We are fans of the Milwaukee Brewers. And currently, the Brewers have Major League Baseball’s best record.
There was a draft where that was the whole edition for this week (apologies to any North Siders fans in our readership… tough last series). But while we’d write about the Brewers on a much thinner pretext than this, there was an article on MLB.com that caught our eye recently. It detailed the average attack direction of swings for all teams in the Majors. We found it quite striking.
Source: MLB.com, “Understanding how the Brewers’ brand of baseball works, and whether it can last”
In general, baseball math suggests that pulled fly balls become home runs, home runs win games, and the league has spent a decade optimizing for exactly that. However, the Brewers go the other way, get on base, and make themselves difficult to defend. While the rest of the league is going left, the Brewers are going right.
Howard Marks, co-founder of the investment firm Oaktree Capital, has a riddle that he claims (as of 2014…) has never been answered correctly:
Suppose I hire you as a portfolio manager and we agree you will get no compensation next year if your return is in the bottom nine deciles of the investor universe but $10 million if you’re in the top decile. What’s the first thing you have to do – the absolute prerequisite – in order to have a chance at the big money?
His answer: you have to build a portfolio that looks different from everyone else’s. As he puts it, if your portfolio looks like everyone else’s, you may do well, or you may do poorly, but you can’t do different. It’s a bit of a truism when you state it like this, but we’d guess most people (including us at times) don’t think about it this way.
We see a version of this in hiring. There is real value in knowing what’s standard: what competitors pay, how they interview, what benefits they offer, how they structure shifts. We help clients benchmark this all the time. But benchmarking tells you how to keep up. By definition it can’t tell you how to get ahead. If your pay, your process, and your employee experience are indistinguishable from the company ten minutes down the road, you’ll get indistinguishable results. The companies that consistently win talent are doing something different somewhere. Recruiting from a pool others ignore. Structuring a shift others won’t. Developing someone others wrote off. It’s not about finding the best players, it’s about finding the right ones, and the right ones are often where the consensus isn’t looking.
Two notes:
- Different doesn’t have to mean clever. Returning every candidate’s outreach. Starting interviews on time. Giving feedback promptly. None of that is innovative, but when most employers don’t do it reliably, doing it reliably is different.
- Different and wrong is also very available, and it loses faster than average does. Being contrarian only pays when you’re contrarian and right. The skill isn’t variance for its own sake. It’s telling the difference between conventions that exist for good reasons and habits everyone just inherited, and only breaking the second kind.
The Brewers’ approach is a good reminder either way. They didn’t abandon all the components required to hit successfully. They just noticed that when the whole league crowds one side of the field, the open grass is on the other.
Until next time,
Your Spherion WI & Northern IL team