When Billy Beane turned to the nascent discipline of data analytics to overcome a seemingly unsolvable workplace problem, his aspirations were modest. He just wanted to figure out how to beat the New York Yankees on the baseball field with a payroll about one-third their size. “We weren’t sitting in our room saying, ‘How do we create a process that’s going to change the way businesses across the world make decisions over the course of the next 25 years?’ ” says Beane, who was the general manager of the Oakland Athletics at the time.  But after the A’s emerged as…

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