Last week I went to see “Moneyball,” a great baseball movie starring Brad Pitt that tells the story of the 2002 Oakland A’s. Pitt plays Billy Beane, the GM of the A’s that led the team to win 103 games, including an unprecedented 20 in a row, the longest streak in American League history, despite having the lowest payroll in the major leagues and a lineup full of cast-offs and undervalued players.

Season after season, Beane would watch teams with deeper pockets steal his star players. When he realized that he couldn’t compete with the New York Yankees’ payroll, he decided he needed to change the way you evaluate talent and change the way the game was won. He needed to re-imagine the game so that it couldn’t be bought and so that he could compete on a playing field that wasn’t level.

What I like most about this movie which is based on a true story, are the leadership lessons, which can be applied to any business:

• Do not prematurely resolve tension. Billy refused to accept solutions from his scouts and assistants that were based on the old way of doing things. He may not have had his own solutions in the beginning, but he held the tension. He didn’t give up in the face of conflict every time he contradicted the so-called “experts.”
• Staying in the fire focuses your attention on outside-the-box solutions. Billy met a young Yale economics graduate who was using sophisticated mathematical models to recruit and draft young players. Billy hired him after the young graduate confessed that according to his model, Billy himself got drafted way too high, and got paid way too much as a young major leagues player.
• It’s not about you. Billy was functioning from a higher principle than ego. He really wanted to change how the players were evaluated and in turn how the game was won.

The start of the 2002 season was an absolute disaster for the Oakland A’s. The team of no-name players constantly lost and took a lot of criticism. Billy’s own team manager refused to follow his directions and repeatedly started their one star player. Reporters, commentators, sports talk show hosts, and fans that called into the shows backed the manager and consistently blamed Billy.

How did Billy get through this rough start? He traded the A’s one star player just before a game, which meant that the manager had to go with the game plan and play the percentages. Then, he fired their head scout who refused to make the necessary adjustments.

• It’s obvious, but sometimes leaders need to make bold and unpopular decisions, and then stick with them. Very few of us are willing to make these kinds of decisions. This can be a very painful, but necessary, period in a leader’s evolution.

What was Billy’s model? There were many mathematical variables, but the single one he chose to focus on was called “on-base percentage” (OBP). This means that by whatever means, whether by taking a walk, getting hit by a pitch, or hitting singles, the player gets to first base. If you don’t have men on base, there’s no way to score runs. This variable defined the A’s strategy and the one thing they would focus on, given their limited resources.

• Do one thing very well. Billy hired a pudgy Triple A player who was virtually unnoticed by big leagues. But when they crunched the numbers, this guy knew a ball from a strike and got on base more than anybody else. With this one big thing in mind, they coached every player on how he could improve his on-base percentage (OBP).

Suddenly, the season started to turn around. Everybody was puzzled except for Billy. The A’s began their winning streak that helped them win their division. They lost in the playoffs, but the model had shifted permanently. Billy’s manager got the credit. But it wasn’t about who got the credit. After the season finished, the Boston Red Sox approached Billy with the biggest offer in the history of the game for GMs. He turned it down. It really wasn’t about the money. The Red Sox, who hadn’t won the World Series since 1903, won the World Series two years later using Billy’s method.

So, here’s the question I want to leave you with: If you had to choose one variable, Billy’s equivalent of on-base percentage (OBP) for your business, what would it be?

For my business, what resonated well with me in 2009, after two of the most challenging years in the history of real estate, was that I was faced to reevaluate how we were recruiting and retaining agents. I discovered an equation for this method. I tracked the total closed company dollar from agents recently recruited and the total closed company dollar from agents who had left the company, to arrive at a total net worth company dollar ratio. The end result, recruiting and retaining productive agents was the key to success not the quantity of agents.

So, if you had to organize around a single big thing, coach toward it, take criticism for implementing it, what would it be?