Jonah Keri

In this talk, author Jonah Keri walks us through the essential difference between winning and losing strategies. The Tampa Bay Rays baseball team used cutting-edge analysis and unconventional thinking to go from worst to first. The Montreal Expos, another small-market team, faced the same economic challenges and did many things right—but ultimately failed. It doesn't take much for a winning strategy to go wrong. Little things add up. When they're good, they can make the difference between winning and losing. When they're bad, they can eradicate any forward momentum you have. Keri speaks on how to maintain momentum, seize optimal strategies, and avoid the little pitfalls that can cause big problems. Drawing on his research for his two books, The Extra 2% and The Definitive History of the Montreal Expos, Keri provides key insights from a lifetime marrying baseball and statistics to worthwhile strategy. 

People used to rely on their gut instinct instead of data. Take baseball: For the first 100-plus years of baseball's existence, the men in charge of the sport relied on intuition and memory to run their teams. Some concepts worked. Many did not. Turns out the human mind is unreliable. We fixate on specific memories, then throw out others that contradict what we've learned. We become a biased observers of events, unable to make clear-headed decisions, because we're too invested in our core beliefs. 

That's where big data comes in. Branch Rickey began using numbers to build a moribund Dodgers franchise into a bunch of winners. Eschewing biases against non-white players he recruited the great Jackie Robinson. Rickey even made smaller decisions based on granular data like pitcher-batter match-ups. Still, those concepts stagnated for another few decades, before the Oakland A's pounced on the value of big data—which is how they developed the concept of Moneyball. Today, all professional sports teams rely on data to some extent. But the best teams use it to govern every move, all the way down to what they feed their athletes. We face the same inflection point in the business world, where the most successful companies use complex algorithms to dominate their market (e.g. Amazon's incredible growth, despite toiling in a low-margin business), while those stuck in old ways fade into irrelevance.

In this talk, author and Grantland writer Jonah Keri goes inside the human mind to show us that what we think we know isn't so, and how a firm grounding in data holds the key to overcoming biases, and making informed decisions—in sports, and in business.