New Lessons from Moneyball's Billy Beane

Here's a post for baseball nuts: Management by Baseball's A 2008 Billy Beane Lesson in Adaptation. It's lengthy (though shorter than the typical baseball game), and connects why the Oakland A's have stumbled in the wake of "Moneyball" (other teams figured out the same tricks), to what it means for your business ("The cold, inescapable fact is that if resources are limited enough, gravity will pull even the most determinedly innovative organisation down towards the mean average.").

So the As, we're informed, did a top-to-bottom organizational review and decided to add a strength coach (to counter high injury rates) a number of scouts and boosted resources in other areas. It seems to be working: The A's are 13-9 this year.

Michael Fitzgerald

Michael Fitzgerald writes about innovation and other big ideas in business for publications like the New York Times, The Economist, Fast Company, Inc. and CIO. He’s worked as a writer or editor at Red Herring, ZDNet, TechTV and Computerworld, and has received numerous awards as a writer and editor. Most recently, his piece on the hacker collective the l0pht won the 2008 award for best trade piece from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. He was also a 2007 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science and Religion.

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