Moneyball's Counterintuitive

In reading Michael Lewis’ Moneyball it becomes apparent that it is much more than a story about the ‘Oakland A’ baseball team and Billy Bean. It is more so a rough guide to successfully managing a team to reach their goal. While the book focuses its content on baseball, it is clear that the themes discussed can be applied to a wide range of industries. This paper will discuss a few of these themes and how they relate to a wide range of management roles in today’s business climate.

What does it take for a manager to effectively lead a team?

and What does a rough sketch of this look like?

“You guys really are trying to sell jeans, aren’t you?” – Billy Beane (Pg. 40)

While managers of several industries may follow a traditional and established model, Billy Beane leads his team effectively by stepping out of the box and adopting drafting techniques that were different from the industry standard. Billy chose to focus more on practical measures, such as statistics, and less on naïve heuristic measures, such as body shape. In doing this, Billy left behind the traditional model and moves on to developing one of his own. He aimed to make sure that this model performed more efficiently than the traditional one. Managers, like Billy Beane, preparing to move past an inefficient model filled with naïve heuristics must find a suitable alternative. As demonstrated in Moneyball, in order for the new model to behave more efficiently it must minimize the aspect of luck in determining the results (Pg133).

Since deviating from traditional measures proves to be risky, managers like Billy Beane who are preparing to move past a heuristic model are faced with many obstacles. Upon closer examination of these tasks it becomes apparent that the real first step lies in discovering the existence of inefficiencies in the current model. The manager is responsible for not only noticing that the current model does not work, but also for pinpointing the nature of these...