Moneyball: Out of the Box Thinking

Moneyball: Out of the Box Thinking

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" the other day.  If you have not seen it, I recommend it. You can view a trailer to the movie here.

The movie is based on a true story. In Innovative solutionthe movie the General Manager of the Oakland A's baseball team, a guy named Billy Beane, attempts to devise a strategy for assembling a competitive team for 2002, but struggles to overcome Oakland's limited player payroll.  They have one of the smallest payrolls in baseball and can't afford to compete 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 Outside the box(as Economists do) looks at things from a completely different perspective.  It's a step by step"cause and effect" perspective, not an "end result" perspective.

I found the movie particularly interesting as 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 to selecting players, leads to a winning streak that sets a Major League Baseball record and puts them in first place in their division, unusual for a team with their payroll.  This winning formula lasts for awhile until, unfortunately, all other major league teams adopt his approach and he losses his player selection advantage.  As always, people emulate success. 
innovation 
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 do at SampleServe.com.  We are changing an industry by thinking outside the box.  We are incorporating web based data management along with high quality data/sample collection services.  The two services go hand in hand and the economic efficiency created by the specialization is hard to compete with.  

Every day, more and more industry professionals are realizing the advantage of our approach and are becoming customers.  I would be happy to send you a customer list and references, at your request.

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