YouSaid · the spoken record

Cade Massey

lines on the record: 84
first: 2021-04-19
most recent: 2021-04-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But as a result, they're hiring thousands of people for the same job every year. It's one job. Now, they put them in different places around the country, but it's one job. Thousands of people, and they get tens of thousands of applications. And they've been doing this for like, I don't know, almost 20 years now. So it's the ideal learning situation if you're so inclined. And these guys are very much inclined. So they have turned into one of the most sophisticated people analytics organizations out there, and especially the admissions process. And what they have done religiously for all these years is”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the process, part of a good group process is how are we going to monitor this process? How are we going to improve this process over time? So you've got to go in knowing that you want to learn. You want to continue to learn. And to do that, you've got to track these things. You got to write things down. You got to revisit the results at the end of the year. One of the organizations that we've taken the most lessons from on this is Teach for America. So these guys hire kids shred out college, basically, not exclusively, but mostly, and that was the original model, to go teach and kind of underserve populations. And they generally spend a couple years doing it, and then they go on and do something else. And so they're trying to develop leaders, Teach for America is, but they're also trying to serve teaching in these communities.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's real hard to make a good decision for the organization if you don't know what you're trying to actually maximize. So that's number two. We've talked about a little bit, but one of the real rules about this stuff is to write it down and keep track. And a lot of times I can give you some principles, but you're going to, if you monitor how it's going and you compare the results against outcomes and compare your forecasts against outcomes, you can improve and refine and you'll learn things that we're not talking about up front. And the best organizations realize it's not that you set up a process, you hit go and you never revisit it.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rule number two goes a lot of different directions. I think a lot of groups don't know what they're looking for. They haven't laid out the objectives. And it can be a painful process to stop yourself and say, okay, we have to talk about what we're actually trying to do here. I worked with an NFL team one time and they were trying to make a decision on which receivers to try to get in the free agent market. So they have set amount of money they could spend in free agency. This is when you go out and get someone who's already been in the league. So this isn't the NFL draft. Different way to acquire players. These are veteran players. Set amount of money they could spend. And we're trying to decide, do I go, you know, with this guy or that guy? And they were different kinds of players. There were some guys who played slot. There's some guys who play the wide out position. And so we said, well, let's find out what the coaches want. I mean, what do they need? What do they care about? And so we did just a simple little survey, tried to get this. And we discovered that they only had different opinions. Some of them wanted the slot guys, some of them wanted the white guys, some of them wanted two decent players. Some of them wanted one all-star player. And there was no consensus.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're really killing the information value if they're correlated. That's rule number one, Ted, in terms of good group process.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we cleaned it up. But I've had the same conversation with very sophisticated baseball teams that do so many things right. And then we have a discussion about, okay, you've got a scout who has given an opinion about a player. And then you have a second scout. You send someone in to give another opinion. Do you let that second guy see the first guy's opinion? And how hard do you work to keep them from talking to each other about the player? And it's hard. Even when they see the wisdom of it, it can be hard culturally to start breaking that dependence. But it's one of the simplest things you can do to improve group decision making is to build in more independence between opinions. The guys who do the stats on this will tell you, you know, it depends on how correlated these guys are, but two opinions, if they're uncorrelated, it's like you get two opinions. So great. You got two people worth of information. But if they're correlated even a little bit, you start really killing the value of information. And very quickly, you get it down. You think you get two opinions. You're really getting like one point.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we know that that's going to bias that second reader. And so the very first thing we did was just say, okay, one, they protested. They thought, oh, we're not biased by those things. We ran a little data and we found out, yeah, you're hugely biased by these things. Everything we know from psychology suggests you would be.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To work in because some organizations, even really good ones, get some basic things wrong. So the simplest one, let's start with the super simple one, is find ways to keep those opinions independent from one another. So two examples. A few years ago, we re-engineered NBA missions at Wharton. So I had been there a couple years and the Dean asked me to visit some with the head of missions. They had been talking about let's try to improve this thing. The dean thought it might be helpful with it. And so we spent a couple years reengineering this thing. And we believe we have the best admissions process in the world and super proud of the work we did. Some of it sophisticated, some of it simple. One of the simplest things we do historically, if an application was read by two people on the admissions committee, the second person who was reading it saw all the opinions of the first person. And they would log in. They actually couldn't avoid it, Ted. They would log in. And it was right there on the screen.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can imagine some organizations do that well, and some organizations don't do it as well So, this is just basic group decision making, and I suspect there's good parallels from the NFL over to asset management, investment teams, or whatever it is. How do you solicit and aggregate a bunch of opinions into an overall decision? We can talk about some good practices and bad practices, but now we're talking about a very general practice. And it has been a fun...”