Over the weekend, I watched Moneyball (again).
It’s a great (dramatised) real-life story about the rise from years of failure to success for the Oakland Athletics baseball team.
The cast, including Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Casey Dorsey, are all excellent.
You don’t need to follow baseball to enjoy the film or to learn an invaluable business lesson.
That is,
Are you measuring the wrong thing?
The Oakland Athletics were a team with little money to spend on players.
Their lack of success also made them unattractive in attracting big-name players.
Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), newly appointed General Manager of the team, realised a new approach was necessary.
Enter building a new team based on statistics and a low budget.
If you watch the film, you’ll see how the new approach delivered excellent results despite doubts and objections from within the club.
Billy Beane’s process was what management expert and author Charles Handy would call “Upside Down Thinking.”
It was the opposite of “tried and tested” baseball management at that time.
Analysis of statistics to understand who truly was winning points in the team lay at the heart of the strategy.
How could that help you?
Always check your assumptions.
The products or services you’re sure are your most profitable, in reality, might not be.
Years back, I had a client who wanted to move into a “more profitable” area of manufacturing.
They didn’t want to make unglamorous bread and butter products anymore.
But that was what their factory and workforce were geared to produce.
Every time they took on one of the bigger, more glam projects, their margins dropped massively.
But for months, they couldn’t see why profits were falling.
After two or three days of poring over spreadsheets, the problem could be highlighted and rectified.
The owners were happy to trade excellent profits and success in their field for glamorous projects they couldn’t afford.
Very best,