Don't Get Stumped

Five things cricket and business have in common

- Paddy Upton

1 Data and science are no longer gamebreakers

In 1995, over a decade after some sports and many businesses were making use of video technology and data management in their pursuit of success, nobody in the international cricket world was using these modern-day tools. Cricket was not the only late adopter. Businesses like Kodak would also wait too long before embracing the digital world. In a 1995 tour of Pakistan, Proteas coach Bob Woolmer was the first cricket coach in the world to take a computer and video camera on tour, in the form of David Leadbetter golf coaching software. Few cricketers took it seriously, except, of course, those who played golf, and who returned from those early tours with improved golf swings.

In 2002, Oakland A’s baseball coach Billy Beane broke new ground and achieved unprecedented success by using advanced statistics. Other early adopters of data mining, target marketing, and scientific measurements of performance got the jump on competition. Today, making smart use of data is no longer a gamebreaker, but a necessity to stay in the game.

2 Culture is the new gamebreaker

Research by three leading HR companies (Forbes, Gallup and Saratoga) on over a million employees from 200 corporations and 60 companies suggest that 7484% of employees want to leave their jobs. When asked why, the main reason was ‘because of my boss’. In the USA, of the 40 million kids who play sport when they start school, 70% give up by the age of 13. When asked why, it was not the sport they didn’t like, but rather their experience in the sport, citing their coaches’ and parents’ behaviour, related to winning and mistakes, as the reasons for giving up.