In October 2011, at the
Predictive Analytics World conference in New York City, IBM shared the supercomputer Watson, made famous by beating Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, at the Expo. Conference attendees could go head-to-head with Watson answering jeopardy-style questions. With great pride, I can say I beat Watson in a best of three questions. Before you deem me a “super-genius” (I am no
Xander), let me confess two things. The smartest thing I did was quit while I was ahead; I have no doubt Watson would have crushed me over an extended period of time. Second, the questions I beat Watson on regarded popular culture. The first question about candy, “What is Baby Ruth?” and the second question about television, “What is Friends?”
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I was looking through my files trying to locate a particular workforce scorecard example for a client when I ran across a saved issue of Fortune magazine. On the cover was Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix and the Fortune “Business Person of the Year.” Hastings was selected over iconic names such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, among others. One of the primary reasons Hastings was chosen was Netflix’s sky-rocketing stock price, up 200% from January 2010 through December 2010.
The same day I found this magazine, Netflix subscribers (including me) received the following brief but direct e-mail from the Netflix Team...
Read More“Congratulations on Moneyball,” Jon Stewart greeted author Michael Lewis last Wednesday as the guest of the Daily Show. Stewart went on to praise it as a smart and well done film.
“I thought it was going to suck,” Michael Lewis blurted to a surprised host. Lewis explained that he thought it was a terrible idea when the studio approached him seven years ago. “I thought I was going to have to go hide,” but directors Bennett Miller and Brad Pitt took a book that shouldn’t have been a movie and made it into an Oscar buzz-worthy film.
Read MoreOften, the root cause of lengthy “Time to Fill” and/or low “Retention” rates is when organizations have not come to terms with their talent realties. There are ways of recruiting that take into account a bigger picture of marrying the employee with the employer. A tale of a firm getting bogged down by traditional hiring practices and one of a firm using a different perspective on hiring are offered here as examples.
Read MoreOn September 23rd a movie version of Michael Lewis’s bestselling book Moneyball is coming to theaters, starring Brad Pitt as Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane. When the book was released in 2003, I bought copies for members of my analytics team, as the story shaped a great deal of my thinking about workforce measurements and to look for metrics that provide insight over the metrics typically on-hand or historically used.
If you’re unfamiliar with Lewis’s book or, like my Russian colleague, not familiar with baseball, let me provide a brief synopsis.
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