Leadership

A Simple Career Lesson from Moneyball

By Jessica Stillman

Updated on: October 25, 2011 / 7:23 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

When Moneyball by Michael Lewis became a bestseller a few years ago, the concept of doing more with less that the book explores in the context of baseball proved to be catnip for business commentators, who went about applying the lessons of the book to various aspects of life at work. Check out the Moneyball take on marketing, for example.

Now the movie based on the book and starring Brad Pitt it out and the business blogosphere is at it again, mining the experiences of Billy Beane and the Oakland A's for career tips. Some of these secrets gleaned from Moneyball are obvious or generic, but personal finance blog Wise Bread actually manages to extract a lesson from the movie that might inspire career newbies. What was the secret of the A's success that actually translates to the office?

What made them successful was looking for inefficiencies in the market and exploiting them. In other words, they found something valuable that no one else was paying attention to. And that's a strategy we can all use to help us out in our careers.
Find something in your company or in your industry that no one else is worried about, and find a way to make it work for you. What you're looking for is inefficiencies or chinks in the armor -- something that no one else is trying to fix that could make a big impact for your company.

This is pretty sturdy advice but also pretty general. Chinks in the armor? What exactly is Wise Bread's Carlos Portocarrero talking about? The answer to this question is where the post gets good, offering not just bland platitudes but some really thought-provoking concrete examples:

If you work at a small company, you may not have a whole lot of material dedicated to helping new hires learn the ropes. But if you really dig in, you'll find that companies lose a lot of money when replacing a hire or making a new one. So if you created something (a manual, a checklist, a presentation) that made this onboarding process faster, smoother, and more effective, then you've just created some value.
When I worked at a publishing company, we had some buggy software, so we had to manually do a lot of checking and editing before we could start laying out the catalogs we made. Instead of complaining about the technology and convincing the bosses to pay someone to fix it (that wasn't gonna happen), I created a simple search-and-replace cheat sheet. Once you ran through the steps in the sheet, you were ready to start laying out, and all those problems were essentially fixed in 15 minutes instead of two grueling hours. I passed the sheet around and boom -- just like that, our group became way more efficient.

Career advisers often tell grads to think beyond their job description and aim to add value. After all business is about the bottom line and the best way to enhance your career is to prove your dollars and cents value to the company. Often though, those who are newer to the corporate game want to go above and beyond but struggle to figure out how to do so. The Moneyball approach to adding value outlined on Wise Bread is nice because, by re-framing the problem as a search for inefficiencies or neglected niches, it helps eager but unsure career starters actually identify these chances to add value.

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(Image courtesy of Flickr user Kei!, CC 2.0)