Michael Lewis has preternatural confidence. That may not come as a surprise for someone who has amassed so many New York Times bestsellers, and who has had three of them made into motion pictures, but that confidence was on display well before he was an established author.
As an undergraduate at Princeton, his thesis advisor suggested that he not pursue a career writing. Though he heeded that advice immediately after graduating, instead spending time as a gopher for an art dealer, as an apprentice to a cabinet maker, and as a tour guide. After a graduate degree he found his way into the world of finance. Throughout this period, however, he wrote. He was encouraged by the responses letters to family and friends received. Even in the period prior to email, these letters were shared and enjoyed by many beyond the intended recipients.
Lewis' first leap onto the international stage was in writing about his experience at Solomon Brothers in the book Liar's Poker. In writing this book about the greed of 1980s Wall Street, he would take on some of the most powerful leaders of his former employer, inserting himself into the story in the process.
Given the success of Lewis' first book, one might have anticipated that he would focus exclusively on books about finance, and he has had plenty of books related to it (e.g., The Big Short, Flash Boys, Boomerang, and Panic, to name a few). But Lewis has also written books where sports are key themes (e.g., Moneyball and The Blind Side), and others that delved into highly personal topics (e.g., Home Game which is about fatherhood, and Coach, which is about his childhood baseball coach). He is the rare non-fiction author who may write about whatever he pleases, and the reading public enjoys each of his choices.
I met with Lewis at his office, which is in a small guest house on his property in Berkeley, California. We discussed the sources of his confidence, why this native of New Orleans chose the Bay Area as his base of operations, how, though he is not working on a book at present, he believes he may have a book in him about New Orleans. As for his process of identifying topics to write about, he notes, "The process is so messy that no business school or writing program would teach it. I just wander, and I feel as if I am a wanderer in the world. I try to encounter experiences in print, on the internet, at dinner parties, and at conferences." No one can argue with the results.
(To listen to an unabridged podcast version of this interview, please click this link. This is the 33rd interview in the Tech Influencers series. To listen to past interviews with the likes of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Steve Case, Craig Newmark, Stewart Butterfield, and Meg Whitman, please visit this link. To read future articles in this series, please follow me on on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: I wanted to begin with the start of your career as an author. Could you talk about where your interest in writing began?
Michael Lewis: I was not studying for an occupation. Instead, I just fell in love with art history, and I did not know where that was going to take me. I enjoyed art history so much, that once I finished my thesis, which was the first serious piece I had ever written, I wanted to keep doing that. However, my thesis advisor told me, "You do not have much of a future here." He was being kind, but he said that the entire art history profession was collapsing. This was because fewer people were being hired and the people in the tenured jobs were never going to leave, so there were not going to be any jobs. I asked him, "What do you think of the writing and the thesis?" In response, he told me, "Never try to make a living at it." He was great, and the writing was not that good. However, I enjoyed it so much that I decided to try to write on top of everything else I was doing. I worked for an art dealer in New York, I apprenticed with a cabinet maker in New Jersey, and I led teenage girls in tours through Europe. I used my art history education that way for a little less than two years, and then I ended up at the London School of Economics [LSE]. While I was at Princeton, it occurred to me that if I was going to make it in the world, I was going to have to learn economics because it was the language that successful people spoke. With the exception of the science and engineering people, all of the ambitious kids in my class were all in the economics department. Some of what I learned at LSE was relevant, while some was not, but overall it was a good tool for thinking.
One of the more fun activities I had [at LSE] was playing on the basketball team as the point guard. The league was a bunch of Americans playing against Brits, and we traveled all over Europe playing semi-professional and college teams. Moreover, I loved my tutor Mervyn King, who ended up being governor of the Bank of England. Overall, I learned a great deal, and a job on Wall Street fell in my lap. However, I was writing or trying to write from the moment I left Princeton. I submitted magazine pieces, and while I did not get accepted, I kept doing it because I enjoyed it.
High: If your thesis advisor told you not to pursue this, why weren't you discouraged?
Lewis: Part of it was because he was not a professional writer. Further, I wrote letters to my friends and parents, and people circulated them. I heard this was happening because I was told that everyone was reading my letters, which gave me a sense that I could entertain and be interesting on the page. The thesis advisor did say, "This is great, and it is the best thesis in your department." However, he told me that I was not going to get the thesis prize because they did not believe that I had an academic career ahead of me. Their logic was that it would be a waste to give it to me, so they gave it to somebody else. Despite this, he thought that I could think. When you are 22 years old, you are not realistic. Instead, you take risks, and even when my magazine pieces were being rejected, I thought, "Wow, an actual editor read this." I would hear phrases such as, "The inflight magazine for Delta Airlines is not an appropriate place for a piece about homeless people in New York City, but it is well written and interesting." I got some encouragement, and whatever encouragement I got took me a long way. Finally, some of my work started to get published while I was at LSE. By the time I got to Salomon Brothers, I had some clips from The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I bailed to become a writer.
