The Pythagorean Theorem of Leadership Development!

Modern Leadership is about disrupting Leadership Development!

Much like what Billy Beane did as GM of the Oakland Athletic’s Major League Baseball (MLB) club. While GM there, Billy Beane leveraged ideas to revolutionize how the player roster for the Oakland A’s was decided based on the work of “sabermetrician” Bill James.

This story was captured in the 2011 movie titled Moneyball, based on the book written by Michael Lewis. The movie focuses on Billy Beane’s use of evidence-based/data-driven decisions (i.e., ‘sabermetric’ thinking) to run his club’s baseball operation. ‘Sabermetrics’ was coined to honor the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) by Bill James in 1980. Bill James defined this approach as “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.” As one can imagine, there was significant skepticism and tremendous resistance from scouts and sports commentators/writers. However, this approach is relatively well-established in MLB and other sports today.

Even if you don’t see the movie in its entirety, watch the ~2½ minute scene in the parking garage (starts at ~19:30 and ends at ~21:43) to get the essence of what ‘sabermetric’ thinking is all about.

The character playing the role of Bill James explains that “there is an epidemic failure in the game (of baseball) to understand what is really happening and this leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams.” Then he goes onto explain that “people who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. In order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.” The money (😊) statement that got me was when Bill James laid out that ball clubs fundamentally have “an imperfect understanding of where runs come from. Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions.” He lays out how the Boston Red Sox saw a star in Johnny Damon, with “an imperfect understanding of where runs come from,” and paid him $7.5 million without ever asking for nor expecting an ROI analysis of their investment!

Bill James went on to become the senior advisor on baseball operations for the Boston Red Sox from 2002 to 2019 when the franchise won four World Series championships. Pretty impressive when you pay attention to the fact that the Red Sox did not win a single title from 1918 to 2004! Looks like Bill James and his ‘Sabermetrics’ broke the “Curse of The Bambino” 😊 (https://www.history.com/news/curse-of-the-bambino-babe-ruth-red-sox-broken)!

‘Sabermetric’ thinking is as critical to revolutionizing Leadership Development and the growth of businesses as it was to baseball a couple of decades ago. Here is why: Millions of leaders are paid to lead inside organizations in the United States alone and are currently not getting the help they need with the results that matter.

The approach to ‘who’ gets Leadership Development today is exclusionary; The focus of Leadership Development is mainly targeted to executive leaders and needs to be more inclusionary. There are leaders in addition to those who head executive teams. There are leaders of sales teams, service teams, account teams, etc.

The ‘what’ of Leadership Development is half-baked and minimalist; It has always been focused on ‘soft skill’ development alone; This needs to expand to developing both the ‘soft’ and the ‘hard (i.e., growing businesses)’ skills at the same time.

Finally, the ‘how’ Leadership Development impacts the growth of the business is completely missing in today's deployments; The ROI of Leadership Development initiatives is virtually non-existent; There needs to be more transparency.

There is a way to unpack Leadership Development in a modern way that is inclusionary, expansive, and transparent, all backed by evidence and analytics. This approach, innovated and patented, by The Rejuvi Venture Inc. gives us a ‘more perfect understanding' of what Leadership Development is.

In a 2011 NPR interview (https://www.npr.org/2011/09/26/140813409/the-man-behind-the-moneyball-sabermetrics), Bill James said that it took 25 years before there was an openness within the baseball fraternity to get a more ‘perfect understanding of where runs came from.’ In the same interview, when asked what was the one contribution that he could look back to say, opened people's eyes, he said it was the Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball. The idea he advocated was that there is a predictable relationship between the number of runs scored and the number of runs allowed and a team’s win-loss record. At first, people were skeptical, but the math could be easily verified independently, and it turned out that the relationship did exist. He said this was key in opening people's eyes to the fact that his theories did connect to the real game.

Applying the ‘Sabermetric’ thinking to Leadership Development means that we get to develop our Pythagorean Theorems for Leadership Development!

Let us not spend 25 years getting a ‘more perfect understanding’ of what Leadership Development is because we already know the answer.

It is time to focus on ‘buying growth’ while ‘buying leaders!’

Time to ‘Sabermetric’ Leadership Development!

No magic here, just logic!