Billy Beane’s “Moneyball Strategy” is a common one in baseball. The Moneyball thesis is simple. It is to get undervalued players from other teams and get rid of overvalued players or those who demand high payment. It worked for Oakland A but did not work for every baseball team.
A brief history
In the early 2000s, baseball’s Oakland A’s were having difficulties finding success. The general manager decided then to hire a new assistant manager. The newly hired assistant used a different spin to identify talent for the team. Other teams relied on the gut instinct of seasoned baseball talent scouts. He looked for talent based on only one statistic. It is how often a player got on base, whether through hits, walks, and so on. The method was unorthodox, but it allowed the team to find diamonds in the rough of free agency. There are players discarded by other groups for poor recent performance. Some of these players have high on-base percentage numbers, and those discarded players became the pillars of success for the A’s. They crafted a winning team for less than it would have cost to take the most popular talent available.
Applying to business
Can you apply some of these tactics to managing your business? Can it work for movies? Ryan Kavanaugh’s ideas caught the attention of many. He is a forward-thinker who gets movies made and has found no small success. He wanted to bring consumers into the filmmaking process. In one of his interviews, he said that he wanted to give them a voice on the set. He wanted to let them know they can effectuate change. He even said that at the end of the day, they are making movies for them.
The visionary producer wanted to create a purely data-driven system for greenlighting movies. Oakland A’s strategy was unorthodox, and no one thought it would work. Ryan Kavanaugh’s Moneyball strategy was also an unorthodox one. People doubted that it would bring any success.
Relativity Media’s former CEO, Ryan Kavanaugh, trumpets his Moneyball data models when he spoke to Esquire. The models showed it informed decisions about what to greenlight and what to pass. It also showed how to determine movies that should or should not receive a cash infusion.
He did things as any great producer should have done. He bought films and developed them later on. According to Ryan Kavanaugh, Relativity Media turns more than ninety percent of the properties it buys into movies. It is a fantastic track record, no matter how you look at it.
He told Variety magazine he did not care about awards. He only wanted to own a business and to make money. This mindset earned him a lot of awards and accolades.