I’m not a huge baseball fan, but my daughter gave me the book Moneyball (used at many leading business schools) by Michael Lewis and I was eager to see the movie. Brad Pitt takes a break from his jet-setting life with Angelina Jolie to play Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. Billy Beane is well-known for fundamentally redefining the way baseball teams make decisions and challenging the way teams had been managed for over a century. He essentially changes the decision criteria used to select players to a much more fact-based model, which focuses on the real value the players bring toward the Intended Consequences (getting a win). Once he redesigns the consonants (People, Process, Technology), he quickly realizes that getting to the expected results is still far away. It’s not until he focuses on the vowels (Adoption, Execution, Implementation, Optimization and Utilization) that the results start showing up. The constraints he faces should sound very, very familiar to everyone. Follow the trail and tell me if you agree that we all need to be a Brad Pitt (no that does not come with Angelina Jolie).