Anantha (via Über Desi Twitter) points us to this inspiring underdog story by Malcolm Gladwell (of Tipping Point fame) of a desi basketball coach who used unconventional tactics to lead his vastly over matched team of eight graders to a successful season. [NewYorker] (via DeadSpin)
His strategy, play the full court press all the time. His reasoning for adopting the full court press was simple:
Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet.
The coach, Vivek Ranadivé, is of course, desi, and in case you thought the name sounded familiar, you’ve probably heard of his father …
His father was a pilot who was jailed by Indira Gandhi, he says, because he wouldn’t stop challenging the safety of India’s planes.
….. or TIBCO.
In 1985, Ranadivé founded a software company in Silicon Valley devoted to what in the computer world is known as “real time” processing. If a businessman waits until the end of the month to collect and count his receipts, he’s “batch processing.” There is a gap between the events in the company—sales—and his understanding of those events. Wall Street used to be the same way. The information on which a trader based his decisions was scattered across a number of databases. The trader would collect information from here and there, collate and analyze it, and then make a trade. What Ranadivé’s company, TIBCO, did was to consolidate those databases into one stream, so that the trader could collect all the data he wanted instantaneously. Batch processing was replaced by real-time processing. Today, TIBCO’s software powers most of the trading floors on Wall Street.
Like all rich-desi-uncles, Ranadive talks about his arrival in America with x amount of money in his pocket, ….
Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket.
…. does not believe in too much political correctness and doesn’t hesitate to stereotype.
“My girls were all blond-haired white girls,” Ranadivé said. “My daughter is the closest we have to a black girl, because she’s half-Indian. One time, we were playing this all-black team from East San Jose. They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls.
But when it mattered, Ranadive’s strategy was as simple as it was effective.
……………… his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”
And they did so by taking on the Goliaths of their basketball league, but on their own terms not Goliath’s.
The cautionary note to this story: when they did play on Goliath’s terms, they lost. It’s an inspiring tale, nonetheless, about taking on stronger opposition by resorting to unconventional means.
This New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell is fairly long, and touches on the success of David v. Goliath, Lawrence of Arabia and, with Gladwellish obsession on famous hoops coach Rick Pitino, among others, but makes for great reading.
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