Looking at Moneyball from a Business Outlook

Looking at Moneyball from a business outlook

After reading “Moneyball: The art of winning an unfair game”, the first thing I tried to envision was the major takeaways from the book. At the first instance it seemed like a book about baseball and heroism – about how a manager defied all odds and converted an underdog team with limited financial resources into one of the most successful teams of the MLB. But as I read through it, I realized that this book has a lot of real life implications. There are so many concepts that can be taken straight out of the book and applied to the business world out there. By implementing the philosophy of innovation and scientific reasoning, a manager can add so much value to his/her firm and business as a whole. So, I believe that Moneyball talks about a number of arts apart from “the art of winning an unfair game” which is the core idea of the book and here I am trying to address some of them.

The art of being rational and analytical

One of the biggest lessons for a manager from this book is the act of questioning the set beliefs. The idea is not to demean the existing beliefs and practices, but analyzing and questioning them scientifically and rationally. There are business practices and markets where there is so much potential to innovate and grow, but the concerned people are either busy making money or content with the current system and do not want to disturb their status quo. In such cases, it is people like Billy Beane who point out the flaws in the existing system by moving to previously unchartered waters and coming up with their own ideas and methods. By challenging the age-old methods of scouts to search for talent and proving them wrong with Oakland A’s consistent success, people like Billy Beane give prospective managers like us the encouragement to look at the existing system and methods through an objective and analytical lens. As future managers, the choice is for us to make as to what we want to be: trend-setters...