In case you somehow missed it, Moneyball is a 2011 movie based on the book by Michael Lewis. Based on a true story, it depicts a baseball team, the 2002 Oakland Athletics, that found itself unable to compete with teams that had three times their team payroll. Facing the collapse of his club, manager Billy Beane realized that relying on the traditional insights of scouts simply wouldn’t result in a competitive team given the budget the A’s had available.

Instead, he turned to the most unlikely of advisors, a statistician who never played baseball but who had a deep understanding of two things: 1) what measurable events best predict wins (primarily runs scored), and 2) what individual performance statistics predict those runs. Using the power of data, Beane could identify low-cost/high impact players that scouts overlooked. The result (spoiler alert!): this radical “Moneyball” approach rocketed the underdog Oakland A’s into the playoffs– at a fraction of the salary of the teams they competed against.

It’s an inspiring story, with potential application in many fields (no pun intended!).

The Moneyball approach is starting up in several sectors: you may have heard of evidence-based policy (government) or evidence-based practice (medicine and mental health). We prefer “evidence-based decision making,” characterized by a potent strategy to make effective decisions through the use of data.

The ideas in Moneyball relate to key decisions that leaders face. Our Evidence-Based Decision Making On The Fly series drills down into the nuts and bolts of the actual decision making process and offers tools to make better strategic choices. For now, let’s just identify some key principles demonstrated by this story, and consider how they relate to decision making, planning, and leadership.

We’ll call these principles the Four Bases of Moneyball, and we’re going to run those bases in the next post.