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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
April 2020 #12249 Page #53
Adverti$er
Oakland Athletics Baseball and Component Manufacturing? Todd Drummond
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nyone who knows me to any degree will tell you I am not a sports fan. I do not follow any professional sports or know much about the players and culture. So it may surprise you to have me compare component manufacturing (CM) to baseball. To be honest, I mean to compare the management practices of the Oakland A’s, whom I witnessed in the movie “Moneyball,” which was based on their 2002 season. What I saw in this movie shocked me because I witnessed the same human behavior I deal with in my professional career as a consultant in our industry. In a nutshell, the general manager, Billy Beane, did not have enough money to hire the very best players to get the winning results he was tasked to achieve. If he did the same thing as always, he knew the results were going to be the same as they had always been before. So instead of recruiting players the traditional way, with the tried and tested method of scouts looking for the best players and then relying on the highest bidder to win, he broke all the rules. He used what they now call a sophisticated “sabermetric” approach to scouting and analyzing players (pure empirical analysis). What do you think the resistance in the team, and especially the rest of the management group, was like when he implemented these brand-new ideas? Again, Billy was telling people that their old methods were no longer going to be used. There was a torrent of resistance. This was a great example of what happens when we implement changes to what we think are the best methods that most of us have been following for years. Think about it for a moment: Do you really think managing a sports team is all that different than managing a CM plant? Both have a need for qualified personnel who have a set of skills to perform tasks so that stated goals can be achieved. Human behavior is the same on a baseball team as it is in the CM shops and office. All of us want to achieve something and be recognized for our achievements. But the management practices of motivation and benchmarks are not what I want to explain. What was most important was that the implementation of change itself caused General Manager Billy to endure a storm of resistance. Because he prevailed, his team went on to create the longest winning streak in baseball’s history: 20 games. He broke all the rules, and it changed baseball and every other professional sports team forever. Continued next page
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