In an email exchange with Malcolm Gladwell, ESPN’s Bill Simmons wonders why NBA teams rarely, if ever, take chances — specifically: Why don’t more underdogs try full court pressing opponents? The conversation then extends to the NFL too.
Gladwell’s response:
Is there any other industry in the world (well, outside of Detroit) so terrified of innovation? I went to see a Lakers-Warriors game earlier this season, and it was abundantly clear after five minutes that the Warriors’ chances of winning were, oh, no better than 10 percent. Why wouldn’t you have a special squad of trained pressers come in for five minutes a half and press Kobe and Fisher? Worst-case scenario is that you exhaust Kobe, and make him a bit more vulnerable down the stretch. Best case is that you rattle the Lakers and force a half-dozen extra turnovers that turn out to be crucial. And if you lose, so what? You were going to lose anyway…
I feel the same way about the attitude of professional football teams toward the no-huddle offense. Right now, great teams (such as the Colts and Patriots) use the no-huddle selectively, as a way to maximize their dominance. But why don’t bad teams use it? If you were the Lions, why not run the no-huddle this season? Why not put together a lighter, better-conditioned offensive line and a radically simplified playbook and see what happens? It’s not as if you are risking a Super Bowl if it backfires. Your offensive line is lousy anyway, so there’s no harm in tearing it down, and your fans aren’t going to turn on you if you get killed while you work out the kinks. Last I checked, your fans have already turned on you. On the plus side, maybe the no-huddle exhausts the other team’s defense so much you slow down their pass rush in the second half. And maybe giving your quarterback a bit more autonomy helps develop his knowledge of the game, and his leadership skills.
The consistent failure of underdogs in professional sports to even try something new suggests, to me, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the incentive structure of the leagues.
Obvious parallels to the business world here too. (“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” anyone?) Sometimes the riskiest thing to do is not take any risks. If you’re outmatched by the competition, isn’t it silly not to take a chance? If you’re an underdog in your niche, the Warriors or the Lions of your industry, playing it safe and imitating the established players will probably doom you to failure.
One or two-person businesses that think they need to follow “common sense” advice that’s worked for the big guys are missing the point. When you’re small and risking less, you don’t need a business plan. You don’t need a board of directors. You don’t need to study the techniques of Fortune 500 CEOs. You don’t need to know Six Sigma ideas. The strategy that’s right for heavyweights has nothing to do with how welterweights should fight.
Related pieces on underdogs who use innovation to compete: “How David Beats Goliath” is Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker about the topic. Michael Lewis wrote about the unorthodox success of Texas Tech’s football team in “Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep” [NY Times]. When Texas Tech reached the No. 2 ranking in college football last year, Lewis followed up with a piece that discussed how Leach knew he had to be different to have a chance.
To appreciate what he’s done you have to appreciate how hard it is to get players—he gets third or fourth bite of apple down there. He’s working with everyone else’s rejects. Generally, he’s doing so much more with so much less.
Lewis also covered similar ground in Moneyball, which analyzed the Oakland A’s success despite its limited payroll.
Ari Rochmann
on 27 May 09I agree completely with your take on this Matt. As a small business owner I cannot take the same route or use the same processes that a larger company would follow. A small business gives one the flexibility and opportunity to try things that the larger companies could only dream of.
GeeIWonder
on 27 May 09Pitino’s explanation is that it’s because most coaches simply can’t convince their players to work that hard. What do you think of that argument?
I think Pitino’s explanation is dead on, and I think Gladwell would be a fool to not take the opinion of the guy he proclaims the master of the art in the sentence before.
If you take a chance, you better be willing to put some mustard behind it. Few have that sort of honest-to-goodness conviction and self belief. A lot of people pretend they do, but very few actually have the goods. Especially when, say, the SvN blog you follow religiously posts something directly contrary to your chosen view.
lucky land
on 27 May 09you have to be adept enough to go no-huddle in the first place. teams in the cellar don’t use it a lot precisely because they don’t have that chemistry.
Grant Hutchins
on 27 May 09I wonder how statistics plays into this. I wouldn’t be surprised if some players worry more about hitting a certain number of rebounds instead of risking that to win a handful of games.
ML
on 27 May 09Grant, The No-Stats All-Star by Lewis explores this a little bit (discussing Shane Battier from the Houston Rockets).
FredS
on 27 May 09No-huddle would not have fixed the Lions biggest problem – their defense.
sfmitch
on 27 May 09To back up your point, look at the 2007 -> 2008 Miami Dolphins.
2007 record = 1 – 15 (1 win and 15 losses) 2008 record = 11 – 5 & they won their division
The introduction of their Wildcat offense was definitely going against conventional wisdom = they took some chances.
