Do You Believe in This Thing or Not?

A few weeks back, I re-watched one of my favourite films of all time; Moneyball. There is a powerful scene in this movie when Billy Beane looks at Peter Brand and says:

“Do you believe in this thing or not?”

The context of this dialogue is what makes this conversation so unique. If you aren’t familiar with the story, Billy (General Manager of the Oakland Athletics Baseball Team) hired a guy named Peter Brand. Peter’s job was to take a formula he had studied in Economics at Yale University and put it to the test in the sport of Baseball. While severely unconventional, many leaders on the team did not understand what Billy and Peter were doing and how they were going to win. The questions grew into rumours of becoming fired when; halfway through the season, the team was struggling and was below .500 (more losses than wins).

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Billy decided that in order to generate buy-in he had to force his entire leadership team to stick to the principles Peter was trying to apply. So, he ‘gutted’ about 1/3 of his team mid way through the season in hopes of moving the players he had into the right positions based on Peters revolutionary formula.

Simply put: Billy had to burn the boats and potentially burn his career, or he could not burn the boats and surely burn his career. The difference was buy-in.

The underlying message here is powerful. If you do not go all in on our goals, ambitions and dreams of becoming the best team, Organization or business in your industry, you are already one step away from a trail that leads to becoming obsolete.

If this is you or your team, here are three ways you need to do to shift your thinking to “here’s to hoping this thing will work” to, “We believe this thing will work.”

Seek Silence

When you go all in on an idea, project or concept that challenges the norm and requires others to be potentially even more uncomfortable than you are, it will create noise. People will talk. Shareholders will doubt. Managers will ‘have better ideas’, etc.. If you are to believe in the thing you feel works best, you must seek silence. Don’t bother trying to silence everyone around you either; that will happen naturally when you see the results through to the end.

Be Ready To Lose It All

You’d better be ready to lose it all. I am not a gambler, but I have played a hand or two of poker. When I win, it seems to always be on the ‘river’ card. I like seeing all the cards on the table. Look for the cards you have and make the absolute best possible decision you can make based on what you believe. Use your intuition. The greater the stakes, the greater the reward. Fortune favours the bold, take the shot and be ready for either outcome.

Throw Money Out The Window & Open The Door To Value

Businesses, Organizations and people often make decisions based on money and not on value. Money is what feeds our families and profits are what keep your business or Organization alive. However, somewhere between Bitcoin and cash there lies a currency of impact. In the scene above, Billy explains to Peter that if the thing they are trying to do goes south, he still had an impressive internship at 25. Why? Because he applied business economics principles to the sport of baseball and added tremendous value and impact to a game which relies on statistics, millions of dollars, with millions of fans. That currency of impact was worth flipping the river card on their formula.

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My Thought Leadership for you today is simply this. Make your move, show the world and share it back with us on Medium.

Whether you do or you don’t, you were meant to do either. — Henry Ford

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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