High: Going into Salomon Brothers, did you view the opportunity as a potential source of content?
Lewis: Totally! In fact, I proposed a piece on the absurdity of Salomon Brothers hiring David Stockman for millions of dollars a year. David did not know anything about Wall Street because he was a Washington guy. Michael Kinsley at The New Republic told me that he could not let me write the piece because while it was good, I would lose my job. I decided not to write it, but I was already thinking about it.
I have always been the type of writer who responds to what is immediately around me. Because of this, if I was dropped into Salomon Brothers, obviously I was going to write about Salomon Brothers. Until about six months before I left the company, it did not occur to me that there was a book idea that would arise from my experience at the company. In fact, the proposal that I wrote for Liar's Poker is far different than the book itself. The proposal was not a memoir and I was not in it. Instead, it was a history of Wall Street that ended with what was happening at the time and how it happened. However, as I started to write it, I decided to write my story and see how it went, and I ended up writing a different story than the proposal I had sold. I told my editor that I had something a little different, and I asked him to look at my new work and tell me to either keep going or go back. In response, he said, "Just keep going because this is significantly better."
High: Mark Twain said, “Write what you know.” You followed that advice.
Lewis: It just seemed as if I was the world's authority on my experience. If you were going to place a 24-year-old writer on Wall Street in 1986, where would you put him to come out with the story of the age? There are two places. One is to put him right next to Michael Milken [at Drexel Burnham Lambert] to watch what happened with junk bonds. The other place is in Salomon Brothers, specifically with the John Meriwether group. I was in the sales arm, so I was right in the middle of the firm. In almost no time, I was having conversations with the vice chairman of the firm and other big names. This worked to my advantage because being in the right place in the firm allowed me to be taken seriously. I was extremely lucky, and the material was great.
High: Were you worried about the reaction from your former employer?
Lewis: When it came out, I walked down the streets of Manhattan and looked to the tops of buildings to see if there were snipers because the senior people were extremely unhappy. However, I was not worried about the mob coming for me because the people on the trading floor thought it was funny. When I left the firm, I had told them what I was doing, but the company did not know exactly what I was going to write. I told them I was writing about Wall Street, and they did not care. They told me, "We are going to try to save you here. We think it is a shame that you are going to ruin your career by doing this when you can make a great deal of money here." At the time, Salomon Brothers was broken. There were factions of it inside that were hostile to the guy running it, and there were factions of it outside that had moved on. People felt betrayed by the leadership, so loyalty was not part of the deal. Because of this, it did not occur to me to think about how they would respond until after I was done with it. However, when I left the firm and it blew up, I thought I was in trouble because I was not expecting that reaction.
High: It is amazing to think about all the books that you have written about the financial markets, which include Liar's Poker, Panic, The Big Short, Boomerang, and Flash Boys.
Lewis: In some ways, Moneyball was about the financial markets too. Moneyball looks at baseball through the lens of someone who has been in the financial markets.
High: Right,. You have a gift for explaining remarkably esoteric topics and making them readable and interesting to people who are not experts in financial markets. What is your process?
Lewis: If it is a gift, the gift is not being afraid to seem a little ignorant and being able to remember how it feels to not know the topics I discuss. Many times, I do not know anything when I walk in. For example, The Wall Street that I came back to for The Big Short was significantly different than the Wall Street I had left. People were willing to talk to me because they figured I would be able to understand the topics eventually, but in the beginning, people were explaining it to me as if I was an idiot. I was never in so deep when I spoke the lingo, which certainly helped. Sometimes, I realize that I do not understand something that I am writing, which forces me into a different headspace. I have to explain it to myself, which allows me to explain it to the reader as well.
High: One of the themes across some of your books is the complexity and issues with the financial markets. You have another series of books that are personal. Coach was about your baseball coach, and you grew up with Sean Tuohy, one of the main characters from The Blind Side.
