On a serious note however, you are correct that an overreliance on numbers can obscure the true value of talent, but the challenge is that HR practitioners are making decisions based purely on intuition and qualitative factors. If they do introduce quantitative measures, the basis of these measures is completely without a defensible methodology.

The corporate equivalent of your basketball and Hall of Fame analysis is the sales organization. Sales is the offensive powerhouse and those that succeed by pulling in the big deals get the deserved recognition. This is because without sales, there is no revenue, and without revenue, there is no company. It is also very easy to measure sales and sales effectiveness. That does not mean that other functions that support the sales team or build the products or run the operations of the company are not important, it just means that there is a recognition that the contribution of sales keeps the company in the game. Without Malone and Stockton, Mark Eaton’s efforts would not have mattered.

I think that we can agree though that it is important that these key contributors are identified and appropriately recognized. These folks typically occupy what I deem “Positions of Pain” because of the very fact that you mention; they are unrecognized yet provide an outsized contribution compared with the status of the role they occupy and position in the organization.

What I think would be a disservice is to not develop an appropriate means to highlight their contribution in a way that measurably shows the extent of their impact. I believe there is a way to intelligently use metrics to provide insight into performance based on the needs of the job as a way of supporting (or refuting) perceptions of one’s performance. That seems to me to be a much fairer and rational way of recognizing talent across an organization.

On a serious note however, you are correct that an overreliance on numbers can obscure the true value of talent, but the challenge is that HR practitioners are making decisions based purely on intuition and qualitative factors. If they do introduce quantitative measures, the basis of these measures is completely without a defensible methodology.

The corporate equivalent of your basketball and Hall of Fame analysis is the sales organization. Sales is the offensive powerhouse and those that succeed by pulling in the big deals get the deserved recognition. This is because without sales, there is no revenue, and without revenue, there is no company. It is also very easy to measure sales and sales effectiveness. That does not mean that other functions that support the sales team or build the products or run the operations of the company are not important, it just means that there is a recognition that the contribution of sales keeps the company in the game. Without Malone and Stockton, Mark Eaton’s efforts would not have mattered.

I think that we can agree though that it is important that these key contributors are identified and appropriately recognized. These folks typically occupy what I deem “Positions of Pain” because of the very fact that you mention; they are unrecognized yet provide an outsized contribution compared with the status of the role they occupy and position in the organization.

What I think would be a disservice is to not develop an appropriate means to highlight their contribution in a way that measurably shows the extent of their impact. I believe there is a way to intelligently use metrics to provide insight into performance based on the needs of the job as a way of supporting (or refuting) perceptions of one’s performance. That seems to me to be a much fairer and rational way of recognizing talent across an organization.

Thanks for the more lateral thinking.

Second, great post, and great point. I’m sure you’ve seen the performance review I did with my daughter when she was in kindergarten… I often use that to make the same point. I did have one group that was particularly anti-the-idea-that-numbers-don’t-tell-the-whole-story… so I asked them to quantify love. Where they ended up was a bit disturbing, b/c the name you give to a romantic relationship that is purely transactional is the opposite of the one that is formed on love—even though many of the quantifiable activities are the same.

I’ll leave it at that.

Again, nice post.

akaBruno, my feeling is that it is always going to be harder to quantify basketball players than baseball because baseball is still so much about individual talent. When you can figure out within a statistical probability what an ace pitcher will add to your win column (and it actually works consistently), I just don’t think you can do that with basketball.

2004 also saw the publication of one of the best books of basketball statistical analysis, “Basketball on paper” by Dean Oliver (http://www.amazon.com/Basketball-Paper-Rules-Performance-Analysis/dp/1574886886/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262900680&sr=8-2) who set out the four factors key to basketball success: Shooting, rebounding, turnovers, and getting to the foul line.

David Berri is a sports economist who carried out some of Oliver’s work in the 2006 book, “The Wages of Wins” (http://www.amazon.com/Wages-Wins-Measure-Stanford-Business/dp/0804758441/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262900680&sr=8-1) and he has a new book coming out in a couple of months.

I’m more of a college hoops guy, and I find ken Pomeroy’s site indispensible (www.kenpom.com).

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