This is an idea that changed my life. Let me share it with you, maybe it will change yours.

Among top performers, the margin of victory is usually very narrow

There’s a lot of buzz going around this season because NBA games are the most lopsided that they’ve ever been in the league’s history. The average margin of victory is 12.3 points per game. The average number of points scored every game is 111.8. This got me thinking about one of my older maxims, “victory is at the margins,”  because it contradicts the maxim.

I calculated the average margin of victory for the games played on April 11th, 2021, and arrived at 6%. That’s closer to what I’ve seen historically. Or if you look at most NFL games, they’re typically won by a single field goal or touchdown. Narrow margins of victory. Normally in the NFL, they have a saying – “any given Sunday.” Because they understand that the margins of victory are so narrow that on any given Sunday the worst team in the NFL can beat the best one.

But what does this mean for your career or business?

This means that small optimizations can make a big difference. If the margin of victory is often only a few percent, then a handful of small optimizations can be the difference between a winning or losing season. Small optimizations are often easier to make than larger ones, and you can stack them. A half dozen 1% improvements, for example. 

This means you should “leverage the lopsided.” Are any of your competitive advantages highly asymmetrical? Or would they impose an asymmetrical cost on your competition? That’s what I’m pondering from this example of the NBA – it contradicts my previous maxim of narrow margins.

Most sports analysts attribute the league’s greater reliance on three-pointers and new rules that increased free-throw shots and possession as the major contributors to the larger victory margins. It would seem that when it comes to free throws and three-pointers, players and teams are more lopsided in their abilities. Previously this wasn’t much of an issue because they didn’t come up that often, but now the game has changed.

My first takeaway here is that the rules of the game changed and those skills ended up having a greater impact on scores – so you want to keep your thumb on the rules of the game that you’re playing or how they’re changing when you put a team together. It’s possible that the guys doing the recruiting at the NBA didn’t realize the impact the new rules changes would have and didn’t trade or recruit players with strong three-point skills or free throw ability which led to short-term asymmetry. By next season, that may change. Or, maybe, there just aren’t enough players to recruit with those skills.

I’m going to keep chewing on this though – I think there is more to articulate. I might dig more into the NBA example over the next few weeks and see if I can find more data that will lead to more insights. I need to develop this idea further.

Key Takeaway

The margin of victory is usually very narrow among top performers. This means small improvements can lead to winning seasons.

-Ordinary_Wylie

This idea changed my life, changed the way I manage my team, and changed how I approach improving a system or process. If it helps you too, let me know in the comments below.

P.S. A lot of people have heard of a lot of these ideas, but I’m wondering if there is value in synthesis? I’m thinking about posting about related topics and their entelechy. That is I could post again about how this idea affects businesses, professionals, and teams that are just starting out and trying to “catch up” to the top performers, and how small improvements compound over time. The idea is that these separate ideas combine to form a concept with greater potential than the parts. Let me know if you’d like some content like that.

P.P.S. If you’d like to get my intelligence briefs, you can get them here: https://thedigitalordinary.substack.com/