One of our core principles is to try and share knowledge and insights from around the world and to get South African businesses to benchmark themselves against international peers. We believe that we can help entrepreneurs build better quality businesses by searching for high-quality insights from leading thinkers from around the world.

One of the common themes we see when we talk to entrepreneurs is that they often make decisions without looking at data and rather acting on emotion or “gut” instinct. We believe that if entrepreneurs spend more time focusing on building data infrastructure to help them make better decisions, then they will give themselves a better chance of success.

Today we bring you one of the podcasts from Harvard Business School which looks at the lessons from Billy Beane.

Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane brought a data-driven and unconventional approach to winning baseball games. By setting strategy and articulating the metric to evaluate and acquire the players who would ultimately implement his strategy on the field, Beane’s sabermetrics approach brought about a cultural shift in baseball from the players and managers to coaches and scouts. Professor Srikant Datar discusses how strategy and metrics work hand-in-hand, and how Beane’s story provides companies with important lessons in data science.