Playing Ball; Challenge the Status Quo!
The best weekends for me are generally the ones that allow me to indulge in my passion; watching movies. This weekend I was truly refreshed to see a great movie that I would recommend to all those who manage people, are in situations where they have to think “out of the box” or have to make tough decisions with a lot of constraints.
The movie 'moneyball' is a sports drama based on a real life event and takes place when Beane (played by Brad Pitt) who is the GM of Oakland’s Athletics seems to be running out of options on wanting to run a successful baseball team. He starts losing his star players Damon, Giambi & Isringhausen to competition and the owner of his team (Stephen Schott) is not willing to lend additional funds to him to pick up fresh start talent from the market.
As Beane is struggling to overcome this hopeless situation and work within the constraints he meets & decides to bring on board Peter Brand (played by Jonah Hill) who comes up with a statistics based & process oriented approach to selecting & playing the team. He recommends the selection & order of deployment of players urging Beane that this is the most optimized way of playing baseball (considering the payroll & win-ability constraints).
Beane is confronted with immense opposition from his lead talent scout who says that he is making a huge mistake by listening to someone who doesn’t have any experience of playing baseball and also from his team manager who wants to stick to his idea about the position of players & wants to play the team & game in the traditional style.
In a memorable scene, Grady says, “You got a scout here with twenty-nine years of baseball experience. You're listening to the wrong one” He says that there are intangibles that only baseball people understand and that Beane is discounting what scouts have done for a hundred and fifty years...He says that, “Baseball isn't just numbers, it's not science. If it was then anybody could do what we're doing, but they can't because they don't know what we know. They don't have our experience and they don't have our intuition.”
Beane & Peter eventually proves his critics wrong and turns around a hopeless situation and eventually the team wins an unprecedented 20 consecutive wins. While the storyline in itself was inspiring, it also highlighted Beane’s ability of thinking out of the box and challenges the status quo (in this case playing baseball). The defining moment in the movie is when Peter tells Beane that he believes that “ There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening....and that this lack of understanding leads people who run Major League Baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams”. He also adds that, “People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players whilst the goal shouldn't be to buy players, but it should actually be to buy wins....and in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs”. He further states that he sees an imperfect understanding of where “runs come from” when he sees bid leagues paying millions of dollars to some stars. He wants Beane to focus on asking the right questions rather than accept the status quo.
This ability to challenge the status quo and think & act out the box, to me, was inspirational. Since professional sports is as competitive as business, it provides some valuable lessons to those of us who play this game on the pitches of the corporate world.
We are often faced with some tough business situations, wherein all seems to be going downhill. We are losing market share, not able to meet our revenue guidelines, and also face the problem of people moving to greener pastures. Our ability to read the business accurately, having a well thought through plan and knowing exactly the process of how our business comes from is what would be the difference between success & failure
Most of us also fail to distinguish what is really happening in the opportunity & why a suspect doesn’t become a prospect or why a prospect doesn’t decide to close. It is because of this lack of understanding we are not able to manage our resources wherein we can glean them for more repeatable and higher value deals at a lower cost of execution. Most of us look at an opportunity from a fulfillment or a pricing/discounting standpoint, forgetting to ask “why” we win (or lose) these deals. Repetitive wins come from following a tight sales process that can qualify an opportunity, unearthing the latent pains of clients and give us an early on probability of win so that we can utilize the resources available at our disposal optimally.
Asking the right question is the key!! It's not “know-how” but the “know-why” that is critical for success.
“Experience” is probably the most overrated word in the corporate world and the “number of years in the industry” is always looked at as the last word while settling arguments or taking decisions. While experience is certainly crucial, there are times when experience has to ride pillion. If experience was the only true prism, then there would be no imperfections in the decisions we take (or the businesses we run). There are times when someone younger and lesser experienced is better placed to take an organization forward, especially if what has worked in past is not working anymore! Sometimes a fresh perspective and point of view of running the business help.
Beane’s ability to follow thru with his decision was evident when he removes the last remaining star player on the team because the manager is not willing to change this traditional way of playing the game. He takes away the tools and forces him to execute the strategy that Beane has thought thru. Beane knows that he will have to pay with his job, in case his strategy fails, but he is willing to stake it all on line because he wants to see the side win. A crucial part of the ability to challenge the status quo is the ability to “ram through” with your thoughts if you truly believe they are better for the business and the ability to “put your job/reputation on stake”.
Towards the end of the movie, John Henry owner of Red Sox tells Beane that Oakland Athletics won the exact same number of games that the Yankees won, but the Yankees spent $1.4 MN per win and Beane managed it with just $260 K.
John says, “I know you've taken it in the teeth out there, but for the first guy through the wall, it always gets bloody. It's the threat of not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it's threatening the game. But really what it's threatening is their livelihoods, it's threatening their jobs, it's threatening the way that they do things”. He concludes by saying that anybody who's not building a team right or rebuilding it using your model will become dinosaurs!
Have you ever been told that what you are saying is not relevant under “these circumstances or constraints”, that you don’t have “enough experience”, that “this is how it was done before your time and that you do not understand this field”.....If you are that “first man to go thru the wall” and are dealing with these proverbial dinosaurs , remember what Beane & Peter managed to achieve was not fiction, they did it following their conviction that there is always a better way to play the game and as Beane says “It’s a process. It’s a process. IT’S A PROCESS.”
