What is the real problem?

What’s the problem? Billy Beane asks for 4 times (Brad Pitt in the film), before blurting out the answer. As expected, the talent scouts continue to consider the issue from the usual angle: “replace these players with what’s out there.” It will take Billy’s determination to focus on the real cause of the problem and begin to build the solution.

Having a limited budget. That is the problem. Pretending it is not so, always taking the same solutions, burying our heads into the sand does make things only worse.

Later in the film, a young graduate in economics will open the eyes of the coach, one who has little to no knowledge, one who has never played and has no guidelines given by experience. The pace of the narrative is punctuated by 4 points that a manager would do well to learn.

I really liked “Moneyball” after watching it for the third time. I think it is one of the films that best expresses the challenge of a corporate change and the obstacles to overcome when it comes to turn things upside-down.

The starting point is disastrous. It is a team (read “Company”), which keeps losing; with a heavy structure, without star players to act as “saviors of the fatherland”, with the best player on the point of resigning and, above all, with a laughable budget.

How to come back from a situation like this?

The film provides you with a 4 step lesson about change management,  the main points that rule the dynamics of a company.

1. Recognize the “problem’’ – Bring to light the real weakness of the organization, explaining the original cause with humility, consciousness and, if needed, with the right dose of firmness (watch the scene)
2. Break the rules of the “sector’’ – Think about a series of unexplored posibilities (creativity) and merge them with a good dose of statistics (rationality)
3. Recognize and accept the “resistance’’ as an inevitable part of changing
4. Execute, with responsibility, unpopular strategies for the sake of the company and not the individual.

These last 3 points are well represented by many scenes included in our membership. But everything starts with the “discovery’’ of the actual problem. Only then the leader will discover that replacing the strenght of 3 average athletes is better than a single excellent individual.

Each one of us has knots to untie, questions to face, and the more we postpone them, the more things get worse.

And this is the case of Oakland Athetics, that have become the joke of all the experts. From the lowest point (which often happensalso to us) Billy understands that he can risk everything to gain everything, that he can change the rules of the game, leaving behind the last 150 years of baseball history. That’s the way the rules change. Listen to Peter’s advice: “People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs”.

Thanks to this new interpretation, he will find out that the solution is in the wasted talent, underappreciated, a “kind of fabric of imperfect players’’ from which he can get, due to his tight budget, players that no one would choose because of their looks, their physical defects and that because of this are not well quoted on the market.

To challenge history, the status quo, the thinking habits but above all ‘to see in people what other people can’t see’. On this last point it comes to my mind a quote from Sir Baden – Powell, founder of the scouts: “In every character, there’s at least 5% of goodness. The game consists in finding it, and then developing it up to a proportion of 80% and 90%. This is education of the boy’s personality, and not simple instruction.’’

Where is the untapped potential in your company? Perhaps this may be the solution to many problems.