Michael Lewis's "Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game" is one of the best books ever written about thinking differently in the pursuit of competitive advantage. Focusing on one baseball team - the Oakland A's - and their attempt to replace brute-force spending with cheaper, creative insights, the book offers the open-minded baseball fan an entirely new lens through which to see America's pastime.
Yesterday, Lewis turned his data-driven eye on the NBA, with an article in the New York Times Magazine about the Houston Rockets' Shane Battier, a forward who doesn't do most of the typical box-score things - score, rebound or dish out assists. Yet Battier's teams win abnormally often, much more often in fact than Battier's contributions seem to warrant.
In a stats-driven league, Rockets' General Manager Daryl Morey has come "...to think of (Battier) as an exception: the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he has ever seen. Or rather, the player who seems one step ahead of the analysts, helping the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his own personal interests."
Certainly health care needs measuring and it's high time we got serious about it. But when will someone figure out the story BEHIND the numbers, I wonder? What if a leader received 'below-average' marks on some scorecard but made everyone around him markedly better? How would you know? And would that be enough?
What if a physician produced great outcomes but left everyone around her feeling badly at the end of a long shift? Would it lessen everyone else's outcomes? Would you notice? Would you care?
Measuring (and rewarding) only what's easy and obvious leads to mediocre strategy and average results. Ask the Oakland A's and the Houston Rockets. As usual, the story is only half the story.
Yesterday, Lewis turned his data-driven eye on the NBA, with an article in the New York Times Magazine about the Houston Rockets' Shane Battier, a forward who doesn't do most of the typical box-score things - score, rebound or dish out assists. Yet Battier's teams win abnormally often, much more often in fact than Battier's contributions seem to warrant.
In a stats-driven league, Rockets' General Manager Daryl Morey has come "...to think of (Battier) as an exception: the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he has ever seen. Or rather, the player who seems one step ahead of the analysts, helping the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his own personal interests."
"...the big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right things. The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn’t historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. (“Someone created the box score,” Morey says, “and he should be shot.”) How many points a player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another example: if you want to know a player’s value as a rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone.Health care has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into a data-driven age. Numerous data sets purport to measure quality. And there's outcomes research and evidence-based medicine, elaborate metrics for patient satisfaction and employee engagement, 360-degree evaluations and community-based health status indicators. The data are balanced, scorecarded, benchmarked, published as report cards and awards, obsessed and fussed over, dreaded and celebrated.
"There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group..."
Certainly health care needs measuring and it's high time we got serious about it. But when will someone figure out the story BEHIND the numbers, I wonder? What if a leader received 'below-average' marks on some scorecard but made everyone around him markedly better? How would you know? And would that be enough?
What if a physician produced great outcomes but left everyone around her feeling badly at the end of a long shift? Would it lessen everyone else's outcomes? Would you notice? Would you care?
Measuring (and rewarding) only what's easy and obvious leads to mediocre strategy and average results. Ask the Oakland A's and the Houston Rockets. As usual, the story is only half the story.
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