BOCA RATON, Fla. – A rock star turned defense consultant and theman who has revolutionized how to run baseball teams both deliveredstrong messages to credit union executives about the approachesthey might take to reinvent and revitalize the CU movement.

Both men addressed audiences at the COOP Financial ServicesTHINK 12 Conference in Boca Raton on Monday, a day thatconference organizers had set aside for the theme ofreinvention.

(CO-OP CEO Stan Hollen discusses the evolution ofTHINK over the past five years in this video.)

Jeff Baxter spent years as lead guitarist with the bands DoobieBrothers and Steely Dan and then as an equipment and strategyconsultant for the Defense Department.

“Essentially I see the big banks in your world as the New YorkYankees in mine,” Baxter said. “They are the very big competitorswith large budgets and large organizations, but credit unions arelike special operations teams, smaller, more agile and motivated tomake change with few resources.”

Meanwhile, Billy Beane, general manager with the OaklandAthletics, is credited with sharply changing baseball management bydemonstrating that player performance statistics need to play amuch larger role than emotion or tradition in making personneldecisions.

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

Beane shared the lessons he learned about studying data andtrusting numbers as means for making decisions instead of simplytrusting in tradition and emotion as guides for decisionmaking.

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

Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane makes a point at the THINKConference.