Moneyball: A pure left-brain play?

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Moneyball, the critically acclaimed new movie starring Brad Pitt, brings to life Michael Lewis’ best-selling book about the spectacular rise of the Oakland A’s baseball team through masterful use of statistics and mathematical analysis.  This would seem to be complete vindication of left-brain thinking over fuzzy-headedness.

After all, the Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane, defied baseball tradition and was proven right.   Conventional baseball wisdom, which favored young power-pitchers and high-profile athletic hitters, relied heavily on intangibles and subjectivity for decision-making.  Instead, Beane brought in nerd-like thinking and reams of data.  Pitting dull numbers and algorithms against the intuition and experience of his scouting staff, he assembled a team of no-names and has-beens that achieved the longest winning streak in history, despite the lowest payroll in MLB.

Left-brain  (logic, analysis, mathematics)            1
Right-brain (intuition, emotion, holistic thinking)     0
Right?

Not so fast.

More to the story

Clearly, Beane’s use of data was absolutely pivotal to the A’s dramatic turnaround. Sabremetrics (the statistical analysis of baseball) has since spread within MLB and is widely credited, for example, as a factor in the Boston Red Sox winning the 2004 World Series.

Beane’s tactics did introduce a welcome and long-overdue measure of objectivity to the realm of player selection—but that’s only part of the story.  Several key right-brain factors were also instrumental to Oakland’s success.  Here are just a few:

Creativity

Challenging conventional thinking takes creativity.  In the movie, a young Yale econ grad named Peter Brand presents a new view of what it takes to win games.  Baseball has never lacked for statistics, but Brand addressed them in new ways, looking at relationships like the correlation between getting on base with runs scored.  This approach allowed Beane to acquire undervalued players at bargain prices.  While the specifics of Brand’s approach are left-brained, the ability to make connections and see things in new ways hails from the right.

Emotion

The movie’s Peter Brand and his real-life inspiration, Harvard-educated Paul dePodesta, were clearly brilliant left-brainers, but it was emotion that drew them to baseball.  Love of the game, not rational analysis, led them to forgo traditional number-crunching occupations to work in an environment in which they would clearly be misfits.

Pattern detection and empathy

Beane’s willingness to adopt this radical new approach stems in part from his own experience.  Certain skills (“tools”) like pitching, fielding, and running, were supposed to be the surefire elements of success.  The more tools, the better the player.  Yet Beane himself, a promising “5 tool” player, should have been a superstar, but wasn’t.  His failure as a player in the majors haunted him—and puzzled him, allowing him to grasp the wisdom of new thinking early.  It also fueled his empathy for underappreciated players who washed out, such as Scott Hatteberg, a former catcher left by elbow surgery unable to throw or bat.  Beane retooled him as a first-base player who went on to…well, you’ll just have to see the movie.

Using whole-brain thinking to win

Right-Brain Brands champions right-brain thinking because it is so often devalued and dismissed.  It’s easy to see how left-brain skills contributed to the A’s success portrayed in Moneyball.  It’s less easy to see the the subtler but vital right-brain contribution.  But it is the whole-brained marriage of right- and left-brain thinking that makes for truly winning ways.

Et tu, Nordstrom?

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Like other patriotic Americans, I spent some time over Labor Day weekend shopping.  Just doing my bit.

The retail world is in perpetual transition, but I thought I could always count on a few eternal verities, namely:
•    Bloomingdales has overpriced brands but great sales
•    Lord & Taylor has the best dress department
•    Nordstrom has wonderful service but infrequent sales
•    You’re a chump if you pay full price at Macy’s

Nordstrom is often held up as an exceptional brand.  Its strength in customer service is legendary.  A discounter, however, it is not.  No coupons to clip in the newspaper, no One Day Sale! (every other week), no All Day Shopping Passes.  Service comes at a price, after all.

Their sales are few and far between, but when they have one, it means something.  The dates of their Half-Yearly Sale are penciled into calendars all over the country.  Their Anniversary Sale in July gives you a reason to buy fall clothes early, because you won’t see discounts like that till deep into the fall.

Or so they’ve always said.

Encouraged by sales associates to catch the Anniversary Sale in July, I bought an expensive blouse at a decent discount.  It was something I could wear soon and mostly year-round, so I didn’t want to wait 3 months till the price dropped.

Imagine my surprise walking into Nordstrom a few weeks later and seeing that same “fall fashion” deeply discounted—well below the price I’d just paid at the Anniversary Sale.

Brand betrayal

I felt like a chump.  That is not how I want to feel.  Nor is it how Nordstrom wants me to feel.

A sales associate I spoke with said she was confused by what the buyers were doing.  She’d never seen anything like this before and didn’t know why they were discounting like this so soon after the Anniversary Sale.  No doubt I wasn’t the only unhappy camper she’d encountered.  That helped a little, but the experience continued to rankle, and it puzzled me.

