The Most Important Part of a Winning Team is the Winning Part

This is a companion post to the Moneyball post below. It's been in the hopper for a while. Just something I needed to get off my chest.

People who put their opinions out in public are lucky that almost everyone forgets them immediately.

Consider Bill Plaschke. His opinions are reliably wrong, and yet he works for one of the largest papers in the country. Bill Plaschke's every column is a microcosm of the fact-free, eternal-present-with-selective-hindsight universe that is sport opinion.

When sports opinionators like Plaschke are asked to explain success and failure, they are free to say crazy things and often do.  The Angels or the Dodgers, or the Lakers or the Clippers, or USC or UCLA win or lose because the top guy got mad when someone played a prank or didn't. They put a rally monkey on the big video screen, or didn't. They steal bases and sacrifice or don't. They let the kids be kids, or they impose discipline and order... You get the idea.

The key move here is to go from these trivial matters to the meaning of life itself.  This is the work of "intangibles."  Intangibles are the incantation of a sports religion.  No one doubts Tim Tebow's monotheism, but that hasn't kept Skip Bayless from turning him into a totem who uses powerful medicine of competitiveness and will to do magic.

Basically, take any difference of style and blow it into the matter of substance, overlay vague generality and viola! After the results are in, it is easy to suggest that this particular difference mattered and that this difference is an expression of some deep and wide difference that sustains the universe.

Sports opinion is not unique in this. Due to a bout of academia, I spent several years of my life in libraries reading through decades of business writing - annual reports, trade journals, news stories, motivational books, speeches, you name it. I didn't learn much about how to run a business, but I did develop an appreciation for Plaschkesque hokum and hindsight bias. Most instructive were articles like "How Xerox Stays at the Cutting Edge" at the moment it wasn't. Business disasters were another favorite. The Plaschke's of the business world were always ready to explain why an Enron's success is driven by their great culture of innovation (or whatever) until Enron went bust. Then they explained why the Enron culture or leadership doomed it to failure. Too many motocross trips for the executives and so on.

In all of this noise, results are what matter. Teams that win are winning teams. It may seem obvious, but some people will try to tell you that winning teams have some magical positive feelings and "chemistry" that make them win. They are usually confusing cause and effect. It's true that most winning teams get along and feel good about their team. But that's because they win. It's true that good teams focus on results, while bad teams make excuses. That is mostly because good teams like their results and bad teams don't.

The lesson: if you want to have the culture of a winning team, the most reliable way to get it is to win.  The most reliable way to win is to do the things that consistently have an positive impact on the odds of winning.   Those things are not magical.