In order to be successful, an 

innovation must satisfy a customer need. Innovations often don't bring the desired
success because they don't bring real benefits to the customer or are aimed at the wrong target group. ... And the
ready-to-serve menus from toothpaste manufacturer COLGATE also failed to win over customers.

Moneyball is based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis and chronicles the 2002
Oakland Athletics season.  The ’02 Oakland A’s, led by General Manager Billy Beane (played by
Brad Pitt), forever changed baseball by adopting an approach that valued rigorous statistical
analysis over the collective wisdom of baseball insiders (coaches, scouts, front office personnel)
when building a team.  This approach, termed “Moneyball,” enabled the A’s to reach the
postseason with a team that cost only $44M in salary, compared to the NY Yankees that spent
$125M to achieve the same outcome.
While the whole movie (and book) is a testament to the courage and perseverance required to
challenge and change the status quo, time and again I come back to three lines that perfectly
sum up the journey of every successful intrapreneur I’ve ever met.

The Beginning
“I know you’ve taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall…he always
gets bloody…always always gets bloody.  This is threatening not just a way of doing
business… but in their minds, it’s threatening the game. Really what it’s threatening is
their livelihood, their jobs. It’s threatening the way they do things… and every time that
happens, whether it’s the government, a way of doing business, whatever, the people who
are holding the reins – they have their hands on the switch – they go batshit crazy.”
John Henry, Owner of the Boston Red Sox
Context
The 2002 season is over, and the A’s were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.  John
Henry, an owner of the Boston Red Sox, has invited Bill Beane to Boston to offer him the Red
Sox GM job. 
Lesson
This is what you sign up for when you decide to be an Intrapreneur.  The more you challenge the
status quo, the more you question how business is done, the more you ask Why and demand an
answer, the closer you get to “tak(ing) it in the teeth.”
This is why courage, perseverance, and an unshakeable belief that things can and should be
better are absolutely essential for intrapreneurs.  Your job is to run at the wall over and over until
you get through it.
People will follow.  The Red Sox did.  They won the World Series in 2004, breaking an 84-year-
old curse.

The Middle
“It’s a process, it’s a process, it’s a process”
Bill Beane
Context
Billy has to convince the ballplayers to forget all the habits that made them great and embrace the
philosophy of Moneyball.  To stop stealing bases, turning double plays on bunts, and swinging for
the fences and to start taking walks, throwing to first for the easy out, and prioritize getting on
base over hitting a home run.
The players are confused and frustrated.  Suddenly, everything that they once did right is wrong
and what was not valued is deeply prized.
Lesson
Innovation is something new that creates value.  Something new doesn’t just require change, it
requires people to stop doing things that work and start doing things that seem strange or even
wrong.
Change doesn’t happen overnight.  It’s not a switch to be flipped.  It’s a process to be learned.  It
takes time, practice, reminders, and patience.

The End
“When you get an answer you’re looking for, hang up.”
Billy Beane
Context
In this scene, Billy has offered one of his players to multiple teams, searching for the best deal. 
When the phone rings with a deal he likes, he and the other General Manager (GM) agree to it,
Billy hangs up.  Even though the other GM was in the middle of a sentence.  When Peter Brand,
the Assistant GM played by Jonah Hill, points out that Billy had just hung up on the other GM,
Billy responds with this nugget of wisdom.
Lesson
It’s advice intrapreneurs should take very much to heart.  I often see Innovation teams walk into
management presentations with long presentations, full of data and projections, anxious to share
their progress, and hoping for continued funding and support.  When the meeting starts, a senior
exec will say something like, “We’re excited by the progress we’re hearing about and what it will
take to continue.” 
That’s the cue to “hang up.”
Instead of starting the presentation from the beginning, start with “what it will take to continue.” 
You got the answer you’re looking for – they’re excited about the progress you’ve made – don’t
spend time giving them the info they already have or, worse, could raise questions and dim their
enthusiasm.  Hang up on the conversation you want to have and have the conversation they want
to have.

In closing
Moneyball was an innovation that fundamentally changed one of the most tradition-bound
businesses in sports.  To be successful, it required someone willing to take it in the teeth, to
coach people through a process, and to hang up when they got the answer they wanted.  It
wasn’t easy but real change rarely is.
The same is true in corporations.  They need their own Bill Beanes.

