Hidden Talents, Winning Teams: What your business can learn from Liverpool FC and the Houston Rockets
Jay Kloppenberg
Co-founder @ Impactful Executive | McKinsey & Co. | Co-founder @ African School for Excellence | Our greatest performance tool is the environment we create
The following article was originally published on my blog, www.lessonbehindthelesson.com.
When PJ Tucker entered the 2006 NBA Draft, no one doubted his basketball talent. A former North Carolina High School Player of the Year, Tucker had averaged 16 points and 9 rebounds per game as a college junior, leading the University of Texas to the winningest season in its history and earning himself Big 12 Player of the Year honors.
No, PJ Tucker’s problem was never basketball ability. But he did have a problem.
Here is how DraftExpress.com described Tucker before the 2006 draft:
Tucker’s size has to be considered his main (weakness). If he was just 2-3 inches taller, he’d be a sure-fire top-20 pick as it would be much easier to see him becoming a real power small forward. At 6-5, he is shorter than most NBA shooting guards, but is more bit stuck between the 3 and the 4 spots when talking about his true position skill-wise. Defensively is where the biggest concerns come out, as it’s unclear whether he has the experience or lateral quickness to defend the perimeter.
Tucker is most likely a small forward in the NBA, but doesn’t have the same type of range on his jump-shot that most small forwards do. He never really attempted to shoot from behind the collegiate 3-point line, let alone the NBA 3-point line, not with his feet set and certainly not off the dribble.
NBA scouts tagged Tucker with the dreaded “tweener” label: too short to be an interior player, not quick enough or skilled enough to be effective on the perimeter. In a league that had become increasingly specialized over the previous two decades, Tucker’s game was like a square peg in a round hole. PJ Tucker, NCAA All-American, fell to the second round of the NBA Draft, the 35th overall pick by the Toronto Raptors.
"There was nothing worse you could be than a tweener," said Tucker, in a 2018 interview with Bleacher Report. "There was nothing worse you could be, and there were so many good guys that were so good that were tweeners, and they couldn't make it...And when you got that label, it was going to stick. It's like getting branded."
And the naysayers were quickly proven correct. Tucker played just 83 total minutes in his rookie season—less than two full games—before the Raptors waived him. With no other NBA team interested in signing him, Tucker headed to Israel. Then to Ukraine. Then back to Israel. Then to Greece, Italy, Puerto Rico, and Germany. He was successful everywhere he went—top scorer in Ukraine, league MVP in Israel and Germany—but no NBA team called again until 2012, when Tucker was now 27 years old and nearing the end of his prime.
When he returned to the NBA this time, things were different. Tucker became an immediate impact player, based not on his scoring or his rebounding, but on what would become his calling card: hustle, grit, and defensive intensity.
Here’s how nba.com described Tucker heading into the 2013-2014 season, his second real season in the league:
What he brings to the table: Hard-nosed, in-your-face defense. Tucker boasts the rare combination of speed and strength that allows him to both keep up with and stand up to his defensive assignment. Hustle plays are commonplace, producing momentum-swinging sequences that don't show up in the box score.
PJ Tucker is still in the NBA today, starting for the Houston Rockets in their second round series against the Los Angeles Lakers. He is one of the oldest players in the league, one of just eight players from his draft class still in the NBA, and he is one of the most important players on one of the league’s best teams.
And here’s the strangest part: He starts at center. Not shooting guard (“Tucker is shorter than most NBA shooting guards”), not small forward (“Tucker is mostly likely a small forward in the NBA”), not power forward (he is “stuck between the 3 and 4 spots”), but center. The spot reserved for the tallest players on NBA teams, where his opponents typically measure 7 feet or taller, towering over him.
How the heck did that happen?
Before we answer that, let’s consider one other story.
Home of the “beautiful game,” hotbed of soccer talent, Brazil produces waves of young attacking players year after year, budding stars who delight fans with their skill and flair, and who seem, even as teenagers, destined to set the world on fire.
Roberto Firmino Barbosa de Oliveira was not one of those players.
At age 15, at a time when many of peers were already rising up the ranks of some of the top youth academies in the world, Firmino was unable to find a club. He only found his way into the country’s vast professional training setup when a local dentist believed he saw something in the boy, and convinced the second-division hometown club to give him a chance. The coach didn’t even bother to learn his name for two weeks, calling him “Alberto” instead.
He made his professional debut at age 18, as an athletic and industrious defensive midfielder. What Firmino lacked in trickery he made up for in speed, technique, and work ethic. His performances in Brazil’s second division earned him a contract with Hoffenheim, a mid-sized club in Germany’s Bundesliga.
