Unencumbered By Experience
Peter Merholz: “As DePodesta points out, he had an advantage over people immersed in baseball because he knew "absolutely nothing" about it. He could approach baseball with a fresh pair of eyes, and see that the way it was valued didn't really make sense.”
After a seminar on technical writing and how it related to marketing (and vice versa), I approached one of the speakers, and my only goal was to introduce myself as the administrator of Vancouver Webloggers, to put a face to the site and also since I had asked him, during question time, about how weblogs could be used in helping communicate between and among the technical writing and the marketing department. He wondered what drew me to the seminar, and my response was that it was just to see whether technical writing was a career worth pursuing. After that, I mumbled something about being "unencumbered by experience", since in the formal sense of the word experience, it's true. (I've done technical writing, if that's what you can call it, on my computer technology weblog, so at least I have evidence of knowledge and writing ability; I leave it up to the reader to decide whether that evidence is good evidence.) As Peter notes, Paul DePodesta, once the assistant general manager of the Oakland athletics, was also says he knew "absolutely nothing". While it's true that he was going in without being a baseball insider, he still had the experience of college, and had to convince people that the things he did while in college related to the positions he applied for. That's why I've been busying myself with putting some of my college papers online, because there are a few that I'm really proud of, and they can add to an already existing writing portfolio, which at the moment consists of weblogs.
Using the phrase "unencumbered by experience" was more an attempt to show that wasn't full of myself and that I have a sense of humour about something that people usually whine about. The guy I talked to told me I should send him my resume, which actually surprised me a little, since that wasn't my goal when I went up to talk to him. I'm all about the weak ties these days, and every bit helps. When I read Betsy Devine's tips for getting hired by an Alpha, I initially thought she was saying "you must be an Alpha in order to get hired by an Alpha". But getting hired by an Alpha means (among other things, surely) not merely making a good first impression but making good first impressions to as many people as possible and then following up on them. The people who are not only smart but have an ability to learn something quickly—who may or may not be unencumbered by experience—seem to be prized over the ones who are experienced in something but can't learn or adapt to a new situation. (I happen think that while there's truth to that, a lot of it is hype, and having experience matters a great deal more that people say it does.)
DePodesta did well by not only learning the requirements for a new position very quickly but also by figuring out that the way things were being done were, while on the surface, successful, had many problems in the system that needed attention. He joined the A's because he saw it as a startup as compared to the Indians, and therefore the A's organization had a better chance of changing direction, since if they had another losing season, at least he wouldn't be criticized for it happening after the type of success that the Indians were having. But saying that DePodesta knew "absolutely nothing", or that he was unencumbered by experience would be an exaggeration. He's "merely" a very smart guy who not only knows how to learn fast, but knows where the system can be improved to benefit the organization he's working for. And how much more can you ask these days?