Lewis: In fact, Sean has a line in Coach. We were in seventh grade, and we were practicing on a basketball court next to the eighth graders. We had our own coach, while Coach Fitz coached the eighth graders. We looked over to the eighth graders, who were lying on the court, and Sean said to me, "Please God, do not let me get to the eighth grade, I do not ever want to have to do that." Sean ended up being the point guard for the high school basketball team, which Coach Fitz was the coach for, and they won two state championships together. There is a wonderful picture of Sean in Coach Fitz’s arms after they won the second one. You are right, The Blind Side ended up being personal for that reason.
High: Another one of your personal books is Home Game, about the early days of fatherhood. What drew you to some of this content that came from your personal life?
Lewis: In each case, there was something in the experience that was rich and exploitable for literary purposes. With Home Game, I was writing about the early part of parenthood. At the time, I was clearly not experiencing the emotions you were supposed to experience as a parent, which was annoying my wife. Likewise, it was mildly disturbing to me, and it was a bit odd. I knew that what I was feeling was different from what people expect, so I saw it as an opportunity to describe how I felt. I believed that many other people felt the same way, but nobody wanted to say it.
Each kid has a book, and with each kid, I was rushing to the deadline before they were born. I knew that once they were born, I was done for about six months. Quinn was born in 1999, which was when The New New Thing came out, Dixie was born in 2002, which was Moneyball, and Walker was born in 2006, which was The Blind Side. In each of the personal stories, I felt that even if it was just me who felt a certain way, I felt strongly about the topic. I sensed that if I got that idea on paper, there would be many others who felt the same way. The Coach was one of these books. It was about a man who changed my life who was going to be fired from the school because the parents of the current players were not letting him change their kid's lives in the same positive way. That was just bizarre to me. The process is so messy that no business school or writing program would teach it. I just wander, and I feel as if I am a wanderer in the world. I try to encounter experiences in print, on the internet, at dinner parties, and at conferences. I try to put myself in situations where I talk to people about many different aspects. When I find something that I am immensely interested in, I look to write something about it and see where it goes. Everything I have written started small, and the books simply mushroomed. Moneyball started with just me casually talking to a New York Times magazine editor about salary discrepancies on the field. I was curious if I would find class resentment if I could get myself into the Oakland Athletics clubhouse. Specifically, I wanted to know if the players who were getting paid $300,000 resented those who were getting paid $8 million.
I have been watching college basketball lately, and there is a discrepancy on the court between the coaches who have five future NBA players who are one and done and the coaches who have four-year starters that play more as a team. While most of those guys will not have a career playing basketball, they can sometimes beat the other guys. The strategies that are involved in either case truly interest me. That is a magazine piece, and I may go find one coach of one type and one coach of another to see how they play that hand.
When I get into a story, I will find that a character is truly interesting, and the situation is bigger than I expected. From there, I call a magazine or whoever is funding me for the R&D and say, "This is going to be small,” or I will say, “You are going to have to wait because it is going to be a book."
As of right now, I do not have a book project. However, I have a bunch of small folders to hold interesting ideas that I jot down at the moment and forget about. Every few months, I go through that pile, and it will be all new for me. For example, I have a folder about teaching kids about money, and I am toying with the idea of writing about teaching my kids about money. This is because my kids do not know anything about money. Every now and then, I come across an article or even a receipt from a child that I view as material for that idea. I know that I will need those materials if I ever choose to pursue that idea, so I toss it in the folder. Each one of these folders has material that has accumulated over time, and sometimes I end up chasing the idea. For example, writing about Kahneman and Tversky in The Undoing Project was in a folder for approximately six years. Over time, the folder continued to grow, and it eventually turned into a book.
I have a trunk full of material for a New Orleans memoir down in the basement. One day, I may decide to pull that out, and something may spark my interest in that. There is a great deal of kindling here, and it is simply a question of where the fire comes from. You truly have to care about an idea because if you do not, the story is not going to be any good. I chose to not pursue many of the ideas because I view it is inert material, whether that be because someone else did it well or because I simply lost interest.
Out of the 40 folders, only one or two may happen, but I do not want to forget about them. If something catches my interest, I want to at least note that and put it away.
High: An author with less of a reputation may be forced into a swim lane, but your books are completely different. How were you able to get to the point of writing about whatever you wished?
Lewis: People have tried to explain all of my books, but if you write enough, you cannot do that. My books are vastly different and trying to compare them is similar to trying to explain all your kids. If you have 15 kids, they are going to be different enough that there is no theory to explain all of them. There are several lucky points in my life that led to the right to write about whatever I choose.