Over the next five years at Hoffenheim, Firmino grew into a solid if unspectacular player. He scored 49 goals in 153 matches over five years. His coaches used him everywhere on the field: defensive midfield, attacking midfield, withdrawn striker, winger, and more.
Firmino played well enough in Germany to earn both his first call-up to the Brazilian national team and a transfer to an exceptionally talented but underachieving Liverpool side that had finished 6th in the English Premier League the previous season.
Even as Liverpool dropped to a disappointing 8th in the league the next year and replaced manager Brendan Rodgers with Jurgen Klopp, Firmino managed to establish himself as Liverpool’s first-choice central striker, scoring a respectable 10 league goals.
After achieving consecutive 4th place finishes in the next two years, the team seemed poised for a step backward when it lost its most decorated and creative attacking talent, Philippe Coutinho, before the 2018-2019 season. Instead, Liverpool lost just one match all year, earning the third-most points in the history of the Premier League. It barely missed out on the league title, coming in second to a seemingly unbeatable Manchester City squad. Then, in 2020, Liverpool set a league record for wins as it cruised to its first title in 30 years, leaving both Manchester City and the rest of its competitors in the dust.
Firmino played 52 matches for Liverpool this season, all of them in the role of the “number 9,” the central striker, the most glamorous position on the field. And in those 52 matches, Firmino scored a grand total of 12 goals.
If that doesn’t seem like a lot, that’s because it’s not. Liverpool right-winger Mohammed Salah scored 23 goals. Left-winger Sadio Mane scored 22 goals. Firmino’s goalscoring production from the centre-forward spot was closer to defenders Alex Oxlade Chamberlain (8 goals) and Virgil Van Dyke (5 goals) than it was to his attacking partners.
For a central striker on a team that attacks as successfully as Liverpool, this is a rather feeble return. Strikers are traditionally judged almost exclusively on their goalscoring statistics. Ronaldo (the Brazilian version) is often cited as one of the best 10 players of all time, despite having frequently wandered around the field for entire games at a mild trot, contributing nothing to his team’s efforts until the moment he sprang to life and scored a spectacular goal.
And he should be highly regarded for that contribution. Goals are really important!
Virtually every club in the world with resources approaching Liverpool’s would move a striker scoring less than one goal every four games to the bench, and find a high-priced replacement with a better goalscoring track record as soon as possible.
But not Liverpool. Not only is Firmino’s job not at risk, he is as well regarded by the coach and the fans as anyone on the team. “What can I say about Firmino?” Klopp asked, rhetorically, in 2017. “He’s the engine of the team.”
He is so well respected that earlier this season, BBC commentators suggested that a struggling Manchester United side needed to find a striker like Firmino, “not necessarily a striker who scores goals.” It may have been the first time in the history of soccer that anyone unironically suggested that a team needed a striker who did not score goals.
How, indeed, did we get here?
Firmino’s and Tucker’s successes appear, at first glance, like irreplicable once-offs. It seems as if the only lesson we should glean from these stories is the always relevant “nobody knows anything.” And perhaps that is the lesson.
I contend, however, that there is more to the story than that. I believe there are important lessons to be learned from these stories about talent identification and team-building, not only in sports but in business, academics, politics, and everywhere else. I believe that Tucker and Firmino—and their coaches and teams—have recognized something about how to maximize the performance of a team, something that anyone charged with team-building or team management would do well to consider.
Let’s back up to 2018. How did Liverpool lose its best and most creative playmaker and become a better team? The simple answer: better defense. Not from its defenders, though. The secret to Liverpool’s success became the defending of its attacking players.
Even before losing its star, Philippe Coutinho, Liverpool owed as much of its attacking success to its defending as it did to his playmaking talents.
“No playmaker in the world,” Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp has said more than once, “can be as good as a good counter-press.”
The “counter-press,” or “gegenpress” made popular by Klopp is a defensive tactic in which the entire team aggressively works together to win the ball back as soon as it loses possession, and attempts to attack the opposition as soon as it wins it back.
“Gegenpressing lets you win back the ball nearer to the goal,” Klopp explains. “It’s only one pass away from a really good opportunity.”
Klopp’s tactics are an extreme example of a trend that has been gradually taking over top-level football for at least a decade: not just the “counter-press,” but the idea of a team attacking and defending as one, at all times.
