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Comments

Alex Matthews

John,

Thank you for a wonderful post! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

It was so thought provoking that I had to take notes as I worked through the paragraphs.

It is great to see someone using the Value Discipline model (product leadership, operating excellence & customer intimacy) described in Tracey & Wiersema's "The Discipline of Market Leaders" back in about 1995. I think it is an excellent model and I have used it several times in practice as an EA and I have never understood why it isn't more widely used. The way you have contextualized the model for current economic times and the examples you have given were really enjoyable to read.

I am going to go away and write a few blog posts about this. First cab off the rank will be a synopsis of the value discipline model and then some thoughts and general admiration for this post.

I'll post links as I write posts if that is OK with you.


Joe McCarthy

I finally got around to watching the movie Moneyball last night, and see some parallels with pull platforms for performance.

Oakland Athletics' General Manager, Billy Keane, used data analytics - and data analyst Peter Brand - to precisely determine the types of performance (e.g., on base percentage) needed throughout the lineup and relentlessly used those metrics to craft a strategy - and team - that could best achieve the ultimate objectives (scoring enough runs to win enough games to win their division).

Among the many touchpoints with what you've written here is the way the A's created a platform to pull the performance of players that were widely viewed as individually suboptimal into a team that won a record-setting number of games. While many might have viewed - and perhaps still view - this strategy as unacceptably unromantic, the movie demonstrated how focusing on metrics can ultimately enable individuals and teams to achieve optimal performance.

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