Databall

Someone once described Moneyball to me as the best book ever written on talent. Michael Lewis's bestseller features Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A's, owners of one of the smallest budgests in the Major Leagues. Beane and his staff make use of large amounts of statistical data to defy tradition and practice and build "winning teams of young affordable players and inexpensive castoff veterans". It was the relevant data, not how they looked on the pitch ("we're not selling jeans") that drove the choice of players.

How this translates to the world of corporate talent is unambiguous: decisions on who to reward or promote need to be driven by data.

On March this year the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference hosted something called Fieldf/x, Sportvision’s newest baseball technology. Fieldf/x is a motion-capture system that uses four cameras perched high above the field to track players and the ball and log their movements, gathering more than 2.5 million records per game.

Many argue it will revolutionise the world of baseball. Tom Tippett, "director of baseball information services for the Boston Red Sox, which means he is in charge of gathering and crunching numbers to help put together a winning team (says) 'I kind of feel like I have to throw away everything I've done for the last 20 years and start over.' (...) Fieldf/x will create a digital catalog of virtually every movement at every Major League Baseball game in every park."

Will there ever be such a data revolution in corporate talent management?

Systems aside, data on sales performance would arguably be the best place to start (data for supply chain roles is perhaps more slippery). It is rich, objective and measured against the same base. We're nowhere close to the sophistication the baseball world has managed to finance but it would be good to see better efforts coming through the business literature.

Just to throw some caution on the baseball assimilation: As we progress on our own data journey we should we mindful the focus on individual performance data doesn't drive us to ignore the nuances of collective performance. It is never the single individual that wins the game.