- The first book I wrote, Liar's Poker, was about a subject I am not inherently passionate about. I became passionate about it because I was in that world, but I do not and did not care about money. Because of this experience, I knew that I could take material that was not deep inside me and turn it into something that truly worked. I felt that if I could pull that off, I could pull anything off and write about whatever I wanted. That said, nobody else felt that way, and I was told I was exclusively a business writer for several years;
- The New Republic let me loose in all sorts of directions from 1990 to 1996. I had success with magazine pieces that covered immensely different topics than anything I had ever written before. I kept a journal as I roamed around the 1996 presidential campaign, which resulted in a book [Trail Fever] that went on to be a giant commercial success. From there, I became known as someone who wrote about politics and money;
- The idea that I had to confine myself to such a category ended when Moneyball was published. From that point on, nobody has asked me, "Is this material a book for you?”
- My conversations with my editor were critical for me in gaining the confidence to write The Undoing Project. I felt as if I was over my skis and that I was the B student. I believed that there were smarter people in the field that could write about it, but my editor simply said, "No. There are many reasons that you can do this. If you care that much about it, go for it. It is about the characters, and you have written about similar ones before." It has gotten to the point where I am the most likely person to break away from new material, rather than someone else telling me not to, because I believe that I might not be suited to do that. Typically, my editor will take my interest in such subjects and say, "Just do it."
High: Could you talk about your source of insecurity in writing The Undoing Project?
Lewis: The source of insecurity I had with the story was not the fact that they were Jewish while I was a goy. In fact, I was raised the same as a Jewish person in some ways. From age five to 18, I went to the Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, which started as a manual training center for Jewish orphans. 75 percent of my class was Jewish until the sixth grade and half of my class was from then on. I grew up in a Jewish environment, so Judaism never felt alien to me. The problem was they were so smart, so I felt I was in the presence of people whose minds were capable of doing what mine was not.
I was uncomfortable, and because of the way my insecurity expressed itself, it took me longer than any other book to just go for it. I gathered material for eight years, and I went back and forth on whether I wanted to do it or not. At one point, Danny Kahneman was convinced that it was never going to happen. I spent so much time with it that eventually, I realized that I knew enough about the topic. I believed that if I did not write it, nobody would. This was because one of the protagonists [Amos Tversky] was already dead, and Danny was almost 85 years old. He let me in, so I was in a privileged position.
High: You talk about how the ghost of Tversky haunted you because you believed he would not have approved of this.
Lewis: His family disagrees with me a bit on this, but what he would have disapproved of was the exercise generally. I believe he would have said, "Michael, if anybody is going to do it, I will let you do it. However, I just do not want to do this because I do not believe anything good will come of it." Danny thought that a bit too, and my pitch to him was, "You might be right, but somebody is going to do it. In fact, it may be after you are dead, and it could be much worse." He bought that argument, which I believe is why he let me poke around in what they did not want me poking around in. In some ways, I believe Danny was a little upset with me because the whole enterprise forced him to relive a part of his life he had just assumed not.
High: You first were exposed to the work of Tversky and Kahneman through criticism you received about Moneyball. Can you explain the connection?
Lewis: The genuine hostility to Moneyball came from inside baseball from people who were afraid they were going to lose their jobs. In fact, they did lose their jobs because the analytics revolution was happening, and these people were not equipped to contribute to that revolution. That type of criticism I could dismiss because it was self-interested and wrong.
The criticism I could not dismiss was delivered much more gently, sweetly, and in a loving shell. Richard Thaler, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and Cass Sunstein wrote a review about the book. In the review, they expressed how much they enjoyed the book, but they said the author did not seem to understand it. They felt as if it was essentially a case study from the work of Kahneman and Tversky. Kahneman won his Nobel Prize the year I was writing Moneyball, which I had not paid attention to. I knew that behavioral economics had an influence on the A's front office, but I never bothered to ask where behavioral economics came from. I never drilled down to ask, "What is going on in the minds of the old scouts.” If I have any trace of guilt about how I wrote Moneyball, it is that it could have left the reader with the impression that baseball people are stupid. Kahneman and Tversky show that everybody makes these mistakes because it is simply the way people are wired. It is not just stupid people who make mistakes. I was fond of the baseball scouts personally, and I could have resolved their mistakes in a way that left them less exposed to the charge of stupidity. This would have been a more interesting story because it would not just be about scouts making mistakes. Moreover, I did not classify the mistakes as rigorously as I could have if I had known the work of Kahneman and Tversky because they had already done so.
This realization is what got me interested in Kahneman and Tversky in the first place. Had this not happened, I never would have written anything about them, certainly not a book.
