Category: Sports

Day 1 of our annual conference is over! It was a huge success: the exhibitor companies were ecstatic about the quality of the attendees they got to meet, while the attendees really enjoyed the 5-speaker slate I lined up for presentations. And I was ecstatic because the day’s final speaker, the FDA guy who hadn’t returned an e-mail from me for six months, showed up and hit a home run.

(To be fair, he did e-mail yesterday at noon to tell me that he’d be driving up from Maryland today. After six months of radio silence.)

I sat in on the first conference session, a keynote address from Pfizer, but after 5 minutes, I had to get up and leave. I headed upstairs from the conference ballroom to our registration area and checked on all our staffers, who were doing a great job of handing out attendee and exhibitor badges and conference bags. (It’s a lot of work, with a ton of people showing up at once. They do an awesome job.) I headed to the exhibit hall, which was filled with people building their tabletop displays and setting up their promotional material.

And I kept thinking, “I really should go downstairs and listen to the sessions.” I mean, I recruited all the speakers; I set up their time-slots to develop a good rhythm of topics and speaker-demographics; I coordinated all of their hotel needs; I collected their presentations and edited them (mainly for font issues on our laptop). But I just couldn’t sit down in the conference hall.

Fortunately, I was able to identify what I had become. And because it’s me, I was able to tie it to . . . yet another book in my life.

A few years ago, I read Moneyball, Michael Lewis’ entertaining book about the practices of Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s. Beane had caused a stir in baseball by focusing on certain player statistics that were valuable — in terms of contributing to wins — but undervalued by other teams. By snapping up players who excelled in these more esoteric areas, Beane was able to build a playoff contender on the cheap.

It’s a really wonderful book, following the A’s over the course of a season while exploring the history of sabermetricians — the “stat geeks” of baseball — and how their obsessive pursuit of metrics for baseball performance led to a new way of seeing the game.

The part of the book that came to mind while I was walking through the exhibit hall was when the playoffs began. Even though he worked incredibly hard to put together an A’s team capable of battling a Yankees team of nearly triple the payroll, it turned out that Billy Beane wouldn’t watch Oakland’s playoff games. He got in a car, turned off the radio, and drove around.

Why wouldn’t he watch? I’m paraphrasing here, but he basically said, “My system is good enough to get them into the playoffs over 162 games. But in a short playoff series, the sample set is too small. Luck plays too big a role.” He couldn’t bear to watch a team that was built statistically to excel in an MLB season, because it was all-too-easy to lose a series on a fluke.

And I thought, “That’s where I am. I’ve put too much energy into getting these speaker lineups together. I’m too burned-out from waking up at 3 a.m. wondering what I’m going to do if the FDA guy doesn’t show up. Now everyone’s here, but it’s up to them. I can’t make any of their presentations better, and I would be too bummed out if one of them had a bad day and left the attendees disappointed.”

So today was the playoffs, and I let my manager (my able moderator Frank Chrzanowski) take over. Like I said, they were all great. I have a couple of pals who will always be honest with me about my speakers’ performances. They raved today.

I actually did go downstairs to the conference to see the second half of the FDA guy’s presentation. He turned out to be witty, acerbic, and entertaining. I thought, “Man, I oughtta get him to write an article for us on this” before remembering, “Oh, that’s right. You swore you were never going to work with him again because he didn’t get back to you for six months.”

So there you go. I’m the Billy Beane of Contracting & Outsourcing 2009.