Eli Goldratt, Bill Walsh and Bill James. The three men who have shown me a lot about thinking outside of conventional wisdom. Napoleon Hill’s principle of ‘accurate thinking’ applied to all three men. They looked for more accurate ways to think about their chosen fields. Goldratt, business. Walsh, football. James, baseball.
Goldratt showed an underlying form of business so elegant and simple that it became easy for me to visualise what is happening in a business.
It made decision making in my own business easy. Would the decision increase throughput (goods sold and produced)? Would it cut bottom line costs? Would it decrease the size of the asset base without reducing throughput?
Everything that didn’t do that was just ‘fancy pants’ number-manipulation with no value to the business.
Bill James The father of the term ‘Moneyball.’ No AFL panel show can go an hour now without mentioning the term and baseball was forever changed because of James’ ideas. James’ ability to see through the stats and why they were inaccurate was important. James’s fascination with baseball statistics was because he saw they had taken on the power of language – they could paint an image for him. Bill James fostered my love of accurate and relevant stats – helping me do well at fantasy football/rugby and makes growing businesses easier.
James and Goldrratt’s ability to build and understand systems is vitally important to growing businesses. Systems are usually inserted retroactively into businesses. So being able to understand and measure the results they actually create relative to their initial goals is vital to every part of business.
Bill Walsh was the real story behind The Blind Side. Michael Oher was ‘only’ the star of the story (ironically he no longer plays left tackle in the NFL). Bill was the story because he made people like Michael Oher (and me if I grew up on the other side of the Pacific) essential to NFL. Walsh’s system demanded it – it couldn’t function as effectively without them. Bill Walsh’s complete rethink of NFL offensive systems was so effective that today all football offences are effectively run based on Walsh’s original philosophy.
‘Paint Me A Word Picture’
is an all too common phrase heard in my social life. Usually in some role-playing game, one of the participants wants a clearer picture of what they are confronted with. They are reliant on the ‘Game Master’ to give them their reality.
A business is actually conceptual. You can either rely on the stories of staff, yourself and advisors or you can look at the picture painted by your metrics. Any systems you build require measurement – measurement to create a word and number picture so you can see what is going on. The word picture derived from the numbers is far more important, than anecdotal or