Pretty good. Makes you think! More in-depth than the movie (as you'd expect)

Btw, there's an upcoming Coursera course on Mathletics/Moneyball: https://www.coursera.org/course/mathletics

This is from memory, but baseball scouts historically rely heavily on athletic appearances (what they think a good pitcher, hitter, etc looks like), more than hard stats.

The Blind Side -- the story of how one of Michael Lewis's classmates as an Ole Miss booster, gave impermissible benefits to a high school recruit and got away with it.

Moneyball -- the story of a GM with 0 World Series appearances and a .530 WP.

Flight of the buffalo: An excellent book about leadership.

Moneyball: I'm not into novels, so this might be the closest thing to it. It's a fantastic book about thinking creatively and working with what you have. It's about baseball, but even if you don't like it, it's quite entertaining and insightful.

No matter what the math says, no coach will do this (save for maybe Billichek, but even he's not that bold). Sports is one of those areas where the "gut" and conventions are more important than stats and probabilities. Moneyball is a great book for anybody whose interested in the intersection of sports conventions and math.

http://www.amazon.com/Moneyball-Art-Winning-Unfair-Game/dp/0...

Metrics related, here's a book review of Moneyball I just wrote: https://dtrejo.com/moneyball-book-review-and-measuring-reven...

"Make your code more testable by moving things that are cumbersome/expensive to test but extremely unlikely to break into functions you don't test. Instead focusing your efforts on making the items that are likely to break easy to test"

Phrased honestly it becomes more interesting discussion.

I have worked on projects that had static analysis and high code coverage standards where code quality was abysmal, the product was barely functional, and development was paralyzed. I have also worked on projects that had none of those things but managed to have happy customers and quality product.

What does this mean?

It means that writing lots of tests is not enough to guarantee good outcomes. 1 great test is an asset, 400 bad tests are a liability. What does guarantee good outcomes is focusing on "equity". Does writing this test improve my equity position? If the answer is no or if you can't qauntitatively demonstrate the value in terms of opportunity cost then the answer is obvious...don't write the test.

The current state of software quality at the development level closely parallels the plot of Moneyball. Consider this quote...

"Okay, people who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins and in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs. You’re trying to replace Johnny Damon. The Boston Red Sox see Johnny Damon and they see a star who’s worth seven and a half million dollars a year. When I see Johnny Damon, what I see is an imperfect understanding of where runs come from”
― Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Many people try to buy quality with an imperfect understanding of where quality comes from.

It's ok to feel down for some time, but it's important to understand the broad picture and not take this personally - regardless of what you were told.

Now, regarding leadership resources, I would recommend to start with the following (in this order):

Moneyball (movie), books: The Goal, The Phoenix Project, The Mythical Man-Month, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, The Culture Code and in-between those - various Simon Sinek videos.

If you read this far, you should be able to continue finding materials on your own from here ;)

Best of luck!

Go on, read Moneyball, and consider that the selection criteria from top-ranked universities may be low-quality indicators of success at actually getting things done.

Tell that to Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A's, who used statistical analysis and team interaction models (i.e. "equations") to turn propel the team into the top ranks with salary expenses of only 1/3th of the other top teams. The story was described in the book Moneyball and dramatized in the film of the same name.

Whenever people start talking about the best ways to hire, I generally just start thinking about Moneyball and game theory and how most people are just making shit up with no clue why they're succeeding or failing. Every success story is equal parts "I worked real hard" and "There are far too many variables/luck for me to ever possibly be able to account for them objectively" but everyone like to put a narrative on it and be a hero (or cast someone as a villain).

IMO, this is one book of a "trilogy" - the Kahneman book, "Moneyball" and "The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande. They all came out in roughly the same time and are three different views on this problem.

So add Moneyball, Liar's Poker, The Big Short (good telling of the 2007 financial crisis), Panic (contrasts before and after news articles around financial crises) and The Blind Side to the list.

(Don't let The Blind Side motion picture scare you off. The book has a lot of on-and-off-the field football strategy that I found interesting.)