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's kind of where my work with Teams has gone over the years. When I first started going, we had this research on the NFL draft. It says, in short, don't be too sure of what you know about these players. And by the way, that suggests that you should probably trade down if you're in one of these top picks. That was kind of our shtick. And so we walk in, we have this advice. And that advising may or may not go well, but then over time, if you find the right organization and you build a relationship, it grows into something a little bit bigger than that. And that is, okay, how are you making these decisions anyway? What's the process that you assign these scouts and they bring back some data and you aggregate it in some way? So there's just a lot of steps here.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we're doing right now, you and me, has been happening everywhere for everybody for the last 14 months. Every gathering that has occurred practically has been recorded. We can get transcripts of these things. The folks who host these meetings are trying to even assess where our eyes are looking. And so we can break into some of the nonverbals. And so what used to seem like complete fantasy has become like here it's here. The data aren't yet available. It's a lot of data. take a lot of computational power to deal with it, but that is here and that is going to be a thing. And we're going to learn a lot from it.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way in which we're not. If we'd been talking a year and a half ago, that would have been pure fantasy. Because who's going to record all these meetings? As a matter of fact, there's a conference room at Google. This almost sounds dated now, but just a couple of years ago I was hearing about a conference room they had created at Google with video cameras on everybody in the conference room. They could code what everybody said, who was looking at whom, who was paying attention, all of these things. You would give permission for this to happen. For people who wanted to, they could give you a breakdown of what happened in that meeting. And this sounded phenomenal and really interesting. This was a room at one of the most sophisticated organizations in the world. Fast forward 24 months. And now”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We might actually have some data to play with. And actually, we'd help also get at this question of we tend to evaluate individuals as if they work independently of everybody else, that they just kind of show up at work. What they do doesn't have consequence for their next door neighbors and their next door neighbors don't affect them, but we know that's not the way organizations work. People are hugely influenced by those who are around them, and yet we try to go in and treat them completely separately and independently. If we look at something like a group activity, whether it's a project the last three months or a meeting that lasts an hour, if we look at enough of them and if we measure it closely enough, we might eventually start being able to say something about who's contributing to good outcomes by this group, who's impeding good outcomes by this group, what combination of people create good things in groups, those kinds of questions. But it takes a lot of data.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“more signal. But some of it's going to have to be created, some of it's going to have to be stuff that we're not currently tracking. So for analytics, if we're ever going to bring the kind of high-powered analytics we're seeing in sports outside of sports, we have to get a lot more data than we have right now. So we have to find what are those data. My fantasy on this, it sounds so boring, but my fantasy is basically meeting analytics. And the idea here is what's the most high frequency event in organizations? It's probably a meeting. What's one of the main units of work that we do? It's probably a meeting. And if we could actually track people's performances in meetings.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is the big challenge as we move from sports to non-sports organizations because what is a performance measure? And the most common performance measure is, what do you think, Ted? So you happen to work in industry, so you guys can keep score pretty well and you guys got good benchmarks and investment management, there's a pretty clear way to look at that. You could probably complicate it for me and tell me all that goes into those things. But at least in that industry, there's a pretty clear performance measure. In most industries, there's not such a thing. What's the modal performance measure in all industries? It's what your supervisor says on some like five-point scale. That's the performance measure, which is not going to get us very far. And we're not going to be able to build a lot of analytics on it. And it's just rife with biases. So I think the best organizations are working on finding new and better performance measures. And there's not going to be one that's going to end up being a suite of these, each of which is noisy, but maybe as a collection, we get a little bit.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if we pull back from this and talk a little bit about financial services generally, you'd intimated there's this first question of what data you're trying to gather. I would ask the question. What type of data Ends up becoming relevant in these sort of people assessment situations.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really proprietary stuff. So you have to be kind of on the inside. I've only been on the inside of a few teams and the teams I've worked with are always trying to refine that. They're always improving it. And they realize it's hard. And they realize that they're not there yet. Baseball is probably a little bit ahead. Baseball's been working on this and this kind of systematic way longer than football has. And it's remarkable how similar the two efforts are. And I think the baseball teams are a little bit better about making it systematic. That's even like I'm talking about some of the best organizations out there. That's one of the main things they're working on. Like this is one of the frontiers and it's just really hard to get. Everyone recognizes it's important, but it's so hard that even the best teams and even in the most advanced sports like baseball are still trying to figure out how to do it.