Innovation Jump-Shots

“I don’t like jump-shooting teams. I don’t think you can win the championship beating good teams shooting jumpers.” This was Charles Barkley explaining why he doesn’t think the Golden State Warriors will go the distance on their three-point shots. Charles obviously knows a lot about basketball (yes, more than me), and yet, I disagree with him, and here’s why:

Yes, the Warriors, my local team, take a lot of three-point shots (27 per game in the regular season) and on average they make 10.7 per game. When the Warriors made 10 or more 3 point shots per game this year, they had a 90% winning percentage for 47 of their 67 wins.

It’s also really important to note that the Warriors aren’t just flinging them up there. On average they shot nearly 40% from 3 due in no small part to the acumen of the Splash Brothers Klay Thompson and Steph Curry. They know a three-pointer is always difficult, but the team has the discipline to take selectively good shots, and when they shot over 38%, they also won 91% of the time for 49 of their wins. So in summary, a sufficient number of reasonably selective 3 pointers wins ball games for the Warriors. They know a sufficient number of calculated three-point shots is going to land, and this strategy has led them to a great season.

So Charles Barkley is right in that wildly flinging up three-point jump shots is a bad strategy. And perhaps it could turn out to be true that in the Playoffs, stepped up defense will prevent the Warriors from landing more than 10, or higher than 38% of their 3s, but so far his theory has been wrong across the course of a whole series. Everyone on the team could have a cold game at the same time, with disastrous results, but with a talented team and strong bench, and consistency of approach across games, the chances of losing an entire series are low.

While it seems perhaps a stretch, there’s a lesson in there that applies to technology innovation: any given bet on innovation can be as risky as a step back three, but with the right talent you can do well by relying on a reasonable portfolio of high risk / high reward innovations. That’s been our approach at Motorola. We take a handful of well reasoned shots every year, and are confident we will land enough to deliver a good result for the consumer. We have always had exceptional engineering. It stands to reason that if we empower a number of teams to focus on real consumer problems, we’ll end up landing some very good jump shots indeed.

And that is exactly what happened with technologies like Moto Voice, Moto Display, Moto Maker, Dynamic RF Tuning, and more. The list goes on, and more balls are heading for the basket. In fact, this strategy led us to become one of Fast Company’s most innovative companies in consumer electronics last year.

It’s true, some of our shots haven’t landed, but we don’t regret taking any of them. We look across the portfolio at the different percentages, and we’re pretty confident we won’t go cold across the board.

Selectively good shots — are something that I like to think we and the Golden State Warriors have in common. Of course, they’re still the ones who get to play in the arena and hopefully take home a championship. No matter what happens and regardless of the final score, I’ll still be a fan. I’m excited to see how far their strategy can take them. And us.