Question

how does the movie "moneyball" overcome their resistance to change? what are the strategies used?

Answer 1

How does the movie "Moneyball" overcome their resistance to change? What are the strategies used?

Moneyball is a Hollywood movie which was released in 2011, starring Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt was given the role of Billy Beane – The general manager of Oakland athletics baseball team. It was all about Billy Beane’s effort to setup and build a competitive baseball team against normal conventions.

In this movie Billy Beane is trying to assemble a team of baseball players. The Franchise which was supposed to provide financial help is limiting the budget. So Billy Beane has no other option than setup a team of undervalued players using a new method to recruit player. The technique which is used or mentioned in the movie is Sabermetric approach. This is method is data analysis of baseball data or baseball statistics which is generated as part of baseball game activities. Data analysis plays major role in the movie.

Here in this movie, Billy Beane is facing multiple resistance from various stakeholders.

1- First he was not given enough financial help to hire better players for the team. He was asked to use the standard budget and build team. This is a very usual issue in any business. In order to overcome this resistance, Beane decides to adopt a new strategy by hiring a Data analyst Brand – Acted by Jonah Hill. He is using a technique called Sabermetric –which deals with analysis and evaluating in game data statics of each game.

2- Second resistance Beane faced is that, with help of Statistical data prepared by Brand, they are planning to recruit set of player who are undervalued in the market. No one welcome this decision and they faced an immediate opposition against this decision. No one wanted to recruit baseball players based on data analysis and statics of baseball games. It was gains the traditional scouting procedure. They were planning to hire players based on on-base percentage. It is basically, if a player can help the team to get base – team scores. They were focusing on only this analysis. Finally Beane and Brand were able to hire players based on the statistical data and on-base percentage.

3- Third resistance came into picture when Beane and Brand decides to play the game with newly hired players. Manager wants to pay the game with the set of player he would like to decide. The resistance against the change is always there in every organization and this can be handled using proper change management policies. Everybody wants to stick to status quo. Here in this scenario Beane and brand plans to sell off the traders the manager wants to play. They decided to go with the players they hired based on statics.

4- Then come the resistance from the players. This is the 4th resistance, Beane is facing. The newly recruited players are not playing as they are supposed to play. They are not ready to play their part to win the game. This happens in every team or every organization. Managers has to identify some method to make sure that all are motivated and they are willing to achieve a common goal. In this scenario Beane is using anger as a tool to convince and motivate them. It is agreed that it is not the best way to motivate a team, but for the right reason, it can be effective sometimes.

After all the handwork and efforts, Beane proved that his strategy was efficient and the team won twenty games in a streak, which is the top number if win by any Team in the season.

Careful analysis of data and execution of the process as planned helped Beane and Brand to tackle the resistance and implement their strategy and it was fruitful.

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