The Analysis of Strategy from movie Moneyball Essay

The Analysis of Strategy from movie Moneyball - Essay Example This approach involves the scouting and analysis of players followed by their acquisition. Through this strategy, they acquire Chad Bradford, a pitcher, and Scott Hatteberg, a catcher. They go on to win an American league record 20 games in a row. This team did not qualify into the World Series in 2002, and they have not made in back into the series ten years down the line. These years remained impressive ones, not only in the history of the game, but also in the franchise. The need to get this team back into World Series, and win more titles called for the team’s top management to adopt and implement new strategies, which will ensure the future success of this team. This paper, therefore, seeks to describe how new strategies, especially technology and innovation, can create a competitive advantage for an organization with reference to the movie â€Å"Money ball’s Strategy†. The Oakland A’s vision was to find young players who had little ability for pay ne gotiations (Rosner & Kenneth). In 1995, new management broke up the roster of the team in order to trim costs and this caused performances to nose dive. At this same period, they designed the new strategy based on a low budget, concentrating on on-base percentage. By 1999, performances had begun to improve, with their revenue responding to this performance. Attendance spiked dramatically, while ticket prices also rose. This showed that their strategy for getting victory in games was successful at exploiting the opportunity at profit. During the period spanning 2000-2004, the average position player’s wage went up from $2.6 million to $3 million (Rosner & Kenneth 358). Home run hitters earned approximately $3.5 million more than the rest of the players. This was difficult for the Oakland A’s team to follow, since they were not in a position to challenge well-established and financially sound teams. However, the Oakland A’s discovered that there was gross underval uation of on-base percentage in the market. The most significant method of measuring skill at batting had been batting average, which weighted home runs and singles the same. The slugging percentage was also in use where home runs counted four times as much as singles. These two, however, ignored walks and sacrifices. There was undervaluation of the ability to get on base. Lack of hitters possessing superior skill at market premiums, who master the patient art of touching base via walks, validated the A’s approach in identifying these players. This translated into winning more games at a discount compared to their competition. At first, however, the team’s scouts were hostile and dismissive to the sabermetrics approach that was non-traditional for scouting players. The manager began to select players based on base percentage, therefore, assembling a team with more potential than their finances would have allowed. The Oakland A’s used an integrated low-cost and d ifferentiation strategy (Rosner & Kenneth 358). This allowed them to adapt to the changing financial environment, which was going beyond them, allowing them to learn and integrate new technologies and skills, while improving their ability to leverage core competencies more effectively across their business model, and enabling them to purchase hitters with improved features at much lower costs. Using this strategy, they managed to exploit the low market demand that was there for those kinds of hitters