So I overpaid for a blouse—happens all the time, right?  The buyers were just making their numbers, moving merchandise. So, what’s the big deal?

Well, Nordstrom broke my trust.   That is a big deal, because it has been a trustworthy brand.  I played by the Nordstrom rules, but they changed them.  Had this been Bloomingdale’s, I would have behaved differently: circled my quarry, visited it over time, watched the mail for savings passes and sale announcements, then pounced at the right time.

A category apart?

Nordstrom was different—I thought.  Classy, above the discount-game fray, yet still middle-class accessible.  Taking the high ground in a category that’s mostly tacky.  Now it feels like They’re Just Like Everyone Else.  In some ways, Nordstrom is (was) like Apple: one of those companies that sets its own rules and manages to both thrive and inspire.

As consumers, we want—even need—companies like that to exist.  Capitalism tells us that businesses are Only After One Thing, but deep down we want things to be different.  We want there to be Good Guys in the world who want something mutual, not the kind who’ll say anything to get what they want.  We need to know there are those who’re interested in a real relationship, not just a quickie.

Emotional intelligence for brands

It takes a huge amount of resources and energy to build a consistent brand that becomes admired—even beloved.  But it only takes a small misstep to break a bond of trust.

Somewhere at Nordstrom HQ, decisions were made that violated the brand. Downstream, Nordstrom’s frontline sales personnel—the ones who provide their legendary service—were sideswiped.  Faithful customers and brand believers were betrayed.  Did they even consider this possibility when they decided to slash prices?   Has something from the Walmart playbook slipped into Nordstrom corporate culture?

Et tu?

Do you fully understand the emotional relationship your customers have with your brand?  Can you put it into words?  Does everyone whose actions affect your brand understand this and integrate it into their decision-making?

Most business decisions involve numbers: costs and benefits, ROI, and the like.  It’s hard to quantify emotions and relationships.  It’s even hard to articulate them.  Yet the deep narrative of the emotional relationship between brand and customer may be the most important thing a brand can have.

Steve Jobs’s departure: Best times ahead for Apple?

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There’s a lot of handwringing out there following the news of Steve Jobs’s resignation as Apple’s CEO.  Yes, things will be different.  Sure, it’s the End of an Era.  But Jobs is only stepping down from operational control.  This could actually be the best thing that ever happened to him—and to Apple.

How many truly creative people love all the management crap that comes with running a company?

In his famous commencement speech at Stanford, Jobs stated that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to him.

“The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

When Jobs left Apple in 1985, it was a public humiliation: he was fired from the company he’d created.  Yet he went on to start Pixar and NeXT, and the rest is history.  Today, Jobs is leaving Apple voluntarily at the top of his professional game, with an amazing organization in place behind him.

Who knows what Jobs may yet accomplish in this next period of his life?  Freed once more from the weight of success, and the weight of running a world-changing company, who knows what yet he may create?  Who knows how much his health may improve by eliminating the stress of running Apple?

Great things may well lie ahead for Jobs and for Apple.  Let us wish him resounding health and great ideas.

Breakout brilliance at HubSpot

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HubSpot is well known for its expertise in inbound marketing.  Its founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, quite literally wrote the book: Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. (Highly recommended!)

Tech innovation from a successful software firm is not surprising.  What is both novel and exciting is to find nuanced human insight and empathy from such a firm.  That’s exactly what HubSpot offers with its Prison Break campaign.

Smashing stereotypes

Do you believe the following?

Young entrepreneurs are the people who belong at startups.
Middle-aged, big company employees have nothing to offer a hot startup.

Lots of people might agree, but HubSpot doesn’t.  They are actively recruiting experienced software engineers from big companies—and paying a bonus for every year of experience.  Instead of painting all seasoned employees from big firms with the same tired, indiscriminate brush (over-the-hill, underproductive, entitled…), HubSpot recognizes that:

  1. experience counts
  2. good people work at big firms
  3. the best are frustrated by bureaucracy and could thrive in a different setting

In a recent Boston Globe article, HubSpot explained their reasons for targeting this new (older) cohort to Scott Kirsner:  “The challenge we face in recruiting,’’ said Shah, “is finding people with a lot of flight hours, who have deployed big systems. And that tends to be people who’ve spent five, 10, or 15 years at bigger companies.’’

While hotshot young developers might offer remarkable talent, they simply haven’t gone the distance or been part of something big.  And HubSpot is planning to be something big.

Growing the pie

The talent war for young software developers can be a zero-sum game, often with a revolving door.  By focusing on companies with a larger (1,000+) workforce, Shah maintains “we can bring new blood into the start-up community, without having to fight other start-ups for the best people.”

As for that revolving door?  They needn’t worry.  For the second year in a row, Boston Business Journal named HubSpot the Best Place to Work. The Boston Globe ranked it 4th among best small companies to work for in its most recent ranking.

