This week’s Business Analytics Maverick of the Week is Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland A’s, for transforming his organization into a [talent / athlete] analytics-driven culture, influencing how the rest of baseball selects players. As shown in the book and recent movie Moneyball, which came out in September, Billy uniquely demonstrated a Maverick ability to go against “business as usual” and convince his gut-driven scouts and manager to stop using irrelevant data to create winning teams and instead measure data that correlated directly to performance – the athletes [the talent].

What did Billy Beane do differently?

When discussing Moneyball at IBM’s Information On Demand last month in Las Vegas, Billy summed up his approach to designing winning teams:

“Measure the data that has the strongest correlation to winning games [- the athletes themselves]” – Billy Beane, GM, Oakland A’s

Therefore, Talent Analytics is proud to honor Billy Beane with the Business Analytics Maverick of the Week award for overcoming strong cultural resistance to using talent data to forecast performance and outcomes – revolutionizing the entire baseball industry.

Mike Kennedy is a Technical Evangelist at Talent Analytics, Corp. He can be reached via mike@talentanalytics.com.