This new perspective on the game has no room for an attacking player who is unwilling or unable to defend tenaciously, no matter how talented a scorer he may be. Likewise, it has no room for a traditional “pure” defensive player, who can break up the opposition play but may lack comfort going forward with the ball. Instead, defenders such as Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold and Manchester City’s Kyle Walker are expected to win tackles, keep defensive shape, and also attack both down the sideline and through the middle of the field. Even goalkeepers are expected to use their feet to retain possession, effectively becoming full members of the attack.
Excel at everything, or you'll find yourself on the bench...even if your name is Philippe Coutinho
The era of the “specialist” is over in top-level football. Excel at everything, or find yourself on the bench.
Coincidentally or not, NBA basketball has undergone a similar tactical transformation. Teams used to be very specific about what each player on the floor was expected to do: the shortest player was the point guard (also called the “1”), who brought the ball up the court and ran the team’s offense. The shooting guard (or “2” guard) played on the perimeter and was expected to shoot and score. The small forward (the “3”) was the closest thing to an “all purpose” player: he played mostly on the perimeter, but could also sometimes go inside to post up or rebound or score. The power forward (“4”) did the dirty work: rebounding, setting screens, some scoring in the post. The tallest player on the team, the center (“5”), anchored the defense and stayed near the basket on offense, to post up or rebound.
Players at each position were expected to have a certain height and a certain skill set. If there was a mismatch between your skills and your height, like a young PJ Tucker, you didn’t have much of a chance in the NBA.
Before the NBA added a three-point shot, the objective of every offense was generally to get a shot as close to the basket as possible. Teams probed and probed, and the area around the basket became more and more congested. As teams began to shoot more three pointers, they saw that the more players they took away from the basket, the more space there was to attack. First the small forward became a full-time perimeter player, almost identical to the shooting guard. Then the “power forward” evolved into a “stretch 4” who also spent his time behind the three-point line. Eventually, the best offenses began to move even their centers outside the three-point line, opening up the area around the basket for their most skilled, athletic players to drive into with the ball. Soon the skill requirements of the center and the point guard were not all that different.
As both offenses and defenses grew more and more sophisticated, it became easier for the best offenses to find their opponent’s weak link. Teams frequently ran offensive actions that required defensive players to switch assignments, so that a team’s smallest player might have to guard a taller scorer, and a big, plodding center could be forced to stick with a lightning-quick guard.
As this change occurred, it became harder for teams to play “specialists,” such as great shooters who had trouble defending, or great defenders who could not shoot. A defensive liability would get ruthlessly exploited, and an offensive liability would cause his team’s offense to grind to a halt, and prevent his team from exploiting its opponent’s weaknesses.
A great shot blocker can be lured out of the paint and forced to guard a 3-point shooter, rendering his strength irrelevant and his weakness catastrophic. A skilled but slight guard can be attacked by a bigger, stronger, faster player on every single possession, thus negating any advantage he may have on the other end.
The most valuable role players today are players who are not liabilities on defense or on offense, on the perimeter or near the basket. They can shoot, pass, score inside and outside, and defend any position on the floor, from point guard to center.
Players like, for example, PJ Tucker.
PJ Tucker is not still a starter on an NBA playoff team because he is a great scorer, or a great shooter, or a great ballhandler, or a great rebounder, or a great passer. He averages less than 7 points and 7 rebounds a game. He is a resolute defender, but he is neither tall enough to be elite defending the paint nor quick enough to truly lock down great perimeter scorers. Yet he still has an important role to play on a winning NBA team, because he has learned to do so many things competently. His scouting report said that he lacked the quickness to defend the perimeter, but he has made himself into an above-average perimeter defender. It bemoaned his lack of three-point shooting range, but he has become a 36% three-point shooter—not great, but good enough to keep the defense honest.
Similarly, Roberto Firmino has become essential for both the English Premier League champions and the Brazilian national team noy by becoming the world’s most lethal finisher, or the best passer, or the most creative dribbler, or the best tackler and defender. He has reached the peak of the soccer world by being good at all of those things simultaneously. There are players who can score more than Firmino, but none of those players defends as well as he does. There are players who tackle better, but they won’t set up as many goals.
As the cutting-edge tactical systems in both of these elite sports have begun to prize interchangeability to a greater extent than ever, it is the generalist, not the specialist, who thrives.
It is worth noting that these philosophies are not brand new in either sport. In the 1970s, Football Club Ajax Amsterdam and the Dutch National Football Team took the world by storm with a philosophy known as “Total Football,” which expected players to interchange positions constantly and fulfil every role on the field. In the late-90s NBA, the Chicago Bulls won three consecutive titles with teams that often played 6-6 Ron Harper at point guard and 6-7 Dennis Rodman at center, and expected players to switch assignments on defense and run a relatively equal-opportunity motion offense (to the extent that any offense with Michael Jordan can be considered “equal opportunity.”)