Inclusive and empathic

HubSpot has crafted a remarkable pitch to seasoned developers based on an empathic understanding of the people they want to attract.   It speaks of “you” as “one of us.”

..I’d like to think that experience makes us better developers. Just because the company or environment you are or in sort of sucks doesn’t mean you do.  You might still be awesome.  If so, I want to pull you into startups.

So often, the tone at hot shops, while colloquial and friendly, contains more than a hint of snark and ego.  The underlying message is: Aren’t we Cool and Wonderful?  Let Us decide if you’re Worthy.

Instead, HubSpot offers things likely to be extremely appealing to the people they wish to attract.  Enticements include:

  • You get to release early and often
  • You can still pay the mortgage or rent
  • You get to work with other exceptional developers
  • You get a bonus for “time served” at a big company

They get it

HubSpot not only gets software and inbound marketing.  They get people, too.  That’s a wickedly powerful combination.  Stay tuned: I predict great things from them.

Empathy fuels growth at Harley-Davidson

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Great marketing is alive and well, happily.  After covering the Bad and the Silly at the recent Edge Conference in Boston in my last two posts, it’s a pleasure to salute admirable work that’s strategic and innovative, integrating plentiful right-brain thinking.

The Good (even Great)

Harley-Davidson is a much admired brand, and justifiably so.  One key reason for the brand’s success is empathy.

While many brands look externally for paths to growth, to acquisition or flashy new digital tools, Harley looks deep into the hearts and lives of real people.  By connecting human aspirations with the brand’s own roots, the company has developed new business opportunities while also strengthening loyalty.  No small feat.

Lara Lee, who created and ran the company’s profitable $80 million Enthusiast Services Division, shared compelling examples of three successful initiatives showcasing intelligent and imaginative use of empathy in the service of business objectives.

Expanding the tribe

In her polished address, Lee explained the rationale behind a program for new riders.  Seeking to broaden its market to include non-traditional audiences (women and younger folk), they put themselves in their would-be audience’s shoes.

Emotional truth: Motorcycles—and Harley-Davidson—can be intimidating to newcomers.

Enter The Rider’s Edge: the Harley-Davidson Academy of Motorcycling.  By developing a school for newbies around thoughtfully designed, empathic experiences, the brand created a welcoming path toward Harley ownership for new groups.  In the process it expanded the tribe—and sold a lot of incremental bikes.

Co-Creating a Customized Vision

Individuality and self-expression are values central to the Harley brand.  Beyond simple ownership, it’s been a tradition among some to customize their bikes over time—a loving fusion of vision and effort.  Today, however, far fewer customers have the time or skill to individualize their bike by the sweat of their own brow.  They may also lack both the knowledge and patience that formerly guided Harley owners to plan personalized upgrades for their ride over time.

Opportunity = Desire (Individuality + Instant Gratification) – (Skill + Knowledge + Time)

Capitalizing on twin yearnings, to have it their own way and to have it now, Harley introduced The Chrome Consultant, a dealer-based personalized shopper to advise potential owners on ways to upgrade and individualize their new purchase.  This makes perfect left-brain sense—and it’s been a profitable initiative.  

(One small right-brain note of caution: the risk of potential culture clash between those who have “earned” their custom bikes, through their own knowledge, skill and patient investment, and those who simply buy their way in to a dream bike upfront.)

Fusing passion with skills

Camaraderie is also central to the Harley brand.  As the brand’s popularity grew in the 1980s beyond its Hell’s Angels roots, the company established the Harley Owners Group (HOG) to provide a mainstream way for riders to congregate.  Chapters led by elected volunteers were a cost-effective solution, but those most passionate and knowledgeable about Harleys weren’t necessarily skilled in organizational leadership.

As the company began offering training to help these volunteers meet their new duties, they discovered accidentally that they were also addressing a powerful unmet need among many of those elected.

They longed to become leaders but had not found the opportunity or support for these dreams in their lives previously. By recognizing and honoring these deep personal aspirations, Harley helped their lay leadership grow as people.

More effective leaders made HOG chapters more vibrant and successful, attracting more members and inspiring a new cadre of leaders, all while strengthening the brand.  A virtuous cycle was born.  Today, the organization numbers a million members across 1400 HOG chapters worldwide, supported by only a handful of corporate staff.

Empathy: The opposite of fluff

These initiatives and others like them are rooted in empathy.  Could a brand less attuned to the view from its customer’s eyes and lives have succeeded in this way?  Unlikely.  While the Chrome Consultant has a faint whiff of car dealer option-salesman (rustproofing, anyone?), it’s clearly grounded in the brand’s core values and traditions.

Empathy is a foundational right-brain skill.  This badass bike brand has enhanced its status and profitability by embracing things often dismissed as irrelevant or fluffy.  Making empathy central to Harley-Davidson and addressing its customers emotional needs as well as traditional functional and intellectual needs has helped make–and keep–the brand the powerhouse it is today.