Oakland Athletics
Purpose, focus, knowledge, leadership
The Oakland Athletics, an American professional baseball team, plays in Major League Baseball’s American League. In 2002, they had the third-lowest team salary in the league ($40 million), a staggering $80 million behind the highest-salaried team, the New York Yankees. With no sign of a change in available funds, the general manager, Billy Beane, sought a new way to get an advantage over the richer clubs. Beane, along with a mostly reluctant scouting team, chose a different approach to building a team: the goal was not to buy players, the goal was to buy wins; and to buy wins, the club needed to buy runs. The whole ethos of the team building was switched to focus on obtaining and nurturing ...
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