Moneyball: Work Within the Constraints You Are Given and Do the Best You Can
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In my recent article entitled, Moneyball and Organizational Excellence, I cited 15 things I observed in the Moneyball film that translate directly to organizational excellence. This article addresses the first of these.
6 minutes (exactly) into the film Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt), complains to Oakland A’s managing partner, Stephen Schott (played by Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick), that he needs more money to compete with heavily financed teams such as the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. Schotts’s response sets the tone for the remaining 207 minutes of the film, “Work within the constraints you are given and do the best you can.”
Dr. Shigeo Shingo, father of Lean methodologies, was often asked by executives, managers and sometimes team-members how they could achieve excellence within the organization without more money, labor (money) or better, newer equipment (money). Proprietary archival video owned by the Shingo Institute, and individual anecdotes indicate this question irritated him to no end. He would answer with a scowl on his face, while tapping the side of his head and say, “It’s not about money, it’s about this,” suggesting that one uses their head [brain] rather than complain about the lack of resources. In essence, he was admonishing to be resourceful.
Now, while I understand there are legitimate needs for more money, more labor and / or better, newer equipment, that should be a natural step in the process of utilizing resourcefulness, not a substitute for resourcefulness. Often, we feel like money is the solution to the problem. However, when we don’t understand the true root cause of the problem, we are destined to use money as an expensive way to repeat a failure that is not truly understood.
As a result of his discussion with Schott, Beane realized that money would not solve his problem. He was now open to seeing the problem for what it truly was, and accepting a solution he likely would not have considered before that discussion. It was this mental shift that made him hyper aware of what was going on with Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill) in his bid to make a trade to get new players from Cleveland Indians general manager Mark Shapiro (played by Reed Diamond), I’ve still yet to read the book – although I’m terribly anxious, I have to maintain discipline on my booklist reading – but I’m convinced my assumption that what Billy Beane learned from Peter Brand would never have happened if Stephen Schott had not nixed the budged increase request to get new players.
This mindset is both key and critical. I used to facilitate Shingo workshops for an organization that thought it would be a good idea to replace the team-member huddle boards with electronic versions. The cost was about $30,000, plus the labor to have them installed and tied into the IT system. As soon as the digital huddle boards became active, team-member performance started to decrease. An investigation was conducted, and it was learned that team-members became disaffected by the digital huddle boards because they no longer sensed ownership of their performance. The data was being collected by another means and so disinterest occurred. The organization decided to return to using analog huddle boards, essentially a paper system. The digital system stayed in place, but its use was redirected to publishing real-time customer feedback, so the team-members got a sense of how their performance was actually helping to “Create Value for The Customer” (Shingo Guiding Principle No. 10). Performance returned and even improved. The reason attributed to improvement was a very visual sense of what customers thought about what the team-members were doing in the creation of value.
I was once facilitating the DISCOVER EXCELLENCE Shingo workshop when one of the participants touched on this idea of being resourceful, with two different anecdotes. One of the facilities she was responsible for had very little capital to work with. There was a chronic problem with a label printer that could not be resolved, which had a significant effect on productivity due to downtime. The controller was asked if a new printer could be bought. The answer was that there is no money in the budget for that purpose. The next question asked was if we could pay to get the printer repaired. Same response. A team-member, frustrated with the situation, decided to observe the printer for some time and realized that the problem with it could be resolved with the use of three rubber bands of the same size. They tested this hypothesis and found it to be valid, and the solution fully implemented. The operator was being resourceful.
The second anecdote was with respect to a safety issue. A specific step in the process caused cuts to the forearms of the team-members performing the task required. Kevlar sleeves were acquired, but Kevlar degrades and decomposes under UV lighting such as that emitted by fluorescent lights used in the facility. The Kevlar broke down and degraded and it was difficult to replace the sleeves due to cost constraints. The controller was asked for a specialized piece of equipment designed specifically for the unsafe task, to which the answer was that there was no money available for such a piece of equipment. Understanding that capital would not be a solution, a maintenance technician working on a master’s degree in engineering found an old electric motor, rebuilt it. Then using old parts from retired equipment, he built a device that would do the same as the equipment proposed to purchase. It was tested and found to be valid. The internally built custom equipment was implemented, and team-members trained to use it.
Now there are questions I might have asked of the controller, particularly where safety was an issue. But that’s a different article. The fact is people within the organization learned that when money was not a solution, to find solutions – ingenious and exceptionally low-cost solutions – that resolved the issues at hand.
I just recently received an email which had a paragraph that applied directly to the concept of working within the constraints we have and do the best we can.
“Going back to the Sphere of Influence, I think we get caught up in focusing on the things that affect us but we have little or no control over. It’s easy to use those things as an excuse for not working on the things we can control. Working within the constraints reminds me of the Apollo 13 movie where the team had to solve the CO2 issue with only the items on the [lunar] module (Apollo 13 (1995) - Square Peg in a Round Hole Scene (7/11) | Movieclips - YouTube. They didn’t complain or look at what they couldn’t control, they made it work with what they had.”
It is said that necessity is the mother of invention. This is a fundamental aspect of Continuous Improvement, the second dimension of the Shingo Model. Improvement is a result of innovation and invention. Throwing money at the problem as a first attempt to solve that problem rarely produces the intended result unless it is well studied, true root cause identified, and all other potential solutions tested and only then determined to be invalid.
Billy Beane, in trying to compete with high budget baseball teams in replacing members that had left for more lucrative contracts was faced with the fundamental truth of the Oakland A’s situation at that time to, “Work within the constraints you are given and do the [very] best you can.” Who knew that would take the Oakland A’s in a direction no one ever expected?
What direction will understanding and application of this constraint take you and your organization on your respective journeys of excellence?
I very much appreciate you and your time to read this article. You can find more articles like this from me at https://www.legup.solutions/blog.
If you have thoughts on this or other topics regarding yours or your organization’s journey of excellence, feel free to continue the conversation in my Secret Sauce feed on Slack.