A fan of baseball? No? Never mind! Moneyball has less to do with baseball and more to do with an underdog’s unique tactics to overcome the odds stacked against it. This movie is based on Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game where Lewis researched the real life baseball team the Oakland Athletics and its general manager Billy Beane.

Faced with a limited budget, Bean (Brad Pitt) decides to take the untested sabermetric approach towards building his team to achieve incredible results in the Major Baseball League (MLB). What are the relationships to business in the movie? Billy Bean had to adapt to survive. He knew Oakland could not compete with the big guns in the league because they did not have deep pockets (they were spending only $44mil in salaries against the New York Yankee’s $125mil!). As such, he had to take risks and make tough decisions to achieve good results. Most startups face a similar scenario when they go up against stiff competition from established businesses in the market. Billy Beane’s success story at Oakland A’s shows that success can be achieved through risk-taking and inventiveness. One of the best scene in the movie was when Billy Beane tried to describe the problems the Oakland A’s were facing (realizing the root cause) and what they needed to do to overcome them (experimenting with new ideas). Definitely a movie you should watch or to get a better view read the book!