Cinema has given us many great examples of leadership. Moneyball is the latest.\n\nIn my favorite scene, Brad Pitt playing Billy Beane, Oakland A’s, General Manager, sitting at a table with his scouts trying to figure out what to do now that three of his star players were poached.  It was business as usual, but the reality was the A’s with a budget of under $40 million (Yankees had a budget of $120 by comparison) couldn’t buy their way out of this situation. Pitt’s character Beane asks, “What’s the problem?” Not once, but three times and continues to get the same wrong answer.  His scouts were trying to solve the wrong problem. Until he meets Peter Brand, a young Yale graduate that understand the goal is not to buy players, but to buy wins. Adapt or die.\n\nThey bucked the system of “buying” players and instead set out to rebuild a team that could win, by getting on base and scoring runs. He applied a theory developed by a guy named Bill James, a guy who never swung a bat, but knew numbers.\n\nOn paper the team they put together  looked like the island of misfit toys. At every turn people were working against him, saying it wouldn’t work, it couldn’t work. It started slow, but then something happened…they started winning. And in fact, they won 20 games in a row breaking 103 year old record.\n\nTogether they defied conventional wisdom and beliefs held by many in the game.  This is the work of a true leader. It was not an easy path to take. This movie reminds us that the first one through the wall usually ends up bloody.\n\nBeane applied a new way of thinking and took a huge risk.  He got back to the true meaning of team, that it’s not about one great individual, but a unit playing together to score runs leveraging each person’s strengths to the benefit of the team.\n\nI’d like to dedicate this blog to my dad, who loved the game and would’ve have loved this movie.