I get annoyed every time I hear baseball announcers say “well, he’s up to 100 pitches now, I wonder when they are going to get someone up in the bullpen.” No pitcher is created equal, and I find the arbitrary number of 100 pitches to be one of those statistics that is used inappropriately to assess the wear and tear and ability of a pitcher to continue to perform at a high level.
For example, a pitcher may throw 100 pitches, but may spread them out over 9 innings. Another pitcher may throw 60, and 52 of them came in one inning. Still another could throw 120, but each inning from innings 1 through 7 managed to throw less and less pitches each inning.
Similar in business, basing your employees performance solely on sales dollars can be very inaccurate – one employee’s sales profit margins may be much higher than anothers, yet their sales volume is much lower.
Don’t look at one figure to make your decisions on your employees; much like in baseball, how they got to the results may be much more telling than one number can indicate.
