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.
He didn't miss the point at all. What he said was that the Warriors aren't trying to win a few marginal games this year, they are trying to build themselves back into the kind of team that can win championships, and you don't get there by training a team to press.
Dean Oliver used to write "The Journal of Basketball Studies" (http://www.rawbw.com/~deano/ ), and I recall him making the point that the press basically randomizes games. If you are a poor team, that _will_ help you win more games. But perhaps developing a culture that randomizes games isn't going to lead you to championships.
Not sure I buy the argument, but it deserves more thought, and is certainly better than you are making out.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.