Billy

Leadership Lessons from Billy

Beane

I just returned from seeing Moneyball, a great baseball

flick. Brad Pitt plays Billy Beane, the GM of the Oakland

Athletics 2002 squad that won an unprecedented

twenty

straight games that season—despite having the lowest pay roll

in the major leagues. Season after season Beane would watch

teams with deeper pockets steal his star players. When he

realized that he couldn’t compete with the New York Yankee’s

salaries, he decided that he needed to change the way the

game was won. He needed to actually evolve the game by reimagining it in such a way that you couldn’t just buy the

World Series. There are some leadership lessons in this true

story for church leaders.

First lesson: Do not prematurely resolve the tension. Billy

refuses to accept solutions from his scouts and assistants

that were based on the old paradigm. At this point, he had no

solutions himself. He simply held the tension. He steeped

himself in the conflict that ensued when he consistently

contradicted the “experts”. He increased

the evolutionary

tension. It’s my experience that most leaders in the church

capitulate in the face of conflict. How do we support our

leaders and congregations to hold the tension, when everything

in us wants to resolve it prematurely for the sake of a false

peace—a peace that will ultimately keep us from evolving?

Lesson 2: Staying in the fire focuses your attention on

outside-the-box solutions. Billy stumbles upon a completely

new model in a young Yale economics graduate. This kid is

using sophisticated mathematical models to recruit and draft

young players. For the record, it’s called sabermetrics. Billy

hires him, after the young wizard confesses that according to

his model, Billy himself got drafted way too high, and got

paid way too much (when Billy broke into the major leagues as

a player).

Lesson number three: It’s not about you. Billy was functioning

from a higher principle than ego. He really wanted to change

how the game was...