You may be asking yourself how I might be different from all the other business “fixers” out there. That’s a very good question. One of my favorite movies is “Moneyball”. It’s about a geeky Yale graduate in economics who reads a paper by Bill James, a guy who had no experience with baseball but had an idea about how to make baseball better.
The Yale grad was fictional, but Bill James and his ideas are genuine. His ideas were actually applied by the general manager of the Oakland As. They hadn’t won a pennant in years, but by applying James’ ideas, against enormous headwinds, Oakland beat the odds and won the pennant. They didn’t win the World Series, but the Red Sox hired Bill James and won the World Series in short order.
I watched the movie again recently, and I could see the parallels between what I teach about business and what Bill James taught about baseball. The concepts are revolutionary and quite similar.
The following are valuable business insights from “Moneyball”:
“It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.” Mickey Mantle.
“There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what’s really happening. This leads people to mismanage their players and mismanage their teams.”
They have an “imperfect understanding of where runs come from.”
“They are asking all the wrong questions.”
“It’s about getting things down to one number using stats the way we use them.”
“Anybody who’s not tearing down their systems right now and rebuilding using this model is a dinosaur – watching their competitor beat them, threatening their livelihood.”
Think about your business in these terms, and discover how to play the game of business better at ProfitPowerSeries.com and AnatomyofBusiness.com.