Meet the New Boss...

Over at Baseball Prospectus, Megan Rowley has an interesting—if sobering and somewhat depressing—look at the (lack of) diversity in baseball hiring.  As Rowley explains, the Moneyball revolution has opened the door to a bunch of mostly white, mostly male, mostly Ivy League-educated sabermetric types…who have promptly turned around and closed the door behind them, creating a workforce almost as monolithic as the one described in Michael Lewis’s 2003 classic.  She notes that this 

is pretty dispiriting coming from a crowd that itself fought so long for relevance in front offices across the league. This isn’t to suggest that there aren't women and people of color who are statheads, any more than it would be reasonable to suggest that all former players are white. But after a decade of painful progress to advance women and minorities to positions of authority, a generation of Ivy Leaguers are falling into the exact same traps: showing a predilection for “Clubability,” as Michael Lewis called it, over something new, something innovative, or even something marginally uncomfortable. They hire people like them. Instead of the Platonic ideal of a baseball organization, one predicated on the ability to stare unflinchingly at our heroes and value underutilized skills, what we get is a whole bunch of history repeating from the very people who were supposed to remind us that clubability is not necessarily indicative of future performance.

Rowley is right, and when we’re at the point where hiring Dusty Baker as a manager is necessary to achieve some sort of social good beyond keeping orthopedic surgeons employed, you know something has to change.

But this is not a baseball-only problem, and it behooves all of us who consider ourselves “reformers” in any area of life to think long and hard about whether we are really creating more-inclusive institutions better able to address modern realities—or simply replicating ourselves and creating openings for the ideas and people we like to flourish.

Take education.  One of the most startling realizations for me when I interned for the D.C. Public Schools during Michelle Rhee’s chancellorship in 2009 was just how homogeneous the organization had become.  This wasn’t an accident: our orientation was held in a room with inspirational Rhee quotes plastered on the wall.  Almost every intern hailed from an elite (usually private) college or graduate school.  When the fourth or fifth representative of the Kennedy School got up to introduce himself, he joked that we had hit a “Harvard patch” in the introductions. 

Rhee succeeded in bringing a lot of smart, committed people to DCPS, an organization that probably wasn’t doing a whole lot of recruiting at Kennedy before she arrived.  And, contrary to what many believe, this wasn’t part of some sort of sinister plot to privatize education in Washington.  Rhee genuinely believed that if she surrounded herself with smart, driven, educated people with little to no experience within the system—people, in other words, like her—that she could change things for the better.

The problem is that no one knows everything.  Everyone has blind spots.  And when you hire a bunch of people who have similar life experiences and similar worldviews, they are likely to have a lot of the same blind spots as well.

So Rhee bungled school closings.  And she said dumb stuff about teachers.  And she did a bunch of puff pieces for national news outlets, while ignoring and freezing out local reporters.  And, in the end, like all true believers, she found herself excusing and justifying behavior that could not be excused or justified.  Because if you’re right—and if everyone around you is always telling you you’re right—you probably don’t spend much time thinking about whether you might be wrong. 

Diversity isn’t about doing things differently than the status quo, and it isn’t about making sure the firm holiday card looks right.  It’s about making sure that your organization makes the best decisions it can by taking account of the widest range of perspectives possible. 

Or, to put it differently: If you still think that putting a bunch of smart guys in a room and asking them to solve a problem is a good idea, there’s a credit default swap in Brooklyn I’d like to talk to you about.