Baseball’s Billy Beane Shows Companies the Power of Data

Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane brought a data driven and unconventional approach to winning baseball games. By setting strategy and articulating the metric to evaluate and acquire the players who would ultimately implement his strategy on the field, Beane’s sabermetrics approach brought about a cultural shift in baseball from the players and managers to coaches and scouts. Harvard Business School professor Srikant Datar discusses how strategy and metrics work hand-in-hand, and how Beane’s story provides companies with important lessons in data science.