I only hire employees by their resume and references, and you are a idiot if you do anything else.

I totally ignore an prospective employee's resume and the word of prior employers and rely entirely on how they perform in their interview, only morons would do anything differently.

Employees should be promoted by IQ rank, to ensure the best end up running the company and their results will eventually catch up to their abilities.

Results matter, so my employees who produce the most results always get the most authority, no matter how ill-suited they are intellectually, and regardless of how many claims of sexual harassment, fraud, and likely embezzlement have been made (or sustained) against them.

And if I do test employees, I demand the testing service give me a single number to rank each employee by, so I can draw a line and fire everyone below it and reward everyone above it without missing my tee time.

I do not want any test service that gives each employee multiple scores, each rating their strength in a specific key job skill, because actually using that information requires me actually putting in work to determine where they can best contribute to our teams efforts and how I can best help them improve their weaknesses to become productive workers instead of firing them, and I will end up missing many tee times.

Judging solely by WAR would be silly.

The Barney anecdote is also silly. Of course you wouldn't trade Cabrera for Barney (at least money aside) even if you believed wholeheartedly in WAR because Cabrera has been outstanding for several seasons while Barney had been (possibly) excellent for half a season. Certainly don't use WAR (or BA/HR/RBI for that matter) for player projection if you have no grasp of random variation.

The more question WAR question is "which would you pay more for, guaranteed first-half Barney production or guaranteed first-half Cabrera production?" That's a tougher question (and recall Cabrera went nuts in the 2nd half of the season). You could extend this to Cabrera vs. Trout -- I'm not particularly confident that Trout is a better player right now, in true talent terms, than Cabrera. I certainly don't expect Trout to keep putting up 10-11 WAR seasons while I do expect Cabrera to chug along in the 5-7 range for at least a few more. But I'd pay a lot more for guaranteed Trout 2012 than guaranteed Cabrera 2012.

Of course nobody can guarantee that. For GMs, "do you believe in WAR?" is a secondary question to "how much faith do you have in projections?"