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The teams have to create their own data because there are vendors who sell tests and they'll tell you they're good tests. Fine. Collect the data and see whether they actually predict something. But these scouts, one of the main job these scouts have is to go out and talk to coaches, talk to former teammates, talk to anybody they can who has some window into that player's character in order to get an assessment. So this is an important part of the scouting business. And then the question is whether that judgment can be rendered in a way that's reliable. And the only way to know that is to write it down in some quantified way and then compare it to outcomes long term and then tweak the model. The first time you do it, it's not going to be right. It's always going to be noisy, but can you tweak it and refine it, learn from experience and improve it enough over time that it gives you some signal in the process?”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The only way to do that is to try to systematize and quantify what is fundamentally a subjective opinion. So a couple of recommendations. One, instead of making a holistic judgment, you need to decompose it. So this is something we know from judgment and decision making that if your judgments are more reliable, if you break them down into component parts. So instead of saying, well, this guy has got a great character. He's got, or he's got weak character, let's break it down into work ethic, resilience, coachability, whatever the elements are. You decide what the elements are, but break it down to those elements. And then you've got to turn the subjective thing into something quantified. And so the best practice is to start scoring these things and then track them over time.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the team that I sat in there with was much more, let's walk you through some plays and tell us what you see. So they try to put something as game relevant in front of them as possible. It's like a mini work sample of sorts. And that's good interview practice. A work sample is about the best thing you can do for an interview. And I think the best teams try to get at that. But Ted, honestly, do these things predict anything? Do these interviews predict anything? It's extraordinary the resources teams put into this. All the coaching and executive power of the team is in that room. It's extraordinary and I don't know what signal they're really getting out of it.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now it's really hard. I mean, it's really, really hard. One, it's time constrained. And then the guys are coached up, the players are coached up. And so it's tough to get at something real. But then fundamentally, it's almost impossible task. I mean, we know from years of research on the academic side that job interviews don't predict a whole lot. The main thing they predict is whether I like you and whether we can get along interpersonally. That's not necessarily job relevant information. And I think the same thing happens in these interviews. The coaches and personnel guys might get a feeling for whether they like the guy, whether they believe the guy, but whether that feeling translates into a reliable signal about his NFL performance is a very different question. I've only sat in that room with one team, and so I can't say for a fact what other teams do. I know people try a wide range of things. Some people have brought in industrial psychologists to sit in there and observe or prepare test questions. Some folks try to be a little bit more antagonist.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Process to watch. They have an informal set of interviews. They just kind of grab some guys and sit them down in the hall and talk to them. But then they have these very formal ones where they schedule them to come through, sit down in the hotel room. And you might have 15 guys in there. They'll have coaches. They'll have personnel guys, the general manager might be in there. This kid will walk in and he'll sit down and they get, I forget whether it's 10 minutes. They'll get 10 minutes to ask them anything they want. And then the horn will blare and the guys will rotate and the new guy will come in and they'll ask them questions again. And they'll do this for hours, multiple days in a row. They're basically trying to poke and prod these candidates and learn everything they can about them. And then they go away and they fold that into whatever process they have for deciding who they want to draft.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that NFL combat is almost become its own sporting event. For years, it was held in Indianapolis, and they would invite the top, I don't know what it is, 150, 200 draft eligible players. The NFL would invite them. They get up there and they measure them in every possible way. So height and weight and basic vertical jumps and broad jumps, but then also some speed test. The classic one is the 40-yard dash. And then they have position specific drills that they put them through. While they're doing all of these things, everybody in the league is there. This gathering, it's of scouts, but then really it is the gathering for the year. So coaches are there, front office folks are there, scouts are there. And everyone's watching these things. They're sitting in the stands watching these things play out. And the teams then take those data back to their buildings and crunch the numbers and argue what it means. The other thing that happens in Indianapolis is that they interview players. And it's a phenomenon.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Personnel decisions yet. I mean, they're gonna. It's just around the corner. They're beginning to build the base of it. It's the same thing I was just talking about. They don't yet have the history to say when we see these numbers, it means this down the road. So we're stuck with, well, what does college production mean for NFL production? So how much do the guy play? How did he do? What kind of teams did he play for? And then, of course, the combine. And those are really the two main sources of information. If you're talking about the NFL draft, those are the two main sources of information. You've got production on the field from when the player was in college. You've got some combined numbers and then you've got anything you can uncover about the player's character. And this is an interesting feature of analytics and professional sports. Every sport, every team realizes character is this hugely important variable and really tough to get at. And the best teams are really working at making that more rigorous and more quantified because it's”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's start with NFL because there's so much more data. It's always an easier conversation. The big challenge as we move from sports to non-sports organizations is what are the right data. So let's talk about that in one minute. Sports, we're just run over with data. It's been a wonderful thing and it's blown up even more recently. We've got baseball, saber metrics got started with just box score stats, but now we've got motion tracking. It's just a complete revolution of what's available. Teams don't yet use a lot of motion tracking in football.