The fourth quarter is when Esteemed CEOs turn next year’s ambitions into action.
In 2002, the Oakland Athletics faced a problem that no amount of hustle could solve. They had one of the smallest payrolls in baseball and they were competing against teams that could spend several times as much. Every conventional answer to the question “How do we build a winner?” required money they did not have. So general manager Billy Beane asked a different question. He stopped asking who the best players were and started asking what actually wins games.
That shift, from chasing the outcome to understanding what produces it, is the work of the fourth quarter for Esteemed Members.
In the third quarter, we set our big goals, refined our strategy and looked ahead to our three year plan. Last month, we focused on budgeting and the discipline of knowing our numbers, especially our expenses. This month, we take those big plans and break them into focused initiatives for 2027. This month, we build operations plans.
Few words in business are as overused as “strategy,” and it is often applied to the wrong thing. The simplest definition is this. Your vision and goals are the destination. Your strategy is the roadmap that gets you there. Your operations plan is what turns that roadmap into motion. It defines the tasks and milestones each goal requires and every one of them needs a single accountable owner and a completion date. What gets done, by whom and by when? That is project management at its most basic, and it is where most plans quietly fail.
But a plan alone does not tell you whether you are winning. For that, you need the right measures.
Key performance indicators are the observable behaviors that predict future success. They give leaders the information to make decisions grounded in data rather than instinct. We measure the behavior, compare it with the result and adjust when the two drift apart. This is the heart of Class 4 of The Esteemed MBAi, What Gets Measured Gets Done. A goal is a destination. A KPI is the behavior you can see this week that tells you whether you are moving toward it. Results lag. Behaviors lead. Leaders who watch only the scoreboard discover too late that their teams stopped doing the things that produce wins.
Which brings us back to Oakland. In the film Moneyball, Beane, played by Brad Pitt, works alongside his assistant general manager, Peter Brand, to rethink how a team gets built. Brand starts with the goal of reaching the playoffs and works backward. How many games must the team win? How many runs must it score? How many can it afford to allow? Then he drills down to the one number that matters most: on base percentage.
Get on base.
A single, a double, a walk or a hit by pitch all count the same. The method matters less than the behavior. Once the A’s understood that, every decision, from which players to sign to which ones to let go, aligned around that number. The insight was not that data matters. It was that most organizations are measuring the wrong things, and the advantage goes to whoever finds the right one first.
That is what I want our CEOs to do with their teams. Define the goal. Identify the behaviors that produce it. Find the critical number, then focus on it relentlessly. In the MBAi, we ask students to write that number into a goal with milestones and a single accountable owner, because a KPI that nobody owns is just a report.
Jim Collins offers a related lens in Turning the Flywheel. He describes how Amazon came to understand its own momentum. Lower prices attract more customers. More customers attract more sellers. More sellers expand selection and build scale. Scale makes still lower prices possible, and the cycle turns again, faster each time.
The lesson is not to copy Amazon’s obsession with price. It is to find the driver that creates momentum in your own organization. Every company has a handful of critical behaviors that connect one result to the next. The right KPI shows your team where to focus, confirms whether the behavior is actually happening and reveals how that behavior feeds the larger goal.
This month, we are turning our 2027 goals into operations plans. We are naming the actions behind each goal, assigning one owner to every task and setting clear completion dates. We are searching for our own on base percentage, the number that can spin the flywheel and carry our organizations toward growth, value and success.
Let’s give it a spin. Let’s Be Esteemed.