Thanks to Lincoln for passing this along.
Depodesta said the best way to establish real metrics for a business is to ask the naive question, and then he laid out seven lessons he learned about developing useful metrics.
1. The first question to ask, he said, is, "If we weren't already doing it this way, would this be the way we'd start doing this?" For further business wisdom he offered a quote from Thomas Paine, author of "Common Sense", issued on the eve of the American revolution: "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right."
2. Be prepared for push back when you challenge your organization's conventional thinking. When the Athletics started putting together a team of undervalued players, Manager Beane and DePodesta worried what members of the press, writing the equivalent of 200 stories on the team during an average season, would say if early decisions looked suspect. "Would the other stakeholders in the team, the fans, think of their team as off the reservation and doing things differently from every other team?" he recalled the pair worrying. Nevertheless, to beat the odds against Oakland's low pay scale, they had to do things differently.
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Related book: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
