We finally saw Moneyball tonight. Loved it. For anyone who doesn't know anything about the plot, the movie is based on the story of a baseball general manager for the Oakland A's who, struggling with a small budget, decided to forego the traditional way of building a team based on a few all-stars and other unimportant player qualities, and instead took a statistical approach.
Without giving too much away, at one point he talks to a team owner who makes a bit of a speech. He explains that any time someone radically changes something, whether in business, government or anything else, and finds success in it, the establishment will cling to the old way of doing things and fight it every step of the way. Eventually, they become dinosaurs, but only after a significant struggle.
I can't even tell you how much that resonates with me, though those close to me can easily understand why. I've seen that story play out in nearly every job I've ever had, starting with the first real gig I had. In three years, I was unable to shake people loose of their legacy, and after three years, I gave up and moved on.
The 26-year-old me was obviously not as mature, and certainly didn't have the experience to bring the kind of change necessary for long-term success. And if I'm being honest, the opportunity to double my salary sure as hell didn't hurt either. But the thing that strikes me about every place that I've been, save for maybe my first position at Microsoft, is that there has been an obvious opportunity to transform something suboptimal into something great. For a lot of different reasons, I've never been able to fully embrace or act on those opportunities.
There are a great many things that motivate me in my professional life, and the one I most often talk about is the desire to create things. I suspect that's a desire that will stick with me for life. But I've also come to realize that the second desire is likely to be the key force in the transformation of what I work on. True to my coaching experience, I'm not looking for high praise or recognition, and I don't want to order people to do this or that. What I want is to guide people and processes toward that better thing, to dispense with the old, less effective thing, and replace it with something better.
I don't know how exactly I'll reach that goal. I don't know if it will be in my current gig, a future job, or even on my own doing something I haven't thought of yet. I guess I'm just reaching this awareness now. Awareness itself goes a long way toward transformation.
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