Every business has its conventional wisdom – those things that have been handed down from employer to employee, mentor to protégé, and senior executive to junior staff that explain how to approach that business. Nowhere is that more true than in baseball.

Rookies come in as players, learning from grizzled veterans and coaches. After passing the veteran stage themselves, they often move into coaching, scouting, or even the executive suite in baseball. And thus the circle remains unbroken.

Moneyball, a #1 national bestselling book by Michael Lewis, documents the efforts of one former player and a small group of like-minded people to challenge all that old wisdom in the effort to find a better, more pragmatic approach to winning. In doing so, the book presents a point of view that marketing execs should consider regarding their own approach to business as well.

The ex-player is Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. According to Lewis, Beane was one of the most talented, most promising high school players of his era. He had incredible numbers, and “looked like a ballplayer” – the highest praise the professional scouts had to offer. Yet his big league career (what there was of it) was extremely disappointing. Beane was a marginal player who could never get past his own talent and temper to fulfill his destiny.

A funny thing happened when his playing days were over. Unlike many before him, he learned from that experience. He came to realize that much of what passed for “wisdom” was really more tradition, based on gut feel and assumptions rather than hard data. When he became General Manager of the Athletics, he hired a Harvard grad/computer whiz named Paul DePodesta to help him replace conventional wisdom with a more verifiable kind: the wisdom of statistics.

Together at Paul’s computer, the two of them conspired to deconstruct the game, eliminate the assumptions, and see what really mattered when selecting players. What they learned had a profound effect on their drafts and trades the next few years, as they discovered players overlooked by other teams because they didn’t fit the conventional mold. They also completely disavowed themselves of acquiring or obtaining superstars, preferring to go with less spectacular (and far less costly) players. In other words, they ran their team like a real business instead of a rich man’s hobby.

Moneyball is a fun, fascinating read, especially if you are into the nuances of the game of baseball.  But what does all of this have to do with marketing and public relations?

More than you might expect. Our world probably has as many assumptions and truisms as does baseball. For example, marketing executives are often told by the Board that they need to hire a big-name PR agency in order to make a splash in the market. So they do it, paying huge dollars based on the agency’s past performance for other clients. But when that agency is on their team, the results don’t measure up to the hyped sales pitch.

What happens in many cases is that the results for big clients are developed by the senior-level talent at those agencies. Smaller accounts never see those folks, except at the prospect meeting. So the question you have to ask yourself is: does your agency have the budget to justify high-priced talent or will your account be serviced by junior-level talent?

Another place where organizations can get hung up is believing their story needs to appear in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and USA Today when the people who make the purchasing decisions are reading InformationWeek and Computerworld. For your company, dominating the key trade publications with case studies and feature articles may deliver a much higher on-base percentage with potential clients than always swinging for the fences with the national media. It all depends on who the key purchasing influences really are.

One of the most entrenched beliefs in the PR world is that an agency’s ability to place a story in a given publication is directly related to its relationship with the publication’s writers. While having a good relationship with a reporter certainly can help, it’s not the most important factor. In the real world, if you have a good media relationship but a so-so story, it will be difficult to convince a reporter to cover the story. By the same token, if you have a great story to tell and if it’s pitched correctly to the right media, the odds are very good that you’ll receive great coverage.

The core of Billy Beane’s approach as detailed in Moneyball is a belief that the things baseball experts value based on “experience” aren’t necessarily the keys to victory over the long term. He believes most teams overpay for high-profile statistics such as runs batted in – which in many cases is beyond the control of the hitter – while under-valuing other key indicators such as on-base percentage that his analysis shows contribute more to winning games.