THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Jeff Ma

When Pro-Trade was rolling out, around 2004 I think, Jeff reached out to me for an advisory role.  We had a pleasant conversation, but we never did anything.  He was trying to do something big with WPA or RE24.  I think I had MGL talk to him too.  Which worked out fine, because Gabriel did actually do some work at Pro-Trade, and that’s how I became a huge fan of Gabe (probably his biggest fan I’d say).  Anyway, that’s my brush with fame as it concerns Jeff.

Anyway, Will had a fantastic interview with Jeff.  I’ll clip just a few of the good ones, but the whole thing is a must-read:

And what he found was that as long as he is pretty approachable on how he does things that people are accepting of his message because at the end of the day, all people want to do is win and if you give them a better opportunity to do that, they will be very accepting of it. I think that’s the same thing in business, if you give them a way to help them make more money and you can be demonstrable about it then I think they are always going to be open to it, regardless of what it is.

Right.  It works perfectly well in corporate america.  The worst person in your office is the micro-manager, the one person who has to do and know every little thing.  The people you enjoy dealing with are the experts in their discipline, who give you insight and tools when YOU need them.  Everyone is basically a support system for everyone else.  That’s who you do it in the real world, and that’s how you do it in the front office.

When we got through this conversation, at the end he said, Jeff it was the wrong decision. I asked, “How do we know that?” He said we know it for sure because it didn’t work. And to me that’s crazy, and I said, “Well Bill just because it had a bad outcome…” and this is something I focus on in the book: bad outcomes don’t necessarily mean bad decision, I said to him, “Bill, if I’m playing blackjack and I have 19 and the dealer has a seven up and for some reason I decide that I want to hit the 19 and I happen to get a two to hit the 21, was that a good decision? There’s no way that was a good decision!”

Exactly.  You get the process down right, and then you roll the dice.  The results of the dice are irrelevant to your process.

When we got really far down the road with DirecTV, I had a call with their VP of sales and their VP of sales was like, “Ya know what, we don’t care about this because we might able to sell it for an extra $100,000, but it’s just not interesting to us.” And I remember being on the phone, I was at Logan Airport (in Boston), and I’m basically yelling at this guy because I’ve never been so frustrated in my life. I remember saying to him, “Even though your consumer thinks it’s really compelling content, you don’t care because you can’t make enough money off of it to make it worth your effort?” And he said, “Exactly.”

Boy did I get a good laugh at that.