Insights and learning can occur at any time, even when you are playing. This week hundreds of thousands of Fantasy Football players are going through the draft process, where each player gets to select NFL players that will be on his or her fantasy team. You can choose from ANY NFL player. Since there are about one gazillion NFL players, most fantasy team owners spend time previous to their league’ draft to whittle down all the players to the ones they want to try to get in the draft.My son and I have a team in a great league, and we have lots of fun evaluating all the NFL players, and then selecting which ones we want to draft for our team. This year, after a couple planning sessions, we have reduced the number of desirable players to a total of 194 players. Once we selected this Meta-level total number eligible, to manage the data and to make a useful tool to keep track on draft night, we needed to divide the 194 into eight position categories ( Quarterback, Running Back, etc.) Within each of those eight categories, we then needed to be able to rank the players, from best to worst, to help guide our draft picks. So…We had 194 data elements that needed to be grouped and stack-ranked in eight categories.
In years past, we would use Microsoft Office software to produce the draft list. Sometimes, manually horsing the data elements into Word tables, and sometimes using Excel spreadsheet lists. Either way, once we were done, and the table or the spreadsheet was completed, it became what I will call static data. The lists could be modified, but a change created a new version of the list. Microsoft Office products have been ubiquitous on the corporate scene for almost ten years. In some companies, it became customary for each manager/executive -level person to have a Powerpoint presentation of what they were doing, what projects, etc, available on the desktop or laptop, to be used whenever needed to explain oneself, or one’s group. We also used Powerpoint and Excel for sales presentations…Here’s a scenario that many of us experienced at one time or another:
You’re on the way to the airport, accompanied by members of your team, ready to travel to a potential new customer . Your laptop is loaded with what you think is latest version of the presentation. In conversation with the team members, it comes to light that the meeting last night continued for a couple hours after you left, and the numbers in the presentation have been modified. So much for the 12 nicely-bound copies you have in your briefcase—they are dead meat—and so are you, unless you can produce some copies of the new version. Here’s another common scenario: You’re on the phone with the prospect, trying to negotiate a nice new deal. You drill down on some of the numbers, giving some reductions that you hope will close the deal. The problem is—The prospect is looking at a previous version of the document, which had been emailed to him two days before. People looking at different versions of data and documents was common. Contrast these uncomfortable, low productivity scenarios with how we were able to deal with our muli-category, 194 data element fantasy football list…We used Google drive’s spreadsheet application, and we both accessed the speadsheet at the same time. We discussed a number of changes to the stack-rank. The data was viable, not static. There is only one version of the data–the correct one, and now we can enjoy the fun of competing with other players to draft great players. The ease of the process we used made me think about what’s going on in the technology industry. As we have discussed in this space previously, the machine that revolutionized the computer industry in the early 80s–the desktop PC, (and its laptop version), has essentially died as a viable product. Companies that tied their strategy to the PC are now beginning to disintegrate. Micosoft’s CEO and former henchman for Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, is resigning. They are seeking to transform the company into a “devices and services” company. They used to be, of course, the world’s leading PC software provider. They missed the transition to mobile devices, and they missed the new Software As A Service (SaaS) model They stayed with static-data applications sold for license fees; and they never learned how to sell to endusers, they only knew how to muscle PC manfactuers and distributors into selling their operating system bundled with the machine.