The Shot Is the Last Thing That Happens

Paris, 10 August 2024. The Olympic final. France has cut the American lead to three. Between 2:47 and 0:35 on the clock, Stephen Curry makes four three-pointers. Four shots in 132 seconds, and a close final is effectively over.¹

It is easy to file a moment like that under talent, nerve, or the ability to be at your best when it matters most. What interests me is the predicament on the other side: what happens to a defender who no longer has a response they can trust?

Give Curry room and you risk the three. Step out too far and the floor opens behind you. Send a second defender and someone else is free. When he passes, you still cannot relax. He keeps moving, and the threat returns from another direction. LeBron James and Steve Nash have both described how his movement without the ball creates opportunities for everyone around him.²

I read sport less for inspiration than for structure. And this is a more useful business question than the usual one about working harder and believing in yourself:

What do you have to build for your advantage to change everyone else’s decisions?

No sporting analogy guarantees a business result. But that question takes us beyond the individual score, towards the conditions that make it possible.

A bad shot does not become a good shot because you were brave

The most dangerous lesson to take from Curry is this: attempt what others would not attempt.

That is half the story. The more dangerous half.

In the 2015–16 season, Curry made 402 three-pointers at 45.4 per cent.³ At that percentage, a three-point attempt produces roughly 1.36 points. A two-pointer would need to go in about 68 per cent of the time to match it. This is shot-value arithmetic, not a measure of total possession efficiency: it leaves out free throws, turnovers and offensive rebounds. Nor does a season average make every difficult three a good choice.

What it shows is how a capability can change the economics of a decision.

Curry’s shot is not good because it looks daring. It is good when the ability behind it justifies the risk.

Sun Tzu’s best-known idea, paraphrased: the winning army wins first and then goes to battle; the losing army goes to battle and then looks for a way to win. Curry’s 2015–16 is that sentence with a box score attached.

In business, it is easy to fall in love with the visible move of a successful company: the high price, the unusual sales model, the small team, the aggressive expansion. We copy the move and skip what makes it viable.

A high price without proven value is not a premium strategy. A small team without good processes may simply be an overloaded team. Automating a bad process does not repair its logic.

The useful question is not, Which brave move could I make? It is, Which capability would make a move that is risky for others reasonable for me?

Consider a company working on construction projects. It can compete on the price of individual items. Or it can develop the ability to spot unnecessary cost, wasted floor area and decisions that will delay construction, while there is still time to change them. Its value then lies partly in improving the project before anyone starts building.

But that advantage has to survive scrutiny. Estimated savings are not realised savings. Changes have costs. A lower budget is not necessarily an improvement if it comes with weaker quality or greater risk.

The company also needs to capture some of the value it creates. If the customer receives the entire benefit while the business keeps the extra work and responsibility, the result may be an excellent service and a poor business model.

Your version of the three-pointer has to improve the customer’s economics without destroying your own.

The biggest advantage changes other people’s decisions

Curry’s gravity is not popularity. It is the defensive attention he draws, including without the ball, that opens space for teammates.²

The business distinction is between a market that knows you and a market that decides differently because of you.

You can have reach, a polished visual identity and a widely recognised name, yet still start every sales conversation from zero. What I would call business gravity is more demanding: an advantage that works before you personally explain it.

A customer arrives already understanding why your approach matters. A partner brings you in while a project is still being shaped. A referral carries a specific reason to work with you, rather than just your name. A potential colleague sees what they could contribute and learn.

None of that comes from declaring yourself different. It needs results that people can understand, verify and retell.

Take holiday rental management. A discussion about fees easily becomes a comparison of percentages. A more useful assessment would include what the owner keeps, how much of their time the service requires, and what happens to the property over the years. A partner who can demonstrate those outcomes has a chance to change the conversation.

Not by avoiding price, but by giving it a meaningful context.

This is where I see a business version of Curry’s psychological pressure. Once a customer adopts a different standard of evaluation, competing offers have to answer it. A price list becomes less persuasive when another proposal explains the economics of the whole investment.

There is an important limit to the analogy, and it is where Sun Tzu stops being useful. His reader has an enemy. An operator mostly has a customer, and a good commercial relationship creates value on both sides. The aim is not to intimidate anyone; it is to make the value clear enough to influence a decision.

The most interesting form of influence is not that people repeat your message. It is that they begin to use your criteria.

Curry’s influence extends to how young players train and imagine the game.⁴ The business ambition might be similar: can our way of working become something customers start expecting from everyone?

Being essential is not the same as being involved in everything

Curry’s game without the ball is an uncomfortable metaphor for the founder’s ego.

Can we be essential to a result without personally finishing every piece of work?

LeBron points to the moment Curry passes: a defender instinctively wants to relax, but the movement continues and new openings appear. His influence does not end with the pass.²

In a business, it is worth watching what remains after we step out of a conversation. Clear criteria? A strong relationship with the customer? A team that knows what comes next? Or a pause while everyone waits for us to return?

The analogy needs one distinction. Curry without the ball is not Curry off the floor. He is still working. The lesson is not that founders should disappear, but that their contribution need not always take the form of direct control.

A founder can establish the criteria for a decision rather than make every decision. Develop a sales argument the team can use rather than deliver every presentation. Help someone take ownership rather than reclaim the task as soon as the result differs from their own style.

Delegating a proposal while retaining approval of every sentence, price and deadline is not the same as handing over responsibility for the sale. Real responsibility requires boundaries: what the colleague can decide, what outcome matters and when the founder needs to be involved.

It also requires a different measure of contribution. Meetings attended and problems personally solved tell us something about activity. They do not, on their own, tell us whether the organisation is becoming more capable.

A better question is: What can my team now do well that it could not do before I worked on the system?

Sometimes the answer is a better offer. Sometimes it is better hiring. Sometimes it is the decision to stop selling a service that consumes too much effort for too little value.

These moves are less visible than the decisive moment in a negotiation. They can also make the next ten negotiations easier.

Box-and-one: the compliment that exposes a weakness

In Game 4 of the 2019 Finals, Toronto went back to the box-and-one it had used in Game 2: Fred VanVleet chasing Curry everywhere, the other four in a zone. It lasted three possessions late in the third quarter. Then Klay Thompson checked back in, and the Raptors returned to their standard defence.⁵

It is tempting to