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the first question is whether you have any data or not. And a lot of organizations who want to get going in this space or want help don't yet have the data. And it's a big hurdle because it's not like you can buy it from somebody and have a good basis for your decisions. Often you have to start collecting data on your process. And that means you're not going to know anything for three, four, ten cycles. And that might be enough to demotivate you from collecting data at all. So the first conversation is You got to start writing stuff down. You got to start recording the judgments, the decisions. You got to start tracking the outcomes. And then we can talk about analytics five years from now.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know we're going to cross over this upcoming NFL draft and investing over the course of this. this idea of trying to identify the next generation of talent. And as you're talking to whoever it is, someone in financial services hiring people or teams team that you work with for the NFL draft, how do you start thinking about the analytics component of let's just say we've got a draft coming up for the NFL?”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financial services was probably the second industry to pick up on that. They really got into it. It's another place where talent and human assets are the most important assets as opposed to a bunch of capital laying around. But the industry that have really spent the most time with it on is sports. And I had written this paper back in grad school on the NFL draft. that pulled a little bit of interest out of some NFL teams and then In the same era that people analytics was blown up, sports analytics was really blown up. And baseball's been doing this for a long time, but then basketball caught fire and then football slowly getting there. And I end up working more with organizations in professional sports than any other industry.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People analytics world really blew up in the last, I don't know, 10 years or so. Google was ground zero and the tech world really kind of bought into this. We need to improve HR decision making by being more evidence-based. And I was fortunate enough to cross paths with Laszlo Bach pretty early into that effort. And so I spent a fair bit of time in and out of Google over the years. And it was a two-way street for sure. We learned as much from those guys as they were learning from us, I think. They had a great group of folks in there.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To happen, does that affect my belief about its likelihood of happening? That whole forecasting world has always been interesting to me. And as I've migrated into what's become known as people analytics, forecasting in people analytics is essentially performance management or performance evaluation. Can you tell how good somebody is at their job? Can you predict who's going to be good at a job next year? I mean, that's all judgment under uncertainty. It's just applied to personnel. So those have been the chief interests of mine over the years.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I took his PhD program the first semester he was there, taught a behavioral economics PhD seminar and a drug. He allowed me to come in and took a couple of buddies in there with me and kind of got pulled in. He's a decision making guy as well, but he really had been pushing this behaviorally economics frontier. And it kind of took me in the direction of working with data and archival data to a little bit different angle for decision making person, but that's where behavioral economics was going. So that's where I went. And I was always interested in, we call it judgment under uncertainty, but I think normal person would call it forecasting, essentially. People's predictions of what's going to happen and what pushes those things around. And within that world, I've been interested in the impact of detecting change and non-stationary environments and how that affects people's judgment and whether people are good at that. And I've been interested in motivated reasoning, how much when I want something.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started out as a pretty much traditional decision making guy. I was doing a PhD at the University of Chicago and they have one of the longest standing decision making programs there. And then I got pulled a little bit into behavioral economics. That was kind of in some sense the dawn of behavioral economics. It was the late 90s. I was there when Richard Thaler moved to the University of Chicago. I'd been there one year in an MBA program.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stories from his work with Google, Wharton's MBA admissions, and Teach for America. We close with advice for allocators and insights for this year's NFL draft. Please enjoy my conversation with Cade Massey. Kate, thanks so much for joining me.”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guest on today's show is Cade Massey, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where his research focuses on judgment under uncertainty, or how and how well people predict what will happen in the future. In particular, he studies people analytics or how to predict who will perform well in the future. Kate is the co-host of the Wharton Money Ball podcast, and for many years he's studied talent selection at the NFL draft, which frames our discussion in advance of this year's draft next week. Our conversation starts with Cade's work in the NFL with data, character assessment, and performance measurement. We turn to decision-making lessons, including the importance of independence, understanding objectives, tracking decisions, and overcoming algorithm aversion. Along the way, we touch on”
2021-04-19 · Capital Allocators · Cade Massey – People Analytics in Investing and the NFL (Capital Allocators, EP.190) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source