One morning, a few Sundays ago, I was sitting on my back porch after finishing Michael Lewis’s Moneyball and I began wondering if there wasn’t something in that book that might be important to the profession of Internal Audit. I became convinced there was an argument to be made that, just as Billy Beane found new measures of success to identify talented ballplayers, so might Internal Audit look at the ways it measures success of the department and the staff to obtain better results. So I started typing away at my computer with the thought that I’d put together a quick post on the subject. 

We interrupt our free-flowing discussions about audit skills because I’m looking for help regarding some concepts I stumbled across that may connect to improving the way we communicate.  Which, when you stop and think about it, isn’t that big a leap from our discussion about innovation and creativity; at the root of both of these is the way we use connections to learn more. But I won’t belabor that correlation too much because my point is not to actually connect this to the Moneyball discussion we’ve been having; it is, as I said, to get a little help out there. 

Sheesh. These recaps are starting to take as long as the entire post. Suffice to say that, so far, we have talked about how the movie/book Moneyball might speak to the profession about the way it determines an internal auditor is “successful”; we talked about hiring the right people, not just the right people for the job; and we talked about how we may be focusing on the wrong traits and skills, and should be focusing on creativity and inquisitiveness instead.  Let's dig into those two a little more.

A recent conversation reminded me of some past experiences which have an impact on the discussion based on my previous post. The point I want to drive home now (the point I want to drive home before we talk about knowing what we need from people and then finding them) is to emphasize that what we want are talented people, not just job fillers.