The idea for this blog was heavily inspired by Michael Lewis' book Moneyball, in which the author showed that our intuition and conventional wisdom often fail us. In baseball as in business, it turns out that facts, evidence and statistical analysis are a crucial corrective to the dangerous tendency to "shoot from the hip" or "follow your gut." That's why companies like Harrah's and CapitalOne have been so successful in recent years.

But the Lewis book seems to provide a metaphor for B2C strategy more than B2B. With B2C, there's a large base of consumers from which to draw key findings. It's about statistics. With B2B, it's largely about the account. And because every client is different and complex, statistics are less useful. What we are looking for in the B2B world are meaningful patterns.

So it was great to see that Michael Lewis had drawn a new and rich metaphorical portrait from the world of sports in the New York Times Magazine this past week. He profiles Eli Manning, rookie quarterback for the New York Giants (and son of the famous quarterback, Archie Manning). While the piece teases out some interesting insights about Manning's high intelligence and solid psychological grounding, what interested me were the insights about how statistics miss the true reality of the game.

"Football statistics do not capture the performance of individual football players as cleanly as, say, baseball statistics capture the performance of individual baseball players," explains Lewis. "No player ever does anything on a football field that isn't dependent on some other player. The individual achievements of football players are often, in effect, hidden in plain sight."

Lewis then goes on to share something even more interesting: "[T]his hidden game can be seen, though not by the average viewer. Shot unceremoniously from two pillboxes on the stadium's upper rim, the videotape made by the Giants coaching staff frames all 22 players on the field. The view the coaches want is the view from the cheapest seat in the house... The coaches want to see that shot because they know it is the only shot that will enable them to figure out who did what -- and assign credit and blame -- on any given football play."

Giants Stadium is compared by Lewis to Plato's Cave. "The millions of people watching the game are inside the cave, staring at shadows on the wall," he writes. "The shadows are distortions of the reality outside the cave, treated, erroneously, as the thing itself. No matter how he plays, some part of Eli Manning's game, like his personality, will remain hidden from public understanding."

This is similar to the problem that afflicts most company leaders trying to understand complex, collaborative and interrelated B2B activities. They can make sales projections. They can count leads all they want. They can monitor the performance of their individual sales people. But unless they step back and look at the whole field (the company and the account) from the cheap seats above, they won't understand the patterns of activity that contribute to overall success (and failure).

Too many of us are trying to manage and coach from the sidelines. We are emotionally wrapped up in the high intensity drama that's right in front of our eyes. But we aren't getting advice from the sky box during the game and we aren't watching the game films on Monday.