I have read quite a few articles on the subject of risk taking in Pro Sports (mostly football – sorry, don’t remember which articles) and the main conclusion seemed to be job security. Coaches who lose following traditional methods are less likely to be vilified by the press & lose their job.
NewWorldOrder
on 27 May 09I can see the parallel to business, but it is fuzzy. What are some concrete examples of things that a 2-person company, for example, can do that a large company can’t/won’t do?
David Andersen
on 27 May 09I echo GeelWonder and Pitino’s explanation. It is risky to assume that the attitudes of the players and coaches on all these teams is identical. It’s easy to assume that because this is the NBA or NFL everyone is the cream of the crop with respect to world-beating attitudes, but it’s not true at all.
People with amazing talent and terrible attitudes/work ethics are in the NBA and NFL (and other high echelons in the world). Getting them to change is tough. They haven’t worked very hard their entire life, why would they change now?
I think behind most organizational problems you’ll find failures of attitude, not failures of tactics and strategy.
David Andersen
on 27 May 09What are some concrete examples of things that a 2-person company, for example, can do that a large company can’t/won’t do?
Change direction quickly.
Ken
on 27 May 09“The consistent failure of underdogs in professional sports to even try something new suggests, to me, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the incentive structure of the leagues.”
To me it suggests incredible restraint. If you’re not a very good violin player, you practice the basics. I would not suggest to a mediocre violinist to just try crazy things, on the off chance that something would sound great and he’d land a gig at Carnegie Hall.
Great sports teams (or any kind of team) are great because they can handle both the average case and the outrageous case so well. (If you’re a chess player, go find a grandmaster and try making crazy moves and tell me how well it works at rattling them.)
Mediocre sports teams have a relative advantage at playing the basics. They might have a 10% chance of winning playing the basics because the Patriots are 10x better at the basics, but they have a 1% chance of winning playing a more exotic strategy because the Patriots are going to be 100x better at that.
Also, what happens 3 years from now? Do you want to be a player or coach who was on the team that beat the Patriots once on a couple of crazy plays, or the one who was on the team that steadily improved through practice?
Software is a completely different business. First, if you strike it rich once, you can get really rich; it doesn’t matter to Bill Gates’ bottom line if he knows the basics of computer science today. Second, tech companies are of unbounded size and prone to natural monopolies; established rich players are not necessarily better than you at either the basics or the exotic strategies.
The upshot of these differences is that, in software, if you try one crazy stupid thing (dude, let’s build a video sharing website in our garage) and it works (sweet, $1.65 billion acquisition!) you’re set for life. You can bet that if the Lions thought they could score that kind of money for following through on one crazy idea, they’d be trying it all the time, too.
Shane Vitarana
on 27 May 09Never thought I’d see the words Six Sigma again. At Motorola, they use Six Sigma in code reviews. It calls for a certain number of bugs to be present in a certain number of lines of code. These bugs are supposed to get flushed out during the code review process. So what happens when you don’t have any bugs? You have to fake them. Engineers frequently faked bugs in their code to adhere to code review standards. There are many reasons Motorola couldn’t make an iPhone. This is just one of them.
I see many young entrepreneurs bringing over their “skills” from large corporations into their startups. Don’t. They’re stupid. They hamper creativity and getting real work done.
Pat Maddox
on 27 May 09It doesn’t pay to be an average team in professional sports. The absolute worst position you can be in at the end of the season is to have missed the playoffs by a whisker – you don’t get the fat playoff payoff, and come draft time you don’t get one of the prized top picks.
Gladwell’s right that professional sports incentive systems are screwed up. Teams are rewarded for being the best or the worst, but not average. What incentive did the 2008 lions have to try to win 3 games last year? None…they would have simply lost the top draft pick to the Rams or Chiefs.
You tend to see a lot more innovation or creativity, although not as high quality, in college sports, because there’s no incentive for finishing in last place.
How this relates to small business…I’m not sure
briano
on 27 May 09the first thing i thought of is the grinnell college basketball team. the coach had trouble keeping enough players on the team to be able to scrimmage through a full season so he developed a new way to play…
Coach David Arseneault’s “system” incorporates a continual full-court press, a fast-paced offense, an emphasis on offensive rebounding, a barrage of three-point shots and substitutions of five players at a time every 35 to 40 seconds.
they went from having trouble fielding a full team to regularly finishing in the top half of their conference. it’s fun to watch and i can imagine it’s even more fun to play.
Bruno
on 27 May 09coftheblackswancof
Derek
on 27 May 09Another article that hits home. Thanks for sharing this guys.
