Bigger wallets don't always equal better teams.
8/4/2003
This book succeeds on a number of levels. For one, it is about how successful organizations can be built by attracting the right kind of talent and not necessarily superstars. It is about the importance of unlearning—constantly rethinking assumptions that built your business but may no longer be true. As Michael Lewis reports, for instance, Billy Beane, general manager of the Athletics, is a student of baseball sabremetician Bill James, who believes that many strategies that pass for baseball wisdom are statistically not valid. For years, it was assumed that the teams with the most money (i.e., the New York Yankees) could buy the best players and thus win the World Series. But Beane's A's have one of the lowest payrolls in the majors yet are still one of the most successful.