Become an All-Star Player by Leveraging Data

How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: Become an All-Star Player by Leveraging Data, with Neil Irwin, Senior Economics Correspondent, The New York Times, and Author, How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World

Be a voracious consumer of data

In thinking about how to use data in your own job in the corporate world, I think there’s a really useful lesson from baseball. And if you remember years ago, the book Moneyball came out by Michael Lewis, it became a movie that was about the early analytics revolution and the Oakland Athletics. Things had changed a lot since that book was published, analytics in baseball has become far, far more advanced. I’ve seen some math that, the first game that used something called Statcast, that tracks the ball movements and help players around the field, collected more data about that one game than all the 190,000 games of major league baseball that have been played before that point.

So there’s more data than ever. And I think what we saw is, even though that data is being collected to enable teams to be more effective in making strategic decisions, it is actually really, really useful for individual players to become better at their sport.

I spoke to Joey Votto, who’s the all-star first baseman for the Cincinnati Reds. And he’s become this voracious consumer of data about his own swing, where pitches are coming that he’s missing, where he’s taking swings that would have been balls. And by being this voracious consumer of data, he’s had to learn how to not overreact to short-term blips in the trends, but it’s made him the effective player he is. It’s also made him a quarter-billion dollars. So there’s something to be gained there.

I think there’s a real parallel in the business world. If you are a savvy consumer of data about your own performance and your team’s performance, you might not make a quarter-billion dollars, but you’re going to be a lot better off. Essentially, you can use data to be your own career coach. I think the key is understanding, what are the real metrics that matter in your organization, your line of work? And being just an avid student of them, understanding the moving pieces, understanding what correlates with what. Often, bigger companies will have people who can help you understand this within an organization. But I think being an avid consumer of the information available to you is the real key to taking advantage of the resources that larger companies have to offer.

Master the art of interpreting numbers

Data alone isn’t insight. You can’t just look at numbers and decide everything you’re going to do based only on numbers. There’s an art to interpreting those numbers, and you really have to apply the logic that you can understand from the world around you to make sure those numbers are not leading you in a bad direction.

For example in my own industry, in the media business, if everybody just tried to write the stories that would get the most traffic, we might get more traffic and more clicks, but we wouldn’t necessarily be building a more successful organization. Because there’d be a lot of trashy, silly, frivolous things that people don’t want to pay for subscription to. And I think there are equivalents to that in a lot of fields, where you don’t want to just solve for whatever happens to be on your dashboard.

You want to solve for the broader sense of both individual career success and organizational strategic success, and understand that indicators are only that. They’re not the whole truth, they are one piece of the pie and one piece of evidence that can point you in the right direction if you use it well. There is a risk, if you focus too much on data and analytics, that you could get in your own head and be too focused on the numbers, rather than the underlying performance of whatever you’re trying to do. Whether that’s sales, or product development or whatever it might be.

But I think the key is, when you use these tools over and over again, it’s not so much about overthinking everything you do. It becomes about an underlying way of thinking, an underlying baseline for understanding the world around you, and what’s likely to create good results in your field. It’s possible to overthink it, but if it’s an ongoing habit you can overcome that.

Demonstrate your deep knowledge

When you’re meeting potential employers or executives in your industry, or people who you want to impress, I think the key is a mix of showing your numeracy, showing that you understand the metrics that really matter in your industry, but being authentic about it. And I think a real pitfall and a real risk is, if you seem like you’re just spouting buzzwords, you don’t seem authentic. You don’t seem like a real person who really has a thoughtful understanding of the business environment and how things are changing. You seem like kind of a charlatan.

And you don’t want to retreat to just the buzzwords. The buzzwords themselves are not necessarily a sign of confidence or executive presence, or that you really know what’s going on in your industry. They can really be a crutch if you let them. So I think the key is to show that you have that technical expertise, you know the key terms, you know what’s changing your industry, but in an authentic way that is really based in deep knowledge, not based on what you read in a magazine article.