Kanako Sakai's Profile

Thanks Korn for an interesting question. I personally feel that this have to be a top-down initiative. First, when the top executives do not support this type of “not-revenue-generating” project, it tends to fail because people become less accountable. Also, since this type of project will basically visualize the discrimination in the company, if the top executives are not engaged fully, they would just try to protect themselves and the company by not agreeing on the outcome.

Having said that, I also think that people could do this bottom-up. In this case, the first thing they should do is to get buy-in and full support from the senior managers or executives. Also when they roll this out, the narrative and positioning of the project would matter a lot. Instead of putting this as “helping discriminated groups”, they should put it in a way that it sounds beneficial for everyone (e.g., “improving the company’s culture”).

Thanks for an interesting article! I really like your point about emphasis being put so much on technology and not on people. This is a critical concern not only for the OWL but also for everyone who is interested in going into people analytics. I wonder how the OWL explained this initiative to the players and how the players reacted to this initiative. From my point of view, there is no benefit to the individual players because they are not evaluated on their individual potentials and the evaluation will not lead them to be scouted by other powerful teams. So, I was not sure what exactly was the purpose of ranking teams with AI as teams are ranked anyways when they play games. Maybe I am not fully understanding the whole thing but just wondering how the AI can benefit the OWL as a whole.