In Moneyball, Brad Pitt’s character, Billy Beane, is trying to build a winning baseball team with zero budget. He goes to the team owner, asking for more money to bring in the best players, only to be turned down. Sound familiar?
HR teams know this struggle all too well. We want to create outstanding employee experiences, but we don’t get the investment. Instead, we’re left scrambling for scraps while sales, marketing, and finance get priority funding.
“HR gets all the scraps of money that are left over. And that’s a real problem for us.”
The reality is, every other department knows how to justify its value. Sales can point to revenue. Marketing has leads. Finance, well… finance literally holds the purse strings.
HR? We struggle to quantify our impact in a way that business leaders actually care about.
This is where we need to start thinking differently.
Introducing Mutual Lifetime Value: a new way to measure HR’s impact
The way we measure HR success is outdated and ineffective. Engagement surveys, retention rates, and employee Net Promoter Scores (eNPS) only tell part of the story. They don’t prove, in commercial terms, why investing in people actually benefits the business.
That’s why I introduced a concept at DisruptHR called Mutual Lifetime Value (MLV).
MLV measures:
✔️ The value your organisation gives to its people
✔️ The value your people give in return
It allows us to track the impact of HR as if we’re running a business within a business.
Because that’s the crux of it—HR isn’t a support function. It’s a commercial function. The sooner we start acting like one, the sooner we’ll get the investment we need.
“So today I’m very pleased to introduce you a concept called Mutual Lifetime Value, where you measure the value you give your people, and you also measure the value you get out of your people.”
Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill and the future of HR
At this point, you might be wondering, where does Jonah Hill come into this?
Well, in Moneyball, Brad Pitt isn’t a one-man team. He has Jonah Hill’s character—Peter Brand—by his side, bringing data-driven decision-making into baseball.
I’ve got my own Jonah Hill—Emilie—who works with me on this concept. Together, we use thousands of data points from companies worldwide to prove a simple truth:
“If you treat your people better, your company makes more money.”
This isn’t just an opinion. It’s a fact. The companies that prioritise employee experience consistently outperform those that don’t.
And yet, HR is still playing by old rules.
In Moneyball, Billy Beane is frustrated because the traditional baseball scouts are stuck in their ways. They keep looking at the wrong data—judging players on gut instinct rather than performance metrics.
HR does the same thing. We focus on outdated metrics, ignore commercial impact, and then wonder why we don’t get taken seriously.
We need to stop acting like those old-school scouts. It’s time to start measuring what actually matters.
HR needs a new approach to people analytics
There’s a moment in Moneyball where Brad Pitt’s character asks the team, “What’s the actual problem?”
It’s a brilliant question. And it’s one HR leaders should be asking every single day.
What’s the real reason employees leave?
What’s the real impact of our L&D programmes?
What’s the real ROI of our engagement initiatives?
Most of the time, we don’t have concrete answers. We guess. We assume. We rely on outdated surveys that don’t tell the whole story.
We need a more rigorous, commercially minded approach to people analytics.
This doesn’t mean treating people like numbers. It means understanding what truly makes a difference—and then proving it in business terms.
“If we were to truly design employee experiences with a customer experience design lens, we would do things completely differently, and therefore we need to measure them completely differently.”
The power of human-centred design in HR
In Moneyball, there’s a seemingly small but powerful moment:
Jonah Hill’s character figures out that one of the players is frustrated because he has to pay for his own soda in the locker room. It’s a tiny detail, but fixing it completely shifts the player’s experience.
That’s human-centred design in action.
HR needs to take the same approach.
It’s not just about data and metrics. It’s about truly understanding people—their needs, frustrations, and motivations—and designing workplaces that actually work for them.
When we do that, everything else—engagement, retention, performance—starts to improve.
What’s next? a choice for HR leaders
At the end of Moneyball, Billy Beane is offered a huge opportunity to take his methods to the Boston Red Sox.
That’s where HR is right now.
We can keep doing things the same way, measuring success with outdated metrics, struggling for investment, and wondering why HR isn’t seen as a commercial function.
Or, we can embrace a new way of thinking—one that’s data-driven, human-centred, and commercially focused.
It’s a choice between evolution and extinction.
Do we become the Brad Pitts of HR, changing the game?
Or do we stay stuck in the past, like the dinosaurs?
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