What kind of an impact are you having?

We went to see Moneyball last weekend. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it highly. Whether you’re a baseball fan or not (and if you know anything about me, you know I’m a HUGE baseball fan), it’s just an excellent movie. Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are great together, and the story is nice and tight all the way through.

Pitt plays Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s GM who uses data to find players to fill out his roster when it becomes apparent he won’t get the payroll dollars to compete with the big boys. Jonah Hill plays Peter Brand, Beane’s fictional assistant GM based loosely on Paul DePodesta who was with Beane during the time around which the movie is based.

The movie is based on the 2003 book by Michael Lewis of the true story of the Oakland A’s. The premise is that Beane and Brand, with a pauper’s budget in the baseball world, build a team based on the concept of Sabermetrics which analyzes baseball players based on data. This, as you can imagine, is a REAL problem for the old boy network who has been evaluating talent based on gut instinct and gas pain successfully for years. They don’t need no damn numbers, they got eyes for god’s sake!

There were a couple of things that really stuck out for me in a general business sense though: 1.) How tough it is to challenge the status quo, and 2.) Affecting culture change within an organization is BIG work.

Challenging the status quo inevitably involves stepping on toes – sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly. (By the way, knowingly is always better). Like the baseball scouts, people get used to doing things a certain way, and having their success being measured in certain a way. When something or someone comes along to challenge “the way we do it around here,” people are likely to put up a fight – figuratively, hopefully. When our work, and our work product, have been measured in certain ways for an extended period of time, it can be tough to see that there might be a better way of doing things.

As for changing a culture, that’s one of the toughest tasks in any organization whether they’re wildly successful or teetering on collapse. You could make the argument that if an organization is wildly successful you should leave the culture alone. But I’m here to tell you that success happens sometimes in spite of leadership rather than because of it. Likewise, circumstances sometimes overwhelm companies with strong cultures. Either way, culture change is tough, but it can transform an organization.

If Billy Beane hasn’t done anything else, he’s managed to keep his small-market A’s relevant for a fraction of the payroll of other clubs, and he’s made others in the game reconsider the real value each player.

Make it your business to understand your company’s goals. If they’re trying to change the status quo, understand why and get on board.