James Surowiecki discusses the acumen of Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, noting the general applicability of many of his accomplishments:

Oakland's success is the fruit of what the legendary corporate theorist Michael Porter likes to call "strategic fit." Every part of its business is tightly linked with every other part, creating, in Porter's words, "a chain that is as strong as its strongest link." You get strategic fit only when you have a clear sense of what you are and of what you are not. "The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do," Porter says. By choice and by necessity, Beane decided that the A's would never be a team of conventional stars. And that has made him the best general manager in baseball.

Of course, this is an oversimplified portrait. First, a large part of Oakland's success has been due to the extraordinary performance of its top three young starting pitchers (Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito). Young pitchers are the most unreliable products in all of baseball, due to injuries; as such, Oakland has been extremely lucky. Second, Suroweicki does not discuss one of the most important strategies in the Oakland program: signing young players to long contracts very early in their careers, giving them financial security while saving money for the team in the long run. That way, the Athletics can have several "conventional stars" on their roster, contra Suroweicki's assertion (Miguel Tejada, their MVP-candidate shortstop, doesn't even walk much) - just at affordable prices. This strategy drove the Cleveland Indians' success in the 1990s, and is being successfully emulated by Oakland.
To back up Suroweicki's point about the difficulty of copying such methods, the Milwaukee Brewers and Detroit Tigers have tried to emulate the tactic of signing young players to multi-year deals. Unfortunately for them, the players they produced and signed were by and large not as good as those produced and signed by Cleveland and Oakland. Talent assessment if the most important part of building a winning team. Possibly the most important achievement of Billy Beane is that he has forced baseball to recognize that in assessing talent, the sabermetric methods used by Oakland can compete with the more subjective observations that have held sway throughout most of baseball history.

(Thanks to David Pinto for the link.)