GeeIWonder
on 27 May 09Coach David Arseneault’s “system” incorporates a continual full-court press, a fast-paced offense, an emphasis on offensive rebounding, a barrage of [...] point shots and substitutions of five players at a time every 35 to 40 seconds.
It’s called hockey. ;)
Stephan
on 27 May 09What are some concrete examples of things that a 2-person company, for example, can do that a large company can’t/won’t do?
Use any language other than Java. :)
Jake
on 27 May 09Coincidence… I was just looking at the new Underdog website.
http://underdog.tv/
Background movie on a website? Now that’s risky, but they’ve pulled it off well.
Happy
on 27 May 09Gladwell ignores the fact that while the teams all shoot to win, they are also part of a league who’s job it is to draw the largest numbers of fans, tv audience, and revenue.
In complaining that “The normal rules of the marketplace and human psychology don’t apply” he makes the faulty analogy to GM. Pro sports teams operate with a territory franchise. They are not the GM vs. Ford model. GM wants to take market-share from Ford. Pro sports teams are not out to take market-share from their in-league ‘competitors’. Teams have a vested interest in seeing their league succeed. This is why we see seemingly abnormal behavior such as revenue-sharing agreements.
The normal rules of the marketplace and human psychology do apply. It’s just that Malcolm’s looking for them at the team level while they are found at the league level. To own a team in the pro sport league of your choice, you play by the franchise rules; just like any other franchise business. To be a player on those teams, you enter into your union’s collective bargaining agreement – just like any other normal employee. Though the money is different than most other employees, I fail to share in Gladwell’s frustration that the normal rules of the marketplace don’t apply.
Martial
on 27 May 09Trying something risky does not mean that you don’t do fundamentals too. You just have to choose which fundamentals matter to your strategy. High stamina is fundamental for the full-court press. Receivers who can sight read defenses and adjust their own routes is fundamental for the no-huddle. Both are skills that you can practice, practice, practice until you are really good at them – and if you are really good at them, then other skills you could have spent time practicing are not necessary.
The Patriots are great because the current coaching staff concentrates on the fundamentals. They can program a complex offense because each individual has mastered the basics of their position. Free agents who come to the Pats have said they are surprised by how much time the Patriots spend in practice repeating those things football players should have gotten down back in high school.
A reason the Lions suck is they don’t spend much time on the fundamentals. The Lions defense was awful because they could not tackle and they took bad angles in pursuit, two fundamental things that a defensive football player must know in his bones and that are taught from day one in PeeWee. But because every football player “knows” them, coaches skimp on the practice in order to concentrate on the “fun” stuff.
Too many people get caught up in being good enough at too many things. Don’t be good enough; be great.
Wim
on 27 May 09We just did.
This is so true, thanks for the post guys!
Mike MacAdam
on 28 May 09The worst case scenario about pressing the Lakers is that they score lay-ups until you take it off. Doing something different can work only if you have the right personnel for that strategy and you do it well. That is very hard, just as Pitino says. The wildcat worked for the Dolphins but it was only one of many changes made. That being said, a different strategy can work for a short period of time. For example, some teams go box and one for a while in basketball and take it off the instant the other team adapts.
My guess is that taking a chance in the software world means going after a market segment that no one else is after. Success in this niche works out when the niche is bigger than expected or if it helps you get into a bigger market.
David Smith
on 28 May 09As the owner of a very small business, I couldn’t agree more. I have found that often the less overall risky decision is actually the most risky decision for the moment.
We develop iPhone apps and simply don’t have the time or money to adhere to Industry Best Practice. We run the equivalent of a No-Huddle offense, knowing that our biggest risk to success isn’t our app being perfect but our app not getting to the market at all.
So far it has been very successful, we currently have the #1 most popular book app, Audiobooks. Which was built in about a week and run on a shoestring IT budget.
When you are small there isn’t really such a thing as a big risk, because you have such a small distance to fall if it all fails.
sloan
on 28 May 09I think the goal is not to do something crazy or risky but to simply try something different and adapt to the situation. All too often businesses and sports teams just stick to what they know. I think the fourth quarter and overtime of the Cavs/Magic game is a great example. Dwight Howard had 5 fouls and the Cavs were still shooting jumpers. Then Anderson Varejao fouled out and they are stuck with Zydrunas Ilgauskas and they don’t post him up once? Why? Adapting to that game situation with James exhausted and the foul situation why wouldn’t you change up your game style for a few plays and at least try to get their best player out of the game? Same for business, adapt to the current conditions and work outside of your comfort zone if there is an opportunity out there.
Irene Bartholomew
on 01 Jun 09Matt, Please add image credits to your William Utermohlen piece. Galerie Beckel Odille Boicos 1 rue Jacques Coeur 75003 Paris FRANCE
This discussion is closed.