Improvement Insights Blog
Business Lessons from Tennis Pros
What do you need to win 80% of the time? Here’s a surprising answer from analysis of top tennis pros.
“Well hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“I get the… American Statistical Association’s magazine, and they had kind of an interesting article about tennis, of all things. It turns out that people like Federer and Nadal and Djokovic and everybody else win 80% of their matches, but they only win slightly more than half of the points they played. So Federer and Nadal and Djokovic, their win percentage were 54% of the points; Andy Murray: 53%; Pete Sampras: 54% and Andre Agassi: 53%.
“So how can you win more than 80% of the matches but only be hitting slightly better [than 50%]? This is an interesting concept.
“I remember the movie about the Enigma [machine] back in World War II: once they cracked the Enigma, they couldn’t just willy-nilly use the information, they had to statistically edge it out a little bit more on the side of the Allies so the 54-55% went their way so that the Germans wouldn’t figure out that that we cracked the code and that we were reading their mail. A slight edge… slight edge.
“So I’d like you to get this idea that you don’t need to be 100% better than your competition, but you need to systematically be slightly better than them in all kinds of things: how long it takes to get what you want and how much it costs and how you take care of them. Slight edge… the slight edge. Through the slight edge you end up winning 80% of the time.
“That’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go out and improve something this week, even if it’s only just a little bit.”
