I remember when my former boss at the time told me that I was not ever going to be a manager simply because of my personality, not because of my extremely good performance on the team. From that day forward, I was going to prove to him and everyone else in the world that no, you cannot assume that not everyone cannot be a manager let a lone a good one. And when he left his position, I took over the team regardless and managed them well based on the methodologies of empowering rather than using my team to push me to the top.

On the topic of Moneyball, I worked for a company that followed those methodologies in both the team structure and product development (video games). The company went under only 4 months after I got hired. This is when I decided to retire from the game industry and move into database development. Up until that time, I viewed the c concept as a very hard one to implement and make successful.

However, the new company I work for does a lot of those tests to measure a employees personality, work ethic and everything else to sort of classify people into groups. From there, they are able to identify how different people work best and how they do the worse. Sort of like our employee stats for everyone to see in plain view.

In total transparency, the entire team knows each others strengths and weaknesses. Thus, you can better understand how to work with one another as well for management to suggest improvements through employee training.

The same applies to management, especially in our company. We did one for all non-managers, one for middle management and then one for executive management. We got everything out in the open about everyone and had great dialog with each others work ethics and personalities.

I know from my experience, many of our managers changed dramatically for the better after the analyzation of how they work. My co-workers also agreed in a postmortem of the analyzation months after.

So, using the concept to not weave (or trade like baseball players), but identify strengths and weaknesses can work if everyone is on board and everyone is willing to change for the better based on the results. Those that don't, well, it's going to be hard to push forward not being a team player.