“Essentially I see the big banks in your world as the New York Yankees in mine,” Baxter said. “They are the very big competitors with large budgets and large organizations, but credit unions are like special operations teams, smaller, more agile and motivated to make change with few resources.”

Meanwhile, Billy Beane, general manager with the Oakland Athletics, is credited with sharply changing baseball management by demonstrating that player performance statistics need to play a much larger role than emotion or tradition in making personnel decisions.

Baxter drew from both his experience as a musician and as a military consultant to demonstrate how the fundamentals of a song or military tactic can remain the same but also change. Chords can be substituted within chord groups to sharply change the sound of a song while the song's lyrics remain the same, and tactics can keep the same goals but be adapted to meet different situations.

Beane shared the lessons he learned about studying data and trusting numbers as means for making decisions instead of simply trusting in tradition and emotion as guides for decision making.

“One of the most important things I learned was that the numbers do not lie and that if you trust the numbers they will work,” Beane said.

Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane makes a point at the THINK Conference.