Developing Organizational Talent: Why data is key for maximizing returns

Data trumps intuition 

In 2002, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, forever changed how baseball teams are built. After losing some of their star players to free agency and having a mere fraction of the salary cap allotted to top echelon teams like the New York Yankees, Beane realized that if he wanted to assemble a competitive baseball team, he’d have to do so without top-tier talent.

His approach revolutionized the baseball world. It centered on using data – quantitative metrics for players’ performance – which allowed him to uncover value that was overlooked by everyone else. Cold, hard data, as it turns out, serves as a better guide to understanding a player’s value than scouting intuition. 

Playing organizational ‘Moneyball’

This story, popularized in the blockbuster movie Moneyball, is not all too dissimilar to building and managing an organization: companies are tasked with allocating scarce resources (talent) in a way that maximizes value to the company. Organizations can imitate Beane’s Moneyball strategy by using data to better map talent to value – but it’s not just about what data you collect. It’s about how you use it. 

Organizations now have the ability to collect data every bit as objective as RBIs (runs batted in). Key performance indicators (KPIs) give a high-level evaluation of a company’s success, and these can be broken down into ever more discrete tasks that comprise the productive work in an organization. Data-driven insights on individual employees can be gleaned from personal assessments or behavioral experiments that more accurately elicit their preferences, interests and attributes. 

When used effectively, data can create a better alignment between organizational roles and employees’ skills and interests so that everyone has an opportunity to thrive.