1. Take advantage of having inferior resources to employ a dramatically different

innovation strategy.
The Oakland A’s were faced with a major salary constraint compared to other teams able to
spend much more on widely regarded superstar baseball players. As Oscar-nominated Brad
Pitt (who played Billy Beane) puts it, “There are rich teams and poor teams, then 50 feet of
crap. Then there’s us.” When you have inferior resources, look at your situation in new
ways to develop an innovation strategy. That innovation strategy likely includes changing
the rules of the game you’re playing.
2. When your market situation changes, you can’t think with old conventional wisdom.
Baseball scouts are characterized in the movie as employing 150-year-old guidelines to
evaluate baseball talent. Granted, some of the conventional wisdom seems pretty perceptive
(i.e., “An ugly girlfriend means no confidence.”) Billy Beane brings his scouting staff up
short, however, telling them bluntly that talking like business as usual wouldn’t work. The
old rules were making for an unfair game and demanded different thinking. In Billy Beane’s
case with the Oakland A’s, the different thinking meant fully embracing a Bill
James sabermetrics approach to new baseball statistics.
3. Seek out unlikely experts, especially ones who do their homework.
Oscar-nominated Jonah Hill plays a composite character named Peter Brand, depicted as an
underling Billy Beane notice swaying decisions during a meeting with an opposing baseball
team. He pursues Peter Brand following the meeting, asking what he does. Brand shares his
view that medieval thinking in baseball had created an “epidemic failure” to comprehend
why teams win. This misunderstanding led to asking the wrong questions about players.
Brand makes a case for major league baseball teams setting their player spending objectives
with a new focus – buying runs – since buying runs translates into buying wins. The movie
depicts this insight as a turning point along with Beane hiring Peter Brand.
4. Consider many possibilities to find the few winners you need.
When Beane asked Brand to evaluate three potential players, Brand analyzed fifty-one
players instead. By having a rich pool of possibilities, Brand armed himself and Beane with
multiple scenarios when various players became available through free agency or potential
trades. The extensive pool of vetted, prioritized possibilities provided options, flexibility,
speed, and negotiating leverage that three player evaluations options wouldn’t have offered.
5. Ask rich, on-target questions to unleash real creativity.
The traditional major league baseball view was for the Oakland A’s to try replacing the
apparently high-producing players lost to free agency. Billy Beane challenged his scouting
staff that the real need was replacing a departing player’s on base percentage – in the
aggregate. In that way, the Oakland A’s could look at multiple, lower-cost players who
could deliver the same on-base percentage the departing star did over the course of a season.
With the change in strategic thinking, multiple solutions presented themselves.
6. A leader can’t make an innovation strategy happen alone, but he or she does have to take
responsibility for it.
The Oakland A’s head scout takes major exception to the baseball team’s new reliance on
computers and statistics to make player personnel decisions. His preference is experience,
intuition, and the intangibles that had been in use for 150 years. He acknowledged though,
“We make suggestions. He (Billy Beane) makes the decisions.” Beane ultimately fires the
scout who couldn’t get past his 29 years of experience, and picks a new head scout who
hadn’t played the game. The new scout’s lack of experience and preconceived notions about
baseball’s conventional wisdom made him a much better fit to implement and not second
guess Beane’s statistics-driven strategy.
7. If there’s a sound case for your unconventional strategy, you can’t abandon it at the first
sign of challenges.
Early in the season when the Oakland A’s made their unconventional player personnel
decisions, the team went on a significant losing streak. With the pressure mounting, Beane
went to bat for the team being on plan, even though it trailed in its baseball division. When
Oakland A’s manager Art Howe deliberately thwarted the strategy’s ongoing
implementation by refusing to play the players Beane had assembled, Beane got rid of the
players, essentially burning the boats, so there was no choice but to implement the intended
strategy.
8. When competitors catch up, the rules will change again.
The Oakland A’s had early success using a Bill James sabermetrics approach, but didn’t win
the World Series using the approach. Additionally, they never had the success that the
Boston Red Sox, who actually hired Bill James, had using the approach to win its first
World Series in decades. Since 2006, the Oakland A’s have not had a winning record, a
symptom, potentially, of money coming back into play as more teams adopt a sabermetrics
approach.