Moneyball
"This delightfully written, lesson-laden book deserves a place of its own in the Baseball Hall of Fame." ―Forbes Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis follows the low-budget Oakland A's, visionary general manager Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball theorists. They are all in search of new baseball knowledge―insights that will give the little guy who is willing to discard old wisdom the edge over big money.
Stats for nerds
17recommend
52mentions
49people
2008–2026years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Perhaps, but during the initial design stages it is the core job function to figure out how to improve the current workflow quality.
If folks don't clearly define the finish line, than a project will run out of budget eventually as scope creep turns it back into the same useless mess.
Proper restructuring usually means firing people that do not recognize they are in a business setting. The Big Brain fallacy is a common bias with people too blind to recognize what other professions bring to the table, and ultimately are unproductive in a large project.
Every manager should read Moneyball before building operational teams with HR, and avoid the trap of the costly Big Brain =3
"Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" (2003, Michael Lewis)
https://www.amazon.com/Moneyball-Art-Winning-Unfair-Game/dp/...
- - The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem
- Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
- The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
- Moneyball by Michael Lewis
- 1984 (re-read again!)
- Moneyball is a good investing book by Michael Lewis. Legendary investor Bill Miller recommends to read books by Michael Lewis.
- If you enjoy Tracy Kidder's writing (and I very much do) I would also suggest just about anything by Michael Lewis - his "Liars Poker", "Moneyball", and "The Big Short", to name a few, are really exceptionally well researched and written.
- I've been enjoying the "Against the Rules" podcast [1] hosted by Michael Lewis [2]. It's related to moderation so I'll post it here.
The show is series of stories/reports on the work of refereeing fairness in different parts of life. With views into how those referees are changing, and in some cases, outright disappearing.
Fascinating stuff from an author who really knows how to tell an engaging story about a potentially dry topic. (Moneyball, The Big Short, Liar's Poker, etc.)
- Have you ever read Moneyball by Michael Lewis? It's about how a baseball team in the early 2000's took a look at market inefficiencies and used it to put together a great team for real cheap. It's like, how is it possible that a multi-billion dollar league was so unable to figure out their hiring process/talent assessment? They have reams of performance data and just needed to apply analysts to it.
Whenever people start talking about the best ways to hire, I generally just start thinking about Moneyball and game theory and how most people are just making shit up with no clue why they're succeeding or failing. Every success story is equal parts "I worked real hard" and "There are far too many variables/luck for me to ever possibly be able to account for them objectively" but everyone like to put a narrative on it and be a hero (or cast someone as a villain).