I dipped into their work with a feeling of guilt because I had missed it. I went from dipping into their work to mentioning it over drinks with Dacher Keltner, who is a psychologist and one of my best friends. I told him that I was looking into some people in his field that are interesting. In response, he said, “I was Amos Tversky's teaching assistant, and Danny lives up the hill. You need to get to know these people."
I met with Danny, and the conversation was social. I thought everything that he said was so interesting that I just kept coming back. I did not know where it was going to go until I realized I had walked into a great relationship. He was writing the entire time but was throwing his work away. He told me three times that he was done and writing a book would destroy his reputation. In order for me to write the book, Danny had to be talked out of throwing it all away, which is the way he is oriented. He is looking for what is wrong with everything he does, but at the same time, he is alive to the proposition that no matter what is wrong with what someone else says, there may be something right in it. He is generous with other people and the nonsense that comes out of their mouths, but extremely ungenerous with his own thoughts and words. This is a funny combination because most people are the opposite, and they are happy with that arrangement because it leaves them and their status intact. Danny has a curious source of status where he believes that this way of thinking is a smarter way to go through the world.
Further, he is a little insecure, he wants to please people, and he is doubtful about himself. He has amped that up into a way of being, which is similar to an intellectual superpower. His graduate students, who are now famous professors, speak about him as if he has superpowers. Because I do not have that superpower, I would come away with the glow of having been in his presence whenever I saw him. Gradually, I would reduce what was coming out of his brain so it would fit into mine. In reducing it, I made it something less, and that feeling made me feel extremely insecure about writing the story. I did not feel as if I could get all of the glow from that planet into my literary vessel. With that said, I wanted to get his ideas down and get them across to people who would not totally understand [Kahneman’s book] Thinking Fast and Slow. Several years later, his book is still on the bestseller list, which is crazy because it almost did not happen.
I usually have a dead feeling toward books when they are done, and I never read them again. I have no interest in the material because I have digested it and am done with it. However, I reread this one when I was done with it, and I was so pleased with it in a way that is unseemly. I truly loved the story.
I thought that when you put books out into the world, similar to kids, what happens to them is unfair both ways. For example, they typically run across an orderly reviewer in a prominent place who should not be reviewing the book and that is that. There is good and bad with each book that should not happen because they have their fate in the world. For example, The Blind Side was a story that was extremely disappointing until it came out as a movie. Before it came out, I felt that it was the book that the world would not appreciate as much as it should. With this in mind, I feel that most of my books have done better than they should have.
High: Is The Undoing Project your favorite of your books?
Lewis: No. Instead, this book is similar to having a kid who is differently abled. This book can truly sing some notes that the other books cannot sing, but people do not hear the notes. For some reason, although the book did quite well, it did not get to the audience I thought it was going to get. Some kids come back from school with straight A’s, but you realize that just because they do so, does not mean they are all that smart. On the flip side, some kids go to school and get three A's and two F’s, yet they will enlighten your mind when you talk to them. In this case, the guys and the material lit up my mind. It is an odd case, yet as I said, it is the one case that I was willing to be pleased again by.
High: This is the longest of your books, correct?
Lewis: It is likely the longest. When I tell the publisher how many words I am going to deliver them, I am typically right on. This book kept expanding, and it was a different type of experience because I did not have complete control of the material. Part of this was because there were some structural flaws to it that I could never completely figure out how to solve. The biggest structural flaw was that I wanted to kick out from Danny and Amos to explore other areas so I could show their effects on the world. However, I did not want to do this because it meant getting rid of what I wanted to have in the book. While I do not have a favorite book, this was certainly the most difficult. That combined with the fact that I spent six years thinking I could not do it may have been why I was so pleased with it.
High: How has your proximity to the subjects of your books helped you?
Lewis: The San Francisco Bay Area is an extraordinary place. When my wife and I were deciding where to settle down, we wanted to find a place where I would not have to be on an airplane all the time for book material. Without knowing what that material was going to be, we knew the only options were here or New York, and we did not want to live in New York. This place has generated so much for me, some of which is not obvious. Two-thirds of The Big Short was here, Michael Burry was in San Jose, and the guys at Cornwall Capital were down in a garage in Berkeley. Moneyball was here, The New New Thing was here, and while the core story of The Blind Side was in Memphis, the intellectual story about what had happened in football was about Bill Walsh and the San Francisco 49ers front office. In fact, the 49ers front office was the analytics leader at the time, and they helped me a great deal. As I previously mentioned, Danny was in the area for The Undoing Project, Amos' archives were at Stanford, and I can walk to the houses of two of the three experts on who Danny and Amos were.
