Data, Insights, Actions, Outcomes: Snippets from Movie - MoneyBall

Sports have always ignited a sense of trust, teamwork, courage and hopefulness in our lives and although that consolidates its true essence, the decisions athletes, teams and managers make nowadays have found a common ground with their direct instincts. Every aspect of today’s world has its floodgates open for information and data to equip themselves with insights and make informed decisions. Sports and athletics have not remained foreign to this implicit concept. MoneyBall, a real-life story based on the bestselling book ‘MoneyBall: The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game' by Michael Lewis, is the movie I suggest you watch to understand how data improvise our actions and speculates its outcome. 

The movie revolves around Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the manager of Oakland Athletics, a major American League baseball team having an 11 match losing streak. Billy Beane restructures his team’s roster with the help of Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a nerdy economics graduate from Yale, by relying on their unconventional and controversial theory of hand-picking the best team through pure use of statistics and data metrics. A team lingering on a tight budget with its top-performing players scored away by richer teams, the genre quickly shifts from a sports adventure film to intellectual suspense taking you through the in’s and out’s of the game outside the field. 

The movie presents the concept of sabermetrics which is the statistics of in-game baseball activity. Foundationally, it is an evolved form of learning analytics that supervises player data and outlines the values of players from purely evidence-based hindsight. This statistical approach was a direct offshoot of the voluminous amount of player data readily available but vastly unengaged with. The implication of this method created history by giving the most undervalued team in American Baseball League, Oakland A’s, a 20 game winning streak. This was not an appreciated tactic by the recruiting scouts back in the day but this sole plan changed the combined future of sports altogether.

Frankly, MoneyBall is a bittersweet tale where a war is waged between your gut feeling and data analytics. Oakland A’s managers weren’t able to create a capable team with all their knowledge and experience but with the use of data and statistics, they were able to turn an underperforming and losing team into a success. By methodical approach to data and its analysis, key performance and indicators become visible that further delve into patterns allowing us to be agile in making the best possible decision and MoneyBall scored a home run in displaying this aspect of Big Data. Regardless, what we should emphasize is the fact that data analytics tools took a better and more well-structured decision than humans and this should encourage the importance of data in our actions. In the VUCA world, we all live where scalable and sustainable solutions are the need, leveraging the power of data and what we can do with it is critical in the businesses we drive. 

A gripping story with a masterful narration and direction, MoneyBall does its best to strike the notion of quality being determined from currency. Billy Beane was able to pick a team on a low budget that outperformed the big money players in the league. It remarks on us that the use of data is optimal and revitalising in our decision-making stages. 

On Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/70201437?s=a&trkid=13747225&t=wha

#data #actions #insights #outcomes #leadership #peopleanalytics #analytics #decisionmaking #problemsolving #managementmovies #learningfrommovies #moviedebrief #talentanalytics #engagementanalytics #learninganalytics #dashboards #purpose #jainsteintalks #jainstein