My colleague Richard Katz, who founded and runs ECAR, has been telling us for a long time that basing all of our professional decisions on anecdotal information and intuition is not the best way to run organizations, that we need to supplement and inform our intuition with real data.
Now Rafe Colburn points out a great talk on this topic from the realm of baseball – The Genesis, Implementation, and Management of New Systems, written by Paul DePodesta, Assistant General Manager of the Oakland A’s. It’s well worth a read, and I hope Richard can get Paul to talk at one of our semi-annual ECAR Symposia.