High: Part of what I found extraordinary about Moneyball is the meta story. You have this general manager, Billy Beane, who was a first-round pick. He was a five-tool prospect who looked like a baseball star, but he did not have a successful major league career. Because of his past, he wanted to build a system so he did not make the same mistake the New York Mets made when they drafted him. Can you talk about that meta story?
Lewis: I did not fully discover that story because he was great at downplaying how traumatized he was by not having gone to Stanford. Billy truly struggled in baseball, so there was a nature of regret the entire time. Billy is smart, and he sensed that he was not going to be an educated person. To make matters worse, at the time, John Elway was a quarterback at Stanford, and they had flagged Billy as the guy to replace him. He would have been the quarterback at Stanford, and while I believe he was likely more suited to play free safety, he might have had a successful NFL career. Because of this, he still has this alternative life that he thinks about that was screwed up by the misevaluations that baseball put on prospects. Baseball's inability to see that he was not a superstar baseball player significantly screwed up his life, and in the book, he is seeking revenge by turning that entire system on its head. With that said, it took a while to get to that story, and it was the other people in the front office who suggested asking him about it. While it took some time to get him to talk about it, it did make the story more interesting. When you get breaks similar to that on a story, it makes you think, "There is a God." That type of material is so good because it enriches the story, and in this case, it helped make it a movie. Brad Pitt, who played Billy in the movie, likely read the story and felt that he saw a bit of himself in it. He knows that he is extremely good looking, which causes him to get the extremely good-looking guy roles. However, he is truly a character actor, rather than someone to carry the picture as the handsome guy. While this is not a tragedy in his case, I believe he feels misunderstood by the system and sensed the same from the book. I feel that many people sense that and feel as if the world does not value them properly, which they are right about.
High: How did Moneyball being published as a movie change things for you?
Lewis: The movies changed my career. Having the movie industry interested in what I write has been a huge benefit for me. When you sell so many books, you are able to sell to an audience that typically does not grab for a book. All of a sudden, I had an industry that is about telling popular stories that was looking at everything I did as a possible movie. This creates a certain energy, and sometimes, someone will buy a story simply because I have written about it. While they cannot turn it into a movie all the time, it validates the material in some way in the publisher's and reader’s minds.
High: You stay in touch with all of your subjects, and your book changed the way in which sports was organized. Is there any regret on Billy Beane’s part that your book made his methods accessible?
Lewis: He was not thinking that way because he did not know what I was doing until he read the book. While I spent a great deal of time with him, I was wandering all around Major League Baseball. I went to the Texas Rangers, the Toronto Blue Jays, and the Boston Red Sox, and he saw that. He did not know what my story was or that I was only going to those places to make sure that they were as different from the A's as I thought they were. If he had known what I was doing, he likely would not have cared because it was not a big deal and the time was right. The Red Sox were about to do the same because they had seen what I saw. In particular, [Red Sox Owner] John Henry was a Wall Street guy, and he knew exactly what they were doing. He was going to make a noisy display by going in the same direction with three times as much money. He tried to hire Billy to run his team, and while Billy took the job for a day, he then backed out. Had I not written the book, I believe the Red Sox would have won the World Series with an even greater intellectual advantage because no one would have read the book. Instead of Oakland, they would have gotten all the credit for the analytics revolution. In a funny way, coming out with the book preserved the real story.
Billy would likely say that the book sped this up a bit. The revolution was going to happen regardless, but instead of happening in seven years, it happened in four. He knew that they were always going to be trampled by the wave of geeks that came into the game. Because of this, he was not upset with it. In fact, he originally told me that nobody in baseball was going to read my book. He was wrong because they all read it, and they all reacted. If you look around the league, Jeff Luhnow was hired by the St. Louis Cardinals, Farhan Zaidi by the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Andrew Friedman by the Tampa Bay Rays. The owners understood this because the owners were a new type of rich guy. These owners came from Wall Street or tech money, so they were not afraid of data. In fact, the data made it more fun for them. Sometimes, their fortunes were built by exploiting inefficiencies and by using data better. Being able to bring that to their team was a bonus they did not expect to have coming in. They thought they would be the awkward people in the room with all these baseball guys talking about stuff they did not truly understand. Instead, they were able to guide the discussion, which was appealing to the owners.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book is Implementing World Class IT Strategy. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Technovation podcast series. He speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