But these were isolated examples. Today, as both sports have gotten faster and the skills levels higher, and as advanced analytics have made weaknesses and inefficiencies more glaring and easier to exploit, the trend toward multi-skilled generalists has accelerated.
We could look to other team sports and see similar trends. American football is perhaps the most specialized team sport in the world. Each position has its own techniques, vocabulary, coaches, training methods, subcultures, and more. And yet one head coach in the modern NFL has repeatedly turned quarterbacks into receivers, receivers into defensive backs, and defensive backs into safeties, both in situational spot-duty and as semi-permanent changes based on team needs. That coach is Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots, the dominant coach of the modern era. Promoting positional flexibility allows him to confuse teams with unexpected wrinkles on both offense and defense, overcome injuries more effectively, and make the most of a limited roster.
In his best-seller Range, David Epstein challenged the famous “10,000 hour rule” of elite performance and advocated late specialization rather than early specialization in everything from sports to arts to academics to scientific research to career choices. He found that, in nearly every field, elite performers are less likely to follow the path of Tiger Woods—golf prodigy by age 2, best player in the world by age 21—than they are that of Roger Federer, who dabbled in over a dozen sports before specializing in tennis as an adolescent.
Teams, he continued, do better by having members with a range of backgrounds and interests and specializations. Even better than a team with a diverse range of specialists, though, is a team full of individuals who each have diverse skills. Those teams derive the greatest insights and the most effective solutions.
This is not to say that no specialization is ever necessary. The best contributors to teams are competent in all the relevant skills, and also have a single area of skill or knowledge that is unique. This mix allows team members to slot easily into roles that suit them, fill in other areas in a pinch, and make connections between disparate ideas that a pure specialist would miss.
McKinsey & Co. refers to this area of relative specialization as a “spike.” A consultant with a large “spike” in one area who lacks a broad set of skills is considered too specialized to provide real value to teams. A generalist who never develops a spike anywhere is similarly limited.
PJ Tucker and Roberto Firmino are both exceptional generalists. They can each fulfill a wide range of roles without ever becoming a liability. They both have “spikes” as well, but their spikes occur in unexpected areas that require a particularly astute manager to see and exploit.
Tucker’s “spike” is in his strength, his tenacity, and his ability to switch and rotate defensively onto players of all sizes and all positions.
When considering his potential, scouts made the mistake of looking too narrowly at how well he fit each position on the floor. At every position, it was easy to think of a reason Tucker wouldn’t succeed, and to find players more suited to the role. But as soon as scouts and coaches began to value positional flexibility, Tucker thrived. The player more suited to the small forward role than Tucker could not also defend centers. The mammoth center might be better at defending around the basket than Tucker, but could he switch onto a guard?
Firmino’s example is perhaps even more unusual. His “spike” is in defending, which wouldn’t be uncommon if he played another position on the field. He consistently leads all Premier League forwards in tackles won. There is a reason his first coaches played him as a defensive midfielder. But Firmino is not special because he can defend well. There are a lot of players who can defend well, many of whom can do so even better than Firmino can. What is special about Firmino is that he can defend so well while also fulfilling the highly demanding attacking duties of an elite center forward. There is likely no one else in the world who can do both as well as he can.
Both the generalist skill and the spike are essential to Tucker’s and Firmino’s success. They are not pure generalists. Neither, however, have they allowed themselves to let their spikes become the be-all and end-of of their play. This narrowing of focus is a problem we often allow not only in sports but in business, medicine, academics, and elsewhere, to our detriment. Experts continue to develop their expertise in a single unique area, but they stop growing as complete professionals, limiting their value.
I have seen this phenomenon play out over and over again among high school faculties. Math departments and English departments and art departments rarely speak professionally. English teachers often view mathematics as a bizarre, intimidating world, and pass that fear on to their students. Math and science teachers may decry the supposed fluffiness of humanities courses.
These schools and teachers do their students a grave disservice. The best mathematicians and math teachers are artists, philosophers and poets. They see mathematics not as a set of formulae and procedures but as a series of beautiful relationships. Far from shying away from reading and writing, they correctly view communication as essential to the mathematical task.
The walls we set up between departments in schools are artificial, and breaking them down improves learning. At High Tech High in San Diego, for example, STEM teachers are commonly paired with humanities teachers to co-design and co-teach interdisciplinary projects. Even better, though, is when these diverse skills and interests can be found in a single individual. Steven Strogatz, best-selling author and acclaimed Cornell University professor, is a great example. He has published textbooks and popular non-fiction on everything from basic mathematics to advanced calculus. He has also written The Calculus of Friendship, a quasi-memoir that tracks his 30-year relationship with a former high school teacher through a series of letters.