I really enjoyed the Stockfighter levels too, and reading The Big Short / Flash Boys / Moneyball in preparation. The levels had the right level of difficulty & I kept feeling I levelled up (especially when optimizing levels, I'm still proud of my Level 5 score). I didn't enjoy the AVR levels the same way & bailed quickly on those.

I got spooked after someone posted on HN that their Starfighter referral had only bypassed the CV screen of the job interview, not programming or whiteboard challenges. That made me question the time I'd spent on Starfighter - I kept a time log in Harvest along the way, and it's about the same amount of time I'd spend on developing a new product to sell online.

I still enjoyed playing Stockfighter though, and it helped me sharpen my Golang skills.

The actual approach was to get a bunch of people who worked to extend the inning by not getting out.. aka getting on base safely. You don't need many big hits when you can get singles and doubles consistently.

A couple years ago, I met a small scale angel investment group that complained "we haven't had a unicorn" but when we chatted more, I found out 60% of their investments were acquired in under five years with them making ~5x each time.

Not as sexy but sounds like a good strategy to me.

It's been a long time since I've read the Moneyball book, and never saw the movie, but it seems to me there are two levels of 'moneyball' approach:

1. Use data to make allocate resources differently than gut instinct/received wisdom (of baseball scouts). This level can be applied very widely. Maybe they (Manhattan DA office) are doing this level to decide who to put resources into prosecuting. But clearly they're not doing it comprehensively, given massive prosecutions for marijuana.

2. Do (1) to make a bet in a competitive environment that goes a different way than most competitors. I don't see this level applying to what the DA is doing at all, though I imagine it could be done in the hiring of law enforcement/prosecution, which seems to be competitive, at least at the executive level. But there's probably a lack of data to make such bets. (I haven't looked, but an idle question I have is whether there's data to support shifting police work to a female-dominated profession; if there is maybe that's a bet that could be made.)

I say this in part because I think there are non-sports fields in which both levels could be very directly translated, eg http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2012/03/04/altmetrics-moneyball...

I'd quote things from the Vanity Fair piece, but there's so much there worth reading -- highly recommended.

[0] http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...

1. You will read more.

2. The reading experience will be better than you think--there was a 1-2 day adjustment period for me. After that, I didn't even notice I wasn't reading paper and ink.

3. You can highlight and make notes in books that are actually usable. Remember post-its, bookmarks, notes in the margins? I loved to mark-up books, but never pulled them out again to reference what I wrote. Now I have all of my highlights in one place. I can even highlight a passage and share it on Twitter or Facebook (if you have 3G, then you can do this while sitting on the beach!)

4. I have all of my books with me via my phone. I just read Moneyball and wanted to share a quote with a friend. I was able to open up the Kindle app and presto, I'm able to share it with them.

5. I am more mobile (I have less stuff). Instead of buying books to collect them, I am buying them to consume them. Others may not have this problem, but I did.

5. Did I mention you will read more?! If you like reading and have ever set a goal to read more, please buy a Kindle. If a friend recommends a book to you during the day, you can download it while sitting in a comfy chair when you get home, and can be reading it seconds later.

Most of the arguments about whether or not to buy a Kindle center on the price. At $140, it is well worth it when you consider the additional amount of reading you will do. You will learn more, you will read more books, it will be worth it!

Given the consistency of these experimental outcomes, may help to explain his authoritative tone. After all, he won a Nobel prize in economics which is completely outside his domain expertise.

If that is not enough to entice you to give it another go, consider the book, The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis. Lewis, in his highly researched and using detailed anecdotes describes how Kahnemans and Tversky collaboration initially began as a collaboration around understanding the decision making process in circumstances where there is a high degree of uncertainty and acquiring additional information is not feasible. The Khanamen/Tversky collaboration is described as a deep collaboration where neither man claims credit for their respective contributions. Only both minds together could have produced their research findings.

