This year, the Sacramento Kings crowdsourced intelligence about who they should take in the 2014 NBA draft. Grantland created two well done videos (embedded below) that chronicle the process of leveraging relatively obscure, but passionate and skilled talent to make (what turned out to be) a $4.7 million decision – the drafting and signing of Nik Stauskas as their 1st pick (8th overall).
It’s interesting to watch these individuals from widely disparate backgrounds and regions with passion and talent interact and provide key feedback to the Kings ownership & GM, including NBA legends Chris Mullin and Mitch Richmond. The experiment highlights many emerging trends, and forces us to further examine key questions.
1. How can organizations best leverage external talent on an interim basis?
1a. How should the recruitment, collaboration, and compensation models evolve to harness this type of talent?
1b. How smart is the crowd vs. the experts? Are the answers different in different contexts, and how can organizations optimize around each use case?
2. How critical are analytics in sports?
2a. How much value can be quantified? How much of sports performance is still beyond the grasp of quants?
2b. How closely aligned are sports and business use cases?
3. How does the narrowing of information asymmetry affecting the dynamics of your industry?
Sports is a great place to observe this and I’ve written about it before. The internet has changed the face of professional sports, and has birthed mutli-billion dollar segments in fantasy sports and gambling. Ordinary fans are privy to much of the same data that high paid executives and owners traditionally paid large sums of money for. “Armchair quarterbacks” have arguably as good a chance at making the right personnel decisions than an owner or executive that’s been in the field for a long time does. Or do they? What role does experience actually play when everyone has the opportunity to leverage similar capabilities?
To varying degrees, the same questions are relevant and true in other industries. The democratization of information availability and capabilities on demand has at least increasing potential to undermine the hold of the old guard. We see this at both organizational and individual levels.
The amount of available roles and teams in the NBA is finite. But in other industries, the competitive landscape is wide open, theoretically allowing space for more innovation.
Anyways, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please share your comments and enjoy the videos below.
