Decision-taking for Hockey- and other GMs

The main challenge of all GMs, in business and sports, is to find a smart way to take decisions.

We all decide a lot of times in just one day and sometimes it takes up to one minute until we decide about strawberry-marmalade or honey, for some people it takes 15 minutes to decide about a black or white shirt… or shall I take a sweater?… additional five minutes... and what about shoes? ;-) Sometimes it takes days to decide about a consultant-contract or not, weeks to decide about Volvo or BMW or where to go on holiday, what internal process is most suitable to monitor company-expenses and many more, you name it… All this takes a lot of time and energy and now I have a real great message for you: 99% of all our decisions are more or less irrelevant. Strawberry or honey doesn’t make your day successful or happy. Looking at the car decision with a very rational mind we have to agree that there is no significant technical difference between most cars so it absolutely doesn’t care whether you chose a Volvo or a BMW, don’t try to rationalise your according decision because you can’t.

Your company won’t be successful or not successful because of a smart or a not so smart expenses process and I guarantee you that’s it’s not really the place you chose for holiday what makes holiday really nice or not so nice, it’s much more the mood of the people you spend it with. What about dress? Steve Jobs did always wear the same looking sweater, Obama did always wear a dark suit and a white shirt. Why is that? Probably because they were smart enough to unload their brains and their “energy-memory-stick” from unnecessary things because they wanted to have a clear and fresh brain for the real important decisions in life; turning smaller decisions into routines seems to be wise. Take the complex, the important decisions after sleeping on it, next morning when your brain is still fresh. Don’t make important decisions based on temporary emotions and stick to your morals. Don’t take too long time for decisions, your decision-quality doesn’t get better with time. To beat confirmation bias I recommend seeking outside opinions with different perspectives. What we further should consider is: What does this decision means for an immediate effect and – what we tend to forget about – does have this decision a side-effect and a long-term-effect because for every decision we pay a price. Every decision means we become guilty and so decision-takers should first learn not to be afraid to take decisions, not to be afraid to become guilty. In addition we also have to realise that GMs have to take a lot of decisions in not decidable situations, means the info you have on the table doesn’t give a clear picture whether you should decide left or right. Nowadays with all the web possibilities we have tons of information on the table but this doesn’t really help to take decisions, actually the opposite is the case. From all these information we have to weigh in all pros and cons without bias, then think about what is the probability of the outcome – and I mean not just the short-term outcome but also longterm, including side-effects and collateral damage and last but not least we have to weigh in the context. Hopefully it will be a different decision about a security system if you run a Hamburger-Takeaway or a nuclear power station. Last but not least a Mark Twain quote: “Good decisions come from experience, but experience comes from making bad decisions.”

Coming back to an earlier point: Most decisions in our life are not important ones and this means we can save tons of time. But building the bridge for hockey now:

In old days it was quite easy, the goal-scorers and sometimes the goalies were the heroes in hockey and even when defenseman Bobby Orr entered the scene he was admired more for his skating and scoring than for his defense.  In Switzerland hockeyfans were proud to also count the assists in the stats and not only the goals scored as in football. Approx. 20 years ago even in Switzerland we started to talk about some sort of +/- stat and if you did so, you definitely belonged to the “real” hockey-experts…  A couple of years ago the advanced stats started to influence North American hockey-talk and nowadays advanced stats are part of every NHL-back-office. 

With John Chayka we even have a 20something years old GM in the NHL who is basically an advanced stats-nerd and he cultivates his status as somebody who makes us believe that he has more and better hockey-datas than others and therefore knows better about players and the probable players future. Not surprising that other teams also started to hire stat-guys and… once more… this wave finally also arrived in Switzerland and it’s definitely more than a trend: It’s a real, a significant improvement in the player evaluation era. So right now if you want to get respect and admiration from hockeyfans just start to talk about advanced stats and there is a good chance that they will respect you as a hockey-professor ;-)

