How to win
Sure it's a cheap link to pop culture, but sometimes you just have to take it. So in homage to March Madness (which really starts today, play-in games are prelim)...
A couple of Wharton professors crunched the numbers of thousands of college basketball games and found that a team that is only slightly behind at half is more likely to win the game than a team that is slightly ahead at half.
See the release, or, if you're really geeky like me, check out the PDF of the actual paper.
In it they make the point that the motivation of being so near a goal but being just short of it is the difference. I think it's also true that this correlates to Jim Collins' Good to Great. One of Collins' key points is that good is the enemy of great. Good companies (those leading by a little at halftime) become complacent and succumb to aggressive, motivated companies.
Now, I don't mean this an endorsement of Good to Great or even ASAE & The Center's 7 Measures, neither of which really need any extra kudos. In fact, maybe I'll do a post sometime on my thoughts of books of that business genre that seek define what makes successful companies successful. (For a sneak peak, read up on The Halo Effect.)
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