Lewis also describes how many reviewers of his book, Moneyball, expressed the many parallels between Kahnemans/Tversky's research and themes covered in Moneyball. Lewis was not familiar with this research when he wrote Moneyball. It was not until others pointed out these parallels that Lewis decided he should engage with Kahneman to write The Undoing Project.

You don't have enough data on other people around you, or even how they view the world, or feel about the world. It's like taking a wild-ass guess, and being proud of it.

I don't really care much for following sports teams either. I used to turn my nose at it, as if I am somehow a superior person for not giving two shits about who is winning. One day, I read Michael Lewis's Moneyball and flipped through Blindside and realized I had been an idiot. I still might not care about which team is winning, yet there are a lot of hidden depths to sports. How many other things have I missed by not looking with an open mind?

- Moneyball. A really engaging story about how game changing startups can turn a centuries-old industry on it's head....er...it's actually about baseball, but the other part is true too.

- Crossing the Chasm. It's a roadmap for introducing a new product. Gives a framework for thinking about the "who" and "why" of a new market.

- Sales Learning Curve by Mark Leslie. It's actually not a book but rather a short paper. Shows how the sales learning curve is similar to the manufacturing learning curve.

- Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds. Why do otherwise intelligent individuals form seething masses of idiocy when they engage in collective action? Why do financially sensible people jump lemming-like into hare-brained speculative frenzies--only to jump broker-like out of windows when their fantasies dissolve? We may think that the Great Crash of 1929, junk bonds of the '80s, over-valued high-tech stocks of the '90s and real estate bubble of the past few years are peculiarly aberrations of our time, but Mackay's classic--first published in 1841--shows that the madness and confusion of crowds knows no limits.

- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. The title pretty much says it all, huh? Oh, this book was first published in 1931...

- Hiring Smart. It's a book that takes about an hour to read and provides practical tips on how to interview someone (as opposed to the other way around).

- Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. Good read with some nice tidbits (particularly on fundraising).

- Patton on Leadership (as in General George S. Patton). It's pretty cool...nothing too touchy-feely.

- Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage

Some of this is documented in the book "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis, who went on to write "Moneyball" and "The Big Short."

When Michael Lewis, author of Liar's Poker and Moneyball and increasingly famous narrative journalist, reviews the literature on the economic crisis, he digs up, reproduces, and editorializes curated news articles from the 1989 crash; prior to that, he published a 9,382,382,293 page compendium of the fundamental work in economics.

But we pay attention to blog post reviews of blog post books, because... we're fans, I guess? Sorry. I feel compelled to keep questioning why we take this guy so seriously.

Then again, the piece focuses on the human aspects of removing the mystery behind the game, perhaps it doesn't need to speak to why/how that came about.

Now granted, those articles could have been biased, but I had no idea there was any sort of left wing vs right wing thing going on. Stupid politrix.

The entire movement reminded me of Moneyball by Michael Lewis.

That can't be used as any form of argument. The ideas behind Moneyball revolutionized baseball. However the financial challenges that Oakland had in the book are still exactly the same today. The reason for their lack of ultimate success is that they gave away their first mover advantage by allowing that book to be written. Now every other team has adopted the Moneyball mindset and Oakland is back to being a cash strapped team with little competitive advantage. Even considering that, they have still been one of the more successful teams when compared to their financial peers.

If you're an entrepreneur and you haven't read Moneyball, [insert snark here].

I was disappointed by The Blind Side, his football book, but it was at least well-written and enjoyable.

I even have a huge bound volume of classic econ texts with his commentary in it. I will probably never really finish it, but I'm a huge fan and a completeist, so, he got me.

It happened with books too: See "Liar’s Poker", by Michael Lewis. He says that he wrote it "so that fewer idealistic college kids would dream of working on Wall Street. ... Somehow that message failed to come across ... They'd read my book as a how-to manual."

http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~pel/misc/The-End-of-Wall-Street...
https://danwang.co/liars-poker-by-michael-lewis/

Michael Lewis also wrote "Moneyball" and "The Big Short" which were made into films.