But now I try to look further down the road, try to guess what lies in the future. I’m pretty sure that the stat-nerds won’t be the hockey-heroes of tomorrow because specific software will deliver us very soon everything we need to know about hockey and a hockey-player. Such products already exist and companies are now in the fine-tuning-phase of developing. Very soon every pro hockey-team on this planet will work with a system that produces all the relevant advanced stats with the help of microchips in jerseys, fixed installed cameras in all arenas and probably also other possibilities. Some hockey-nerds will sooner or later “proof” what kind of advanced stats are more relevant than others, what are the really important stats. We all will know this very soon. We need this data to support the GMs and the coaches in taking decisions and now we start to come closer to what I want to tell you: The future of success lies in smart and efficient decision-taking and this not only in hockey but also in business. Advanced stats support this but first of all we have to be careful and smart with data because even the highly developed stock-exchange algorithms and specific software don’t predict the future of shares really reliable… if at all… - and in the tendency the same will probably be with hockey-analytics-dat. Means the use of data itself will be important – what you read into it - and not so much the data itself.

As a Head HR I do know something about judging, evaluating human beings. I know something about assessments, about psychological and other tests and I do know that the result of predicting the future performance of people doesn’t get better the more data you have and/or the more tests you use, even the opposite is true, at least some studies show this. The only more or less reliable diagnostic-instrument is the trial-period… and nearly nobody really uses it as a serious and tough diagnostic-instrument... So I predict that not the advanced-stat-nerds will be the future heroes on the hot GMs-seats, the future-hero-status will belong to smart decision-takers what brings us now to the question: What is the fair value of a hockey-player? How important is a goal-scorer? What about a constant good CorsiF-player who appears just seldom on the score-sheet? Shall I spend more money for a good defensive d-man or for a good offensive d-man? What’s the value of a so called “character-player”? Actually I notice more often than not that mentioning a good character or off-ice-value means limited skills and skating but I don’t dare to tell bad things about him… ;-).  How much shall I spend for a good goalie? What about a soft player who can’t shoot the puck but produces 1.5 assists per 60m 5on5? Shall I spend more money for a backup-goalie or for a bottom 6 role-player? What about the value of a player who had great advanced stats in one team but pretty bad ones in another? Much more questions than answers.  Even a sharp brain like John Chayka (GM of the Arizona Coyotes) will find himself more often than not in actually “undecidable” situations but he has to decide and also he will remember that every decision has a price-tag. As a player – and as an employee in a company – we always also have to remember that another GM or another boss will judge our value differently. As a boss, as a GM, as a leader we have to know, that leading is always leading in dilemma. Also John Chayka will find out that he won’t be judged by performance but by success and success is performance plus luck. A successful GM or CEO is more often than not just a smart decisions-taker and he is not afraid to decide even if he is pretty unsure and even if he knows that his arguments are not yet on thick ice.

 

So, coming back to the question about the value of hockey-players: I don’t have the answers to find more or less true values for hockey-players, also I don’t know the truth but of course I don’t want to let you go without an opinion: Nowadays it’s trendy to hype reliable defensive d-men, it’s trendy for “hockey-experts” to explain how good this player is without the puck and how a player does all the small little things right what an average fan doesn’t see and so on… and yes, to a certain extent I agree with this. On the other hand I still see that the best paid players – not only in the NHL – are scoring forwards (from the top10 in NHL-salaries 8 are scoring forwards, 1 is an offensive d-man and 1 is a goalie). But if character, doing all the little things well and showing warrior-qualities are so important why doesn’t this show on the pay-slip? Hmmm… are the NHL-decision-takers dumb? While I agree that building a successful hockey-team is a very complex matter and even advanced stats still don’t give satisfying answers to a lot of questions: I personally now like to stick up for the opinion that high-octane scoring-forwards or high-end offensive-d-men really should have more value than simple fighting-machines with just decent skills. Why is that? In my opinion to score goals in hockey is the most difficult act. Creating a goal-scoring-chance, putting the puck in the net – this is what special players separates them from ordinary players. So, after evaluating so many stats, views, opinions I come back to the point where I believe that the goal-scoring-players, the offense creating players really are the top-shots in our game.

Yes, I agree that players like McDavid, Kane and Laine make more money than Bergeron, Couturier or Komarov. I will stick to this shy opinion until somebody presents me strong indications that my opinion has to be reviewed. But for now: The puck stops here.

Horgen, 11^th March 2017 / Thomas Roost                                                                                 DecisionTakingFor(Hockey)GMs