
What Gladwell is Missing: Institutional Memory - llimllib
http://billmill.org/institutional_memory.html
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foulmouthboy
All of these criticisms miss Gladwell's point. The point isn't the full court
press. It's that the teams that were beaten by the full court press thought it
broke some sort of unwritten rule of youth basketball that supposedly reads,
"don't full court press".

The whole point of the article is that in areas of competition or warfare,
very often, one side lives (and sometimes dies) by obeying rules that don't
actually exist. Goliath thought that, win or lose, the battle should happen
hand to hand and David knew to use a sling and a rock to his advantage.

When one side is playing by a certain set of rules that the other side doesn't
have to acknowledge, then the side with fewer rules has an advantage. That's
the point.

~~~
trapper
As someone who has coached basketball I call B.S. You don't put on a press
because if you are playing against a team that knows how to beat it you will
get destroyed because they will run you into the ground. It's a suboptimal
strategy because of this.

What he is essentially saying is that in any two team dynamic system you can
gain a short term advantage by playing the suboptimal strategy. In this case
it's not going to work next year, because most teams will train how to beat
it.

It's like telling your military to charge the opposition. This may surprise
them, and you might win, because the opposition isn't expecting it. But next
time don't expect it to work.

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foulmouthboy
I'm talking about the original Gladwell article. In the original article,
Gladwell points out that there are rules that competitors limit themselves to
despite the fact that they aren't explicitly laid out. The coaches of other
teams were upset at this particular team because, as they put it, it's unfair
to keep using a full court press against 12 year old girls.

The other example Gladwell referenced was of a naval simulation primarily
played by people well versed in military strategy. While most players used
traditional strategies seen throughout history, one player found that the
optimal strategy was something that would never work in real life, but was
totally feasible within the rules of the game. The other players cried foul
because he went against the "spirit" of the game, despite not breaking any
rules.

Again, the point of the article: The best way to win is to not limit yourself
by rules that don't exist.

[edit] I realize we're talking about two different things. I don't really have
an opinion either way in regards to running the full court press more often at
other levels of competitive basketball. I still think people are missing the
point of the original article, and Gladwell isn't helping himself by going on
about the full court press thing.

~~~
llimllib
I don't understand why Gladwell seems to be the only person that gets a free
pass to make totally illogical arguments, but have hundreds of smart people
say "oh, well sure, the _argument_ sucks, but you're missing the _point_ ".

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russell
Gladwell's article says that the underdog can win by using unorthodox tactics.
One of his examples is a team of undersized, unskilled 12 year old girl
basketball players that made it to the Nationals by employing the full court
press and running the other teams into the ground. The emphasis in their
training was in conditioning. Another example was T E Lawrence's use of
mobility to defeat the Turks in WWI.

Mill criticizes the article by saying that no team has made it to the NBA
championships by using the full court press. It seems that Mill has missed the
whole point of the article: if you are going to lose, do something different.
You can beat the incumbents by introducing disruptive technology.

~~~
llimllib
> if you are going to lose, do something different.

Rather, I say if you're going to lose, build for the future. Don't optimize
for seventh instead of ninth place, try to win the championship a few years
from now.

~~~
krschultz
That is true in a place like the NBA where equality among competing
organizations is a goal of the governing body, i.e. the draft hypothetically
helping the losers become equal to the winners. Just keep plugging along and
eventually you will be bailed out.

In something like business, or in Gladwell's example lower level sports, this
is not the case. Small schools will always be small, they will always have
fewer kids to pick from for their team and thus need to get unorthodox to gain
an edge.

In the business world, if I'm competing with 20 people vs 20,000 people I need
to get unorthodox to shake things up, even if my solution isn't perfectly
optimal.

~~~
llimllib
There's also more opportunity to invent a whole field in business than there
is in NBA basketball. Totally agreed.

Nonetheless, I think my point in the conclusion holds: if a company is not
optimizing what you think they should be optimizing, you're more likely
expecting the wrong goal than they are failing to optimize for the goal you
expect.

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jpwagner
Judging by the comments around here, quite a few of you seem to really want
Gladwell's analogies to work.

However, the story of David and Goliath is not one of trying new techniques
after failed attempts with old ones, it is the story of an act of God (and
possibly technology.)

Additionally his basketball example doesn't work.

I think his point is as simple as: "when what you're trying doesn't work, try
something new."

Terrific!

But the objection is with the clarity of his examples.

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anamax
Actually, Gladwell's basketball analogy does work, it just doesn't work the
way folks seem to think that it does.

The basketball team didn't win because it decided to use a full court press.

Reread the story. The kids trained so they could run a full court press the
whole game. The other teams didn't have the athletic ability to keep up.

You can't just play the game differently. You have to do what it takes to be
successful playing the game differently.

~~~
jpwagner
So you're saying people misinterpreted Gladwell's argument?

So his argument was unclear?

~~~
anamax
> So his argument was unclear?

I didn't think so. Then again, I read the story as written instead of treating
it as a basketball lesson and changing the facts to fit my world view.

I've no doubt that a full court press can be broken with sufficient skill and
althetic ability and that a broken press is worse than no press. (I suspect
that that's why NBA teams rarely use the press.)

However, if your opponents don't have that skill/ability, using the press
apparently does put them at a disadvantage. That disadvantage may be
sufficient to make up for other advantages that they have.

I find the "optimal" talk somewhat amusing.

We're talking about playing an opponent that has made certain decisions. You
can win by taking advantage of those decisions. It doesn't matter what would
happen against a different opponent until you run into said opponent.

That's especially true of perfect opponents. The fact that one strategy would
fail worse than another against a perfect opponent doesn't matter unless
you're playing a perfect opponent. Since they rarely exist and you're going to
lose anyway, worrying about them seems dumb.

In some sense, there are no points for approximating optimality.

You're rarely playing an optimal opponent and there are no points for
"optimality".