If we step beyond the narrow confines of academics to a broader discussion of business, this problem becomes even more acute. In most businesses, the sales team, the accounts team, the finance team and the R+D team all become silos, leaning into their expertise and barely registering the rest of the company. Employees may begin their career with a brief rotational period, but once they settle into a particular department, that is where they stay. They settle into their area of expertise, and know less and less about the rest of the business.
Several predictable problems ensue. First of all, the business loses opportunities based on its limited problem-solving capacity. Every problem must be solved within the confines of a single department or a single form of expertise, without broadening the scope or looking elsewhere. Second, the individual employees become less effective than they could otherwise be. They become like PJ Tucker forced into a traditional “small forward” role, unable to make full use of their diverse talents. Third, the business becomes fragile. Key losses cannot be easily replaced, and tasks cannot be reallocated to existing employees in a crisis. This stagnation damages the business not only in the face of challenges but when opportunities occur as well. A business without multi-skilled, flexible employees and a culture of generalist staff development cannot pivot as quickly to take advantage of these new opportunities. Those that can do so have a huge advantage.
When I worked for a pan-African Private Equity firm, our most successful and profitable investment was not the corporate darling in the huge Nigerian market with the Harvard Business School CEO and the suite of high-profile international investors. That company lost money every quarter, until it eventually went out of business. Our best performer was the plucky Cameroonian bank built from the ground up by a locally-educated albino man. When we met them, this company had not even invested in banking software and had no reliable internet—it tracked thousands of transactions every day using Microsoft Excel, and sent the records from across the country to the head office every day on USB drives.
Why were they more profitable than their peers? I could answer with general truths, saying they had “greater attention to detail” and were “more attuned to the market.” And that would be true. But the more concrete answer is, “lower cost of capital.” Commercial banking profitability basically comes down to a simple formula: Interest earned minus cost of capital, minus operating expenses, equals profit. Borrow a dollar for 10¢, lend it back out for 20¢, spend 5¢ doing the lending, and you’ll make 5¢ at the end of it. This Cameroonian bank was able to keep the operating expenses in check, but where it truly drove its profitability was through a lower cost of capital than its competitors.
Banks in much of Africa borrow at very high interest rates, upward of 20% annually. Even after passing those rates on to their borrowers, they often find it difficult to make money with such a high cost of capital. Deposits from small clients, however, typical cost in the 2-6% range. When various fees and charges are included, the bank often ends up paying 0% (or less!) for the capital it receives from depositors and then lends back out to its borrowers. It therefore behooves a bank to maximize its deposit base. However, raising deposits is generally quite expensive for a small bank: you must invest in centrally-located, well-staffed, air-conditioned branches, above-the-line advertising, and a well-compensated direct salesforce. Building the trust required to convince ordinary people to hand you their cash requires a great deal of time and money.
The CEO of this Cameroonian bank found a novel solution to this problem. Instead of relying on a major ad campaign and a single sales team to drive his deposit collection, he made deposit growth the second job of every single person in the company. Everyone had a monthly sales target, from the CEO himself down to the janitor in the most rural branch. Everyone received training on selling savings accounts, and everyone was expected to bring in new customers every month. Over the years, these customers began to add up. Every other bank I observed left the task of deposit collection to a specialized team. But the company that made it everyone’s secondary responsibility was the most successful. This bank did not employ specialists. Even the janitor was a generalist with a spike in cleaning.
When designing teams, managers would do well to take their cues from this Cameroonian bank CEO, as well as the Houston Rockets and Liverpool FC. Yes, every role must have a job description, and the person hired into the role must be able to meet the minimum requirements of the role. But what else can the person do? Instead of hiring the candidate who can fulfill the narrow requirements of the role at the most advanced level, consider the person who can both fulfill the requirements competently and bring the most value to the team more broadly. Consider the generalist with a spike, rather than the specialist.
Once employees have been hired, the best manager will empower them to continue to develop diverse sets of skills, rather than allow them to relax into their particular areas of expertise. She will enable her team members to learn from one another to build diverse skill sets, creating the flexibility necessary to respond to unanticipated shocks, challenges, and opportunities.
Do not be the manager who sends PJ Tucker to the Israeli Basketball League and can’t figure out what to do with Firmino. Be the manager who recognizes unique blends of talents, and uses them to make your team successful.