Breaking the rules

The first sentence of Malcolm Gladwell's piece in this week's New Yorker on "When David beats Goliath - When underdogs break the rules" starts:

"When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles."

At this point, like any tech professional, I thought "Is that Vivek Ranadivé from TIBCO?". And, when I flicked a couple of pages further to check, sure enough it is Vivek Ranadivé the CEO of TIBCO.

Well worth reading the article. Gladwell talks about how the "full press" strategy for basketball, while not pretty, can unsettle more skilful opponent team and allow the underdog to win. Gladwell uses a number of analogies, such as Laurence of Arabia's campaign against the Ottoman Empire, though I'd say a glaring omission is Jack Charlton's "Put them under pressure" strategy for the Republic of Ireland team in the Italia '90 World Cup campaign. That strategy was based on harassing the other team into losing the ball, and generally closing down the other team and not letting them play. It meant that the Irish team did much better than expected, reaching the quarter finals versus Italy in Rome. However, the strategy fell down when the other team didn't play (witness the notorious game versus Egypt) but it generally worked well. But, as Gladwell asks, what if every team did this? I think the secret is practice, attitude and training, something which is a common thread with Gladwell (that practice, training, and attitude trump talent - e.g. the Beatles spent a year performing 8-hour sets in Hamburg in order to hone their art). Not every team gets the attitude right, and that's what Ranadivé instilled.