We watch a lot of baseball in my family, and I’ve been reading an old book about the economics of baseball, Moneyball: the Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis. (The 2011 film is worth a watch too.) A central theme of the book is that the Oakland A’s routinely found undervalued baseball players by paying careful attention to players’ performance, and dismissing criticism of those players that was rooted in a bias that they didn’t fit the “look” of a successful player. Lewis, paraphrasing the General Manager’s advice, wrote “When you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply by their appearance, you are less likely to find the best person for the job.”
I love when I find unexpected connections like this; I didn’t expect anything from Moneyball to relate to work, and yet this idea speaks to how we select people to join our organization or join projects as ASR staff. We can, and should, think about the qualities that make someone a successful ASR employee and work to ensure we remove bias from our processes. On that note, please check out the article below about joining ASR’s DEI Community of Practice and the many other informative items in this edition. Take care, and enjoy the holiday weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment