well-thought out rationale supporting his decision. For instance, most of his products were priced to retailers at 50% of the price to consumers because that is how it had been for decades. I asked him “what are the odds that your optimal pricing is 50% rather than something higher or lower?” What are the chances that a round number like 50% could be optimal for all products in all cases when he literally had thousands of products?

I sent him a copy of Moneyball when I returned from the trip because I knew he was a sports fan. He read it immediately. It sparked him to commission a consulting firm to delve deeply into pricing models and ultimately led to a significant change in their pricing policies. They no longer used 50% as a target and established different wholesale prices for each of their SKU’s based on demand and updated these prices regularly. A few years later, he told me that decision literally saved his firm millions of dollars and the pricing efficiency helped to distribute his products more effectively. He said this was probably the project he had led that had the biggest impact on his business since he had been there.

Businesses can use sports analogies too readily, but in this case it really worked. The rise of statisticians in sports has worked and there are lessons that businesses can learn from this.

I find it fascinating when old-timers and sports talk radio hosts lament the rise of “analytics” in sports. You can see the impact of statisticians every time you see a baseball team set up in a defensive shift, when you see a football team go for it on fourth down, or when you see a hockey team pull its goalie earlier than usual. These decisions being made more frequently and in situations where the prior norms of the game would have prevented them from happening. It is all because data jockeys have been given a seat at the sports management table to the chagrin of the purists.

But data geeks haven’t totally taken over sports and longstanding traditions continue to hold sway. For instance, in baseball it can be shown that more runs on average are scored in the first inning than in any other inning. This makes sense, as the first inning is the only time in the game when you can be sure your best hitters will be at the top of the batting order. So, why don’t major league teams start their closer and have him pitch the first inning? Instead, they reserve their most powerful pitcher for the 9^th inning, when, more often or not, the game is already decided. I’ve been predicting that teams will figure this out and start their closer for about 20 years now and they haven’t done it yet. (The Tampa Rays did something close to this and had an “opener” pitcher in their rotation, but it didn’t work well because this pitcher wasn’t their most powerful arm.)

Similarly, hockey teams continue to be slow to pull their goalie when behind late in the game. Hockey coaches also continue to make a decision that baffles me every time. They are down by one goal late in the game so they pull their goalie and promptly surrender a goal. The first thing they do is put their goalie back in which makes no rational sense at all. If you are willing to take the risk of being scored upon when losing by one goal, you should be even more willing to do so when losing by two goals. There is an excellent paper on pulling the goalie (“Pulling the Goalie:  Hockey and Investment Implications.”) which shows that coaches aren’t pulling their goalie even close to quick enough.

These sports cases are interesting because it is the fans that always seem to notice the coaching strategy errors before the coaches and general managers. This illustrates the value of an outside perspective in organizations that have longstanding policies and traditions. I don’t think my client could have accomplished his pricing changes if he wasn’t brand new to the organization or if he didn’t hire a consulting firm to work out the optimal strategy. This change was not going to come from within his organization.

Businesses have been slow to adapt their thinking despite the vast amount of data at their disposal. Decisions are made all the time without consulting what the data are indicating. More relevant to our industry, in most organizations market research is still seen as a support function to marketing, as opposed to its equal. I don’t think I have ever heard of an organization where market research reports directly to senior management or where marketing reports into research, yet we often hear senior managers say that connecting to customers is the most critical part of their organization’s success.

Many saw Moneyball as a book about sports or a great movie. I saw it as one of the most important business books ever written. Its key message is to use data to break out of existing decision patterns, often to great success.