Firstly, thank you to all whose planners and marketers who have contributed to the series. There are only a finite number of books that are true "Timeless Marketing Classics" and it makes sense to draw the search to a close before somebody suggests Peter Drucker.
So as we sign off for 2009, the final Timeless Marketing Classic comes from Will Humphrey.
"So then. My planning and strategy book for the ages. What would it be? Well, the easiest thing in the world would be to say ‘Truth Lies & Advertising’, and just be done with it.
But I’m not going to. Shocker.
No, this is a bit of a left field recommendation, but then, it’s easily the best book I’ve read on strategy and thinking in my career. And, guess what? It’s not even an advertising book. It’s a book about baseball. Called ‘Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game’ by Michael Lewis, it documents the playing and management career of a forward thinking baseball coach, Billy Beane, as he attempts to guide the Oakland As to success.
Simon Kendrick (a proper baseball fan, unlike yours truly – and a much better writer than me) has produced an excellent write up of Moneyball here. He pretty thoroughly reviews the book, so I won’t add much more to that.
But what I will attempt to answer is why I think the book’s so good. Especially as I’m not a baseball fan, really. Nor that much of a data fan. Well, I think it’s because the book does such an excellent job of humanising data. Allow me to explain what I mean by that, and why I think it’s important.
What I mean is that data, to me, means nothing unless I can map it onto something. That piece of data about yellow fat users means the square root of fuck all unless you can map it onto just what people say, and how they react to things. Reading Moneyball, I began to get a sense of the sort of people the A’s employed, and just why they were there – simultaneously seeing them as instruments for victory, and not just people, or vice-versa…people who were uniquely gifted at doing what they were employed for, just with character traits which sometimes blinded you as to what they were really there for.
It’s so important for planning/strategy types – you need to know that sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar, that occasionally, data can’t give you all the answers, but when it’s coupled with how people behave and a sense of where things are going, it’s invaluable. No other conventional ‘planning’ or ‘strategy’ book has yet done this for me.
It was relevant then because it was able to reduce baseball to a series of plays and data, and it continues to be relevant because – at its heart, it’s about more than baseball. It’s about analysis, about doing your homework, and about trusting your instinct. And other people’s. Which, I think, is all we can do as strategy people."