Ultimate Performance: Measuring Human Resources at Work

How Other Industries Measure

Baseball. Baseball is one of the industries that show us that we could be measuring the wrong indicators when we’re looking to see either how we’re doing now or how well we’re going to do in the future. Such metrics could mean that we’re focusing on talent as opposed to performance. Talent is ability or potential, but the focus should be on performance. When we generate metrics, we want to measure performance—how well we’re doing, but not talent—how well we might do in the future. This is because we can only gauge how well we will do in the future by taking an honest account of how we’re doing now.

This is one of the reasons why baseball is an industry in which the way performance is measured has come under fire. Measuring performance in baseball should be one of the easiest tasks out there. You have players who are batting against the same players on the same fields. This means that generating statistics in baseball is fairly simple. The problem, however, is that sometimes we don’t know which statistics indicate future success and which do not. That is, we don’t know which statistics are relevant.

Michael Lewis’s hugely successful Moneyball took the question of which statistics are relevant in baseball head on. The central argument of Moneyball is that the metrics that baseball insiders (including players, managers, coaches, scouts, and the front office) have used over the past century have been flawed. In Lewis’s words, “Traditional yardsticks of ...