"But if we win, on our budget, with this team,
we'll change the game."
- Billy Beane, Oakland A's General Manager
I saw the movie "MoneyBall" for the second time the other day. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. You can view the movie trailer below.
The movie is based on a true story. In the movie the General Manager of the Oakland A's baseball team, Billy Beane, attempts to devise a strategy for assembling a team for 2002, but struggles to overcome Oakland's "limited" player payroll. You see, they have the smallest payroll in baseball and can't afford to compete head to head with the big payroll teams like the New York Yankees.
In the movie, and in real life, he teams up with an economist named Peter Brand, and together they look at players and player statistics from a completely different angle than was traditional throughout the history of baseball. The economist (as economists do) looks at things from a step by step "cause and effect" perspective, not an "end result" perspective.
I found the movie personally interesting as I often feel like Billy Beane and also a little bit like that economist. I like to challenge conventional thinking and search for alternative data or data patterns or approaches to a problem that lead to positive results. This type of thinking is obviously applicable far beyond baseball.
In the movie, the results of the new approach and new criteria for selecting players, leads to a winning streak that sets a Major League Baseball record and puts them in first place in their division, unheard of for a team with their limited payroll. This winning formula lasts for a few years until, unfortunately, all other major league teams adopt his approach and he loses his player selection advantage. As always, people tend to emulate success.
Ultimately, it's an interesting story about innovation and thinking outside the box and changing an industry for the better.
I see many parallels between what Bill Beane did and what we are doing at SampleServe. We are changing an industry by thinking differently and the results speak for themselves. We incorporate a free mobile field data/sample collection application with a web-based data management and reporting tool. Data goes from the field to a report seamlessly. The two services go hand in hand and the economic efficiency created by the specialization is hard to compete with. You can learn more about our mobile app and our cost-effective reports from this short video below.
Every day, more and more industry professionals are realizing the advantage of our approach and are becoming customers. We would be happy to do a short demo of our product for you. You can schedule a web demo here.
Here's to economists, innovative thinkers, and to changing an industry!
