How is people analytics like Moneyball?

- So one of the ways to understand people analytics is to look at the story of the book or the movie Money Ball which is about the Oakland A's. And the Oakland A's didn't have a big budget. They couldn't afford to pay for the super hitters you know that made millions of dollars per year and so they decided to apply some statistics and hired some PhD types and looked at the data on what really did cause a winning season. Because the goal is to win the season not just to win one game or get a bunch of hits. And what they've found and it's interesting the story and the movie is very, very fun to look at is that the recruiters the people that were out scouting looking for players were actually some of the hardest people to change because they had been so ingrained in these traditional approaches to looking for players. That's exactly what's going on in your company. How people are hired, who gets promoted, who gets the new job, who gets a raise, all those decisions are being made all the time in your company based on gut feel. Sometimes there's data, most of the time there's not. And the impact of a two, or three, or four, or five percent improvement on those decisions is huge. You have opportunities to improve all of those decisions that are being made all the time in the management side of your company with people analytics. And of course what happened with the Oakland A's is they created a whole new industry basically for the baseball profession that has now become you know very, very core to the whole domain. And that's what's happening in HR as you start to get more sophisticated about the use of data in your company you're going to realize that you're developing a competitive advantage that is helping you win games just as the Oakland A's did at an ever increasing rate. Of course your competitors are doing the same thing so there is a little bit of a war going on here for data to become smarter, and smarter, and smarter about what makes your company successful. But that's why it's such an exciting area to be affiliated with.