Here’s a guest post from Rob Symes, who has just made a documentary film called Outside View on sports and data:
“When the Houston Astros take the baseball field for Jackie Robinson day on April 16, a former NASA engineer will be paying close attention. Sig Mejdal, the Astros’ Director of Decision Sciences, is the embodiment of a ten-year revolution sparked by Michael Lewis’s bestseller Moneyball. The Astros, the team with the lowest payroll in baseball, rely on Mejdal’s statistics to help them find undervalued players.
But while people analytics has been embraced by sport, as Soccernomics fans are surely aware, it has largely been ignored by business. Seventy per cent of NBA teams employ data-savvy analysts to advise on recruiting decisions but only ten per cent of HR professionals in FTSE 100 companies have a numerate degree.
As Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman says in the upcoming documentary The Outside View, one of the keys to good decision-making is to let statistics “not humans make the final decision.” However, while Amazon’s use of data analytics has transformed e-commerce, and companies like Dupont Pioneer are increasingly using data to make the agricultural industry more efficient, data rarely influences companies’ hiring decisions. As Kevin Roberts, the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi says in the documentary when hiring candidates, “you don’t measure it, you smell it, you sniff it.”
Rob Symes, the presenter of Outside View (which focuses on the gap between the use of data analytics in sport and business) says: ‘When hiring, companies in the FTSE 100 must embrace data analytics or risk being superseded by more technologically savvy upstarts.’
The fact is that as the Houston Astros make player selections this year, they are unlikely to be making them solely, as Jack Welch once said, from the gut.
The Outside View has its premiere at the Barbican in London on the 25th of April. To sign up www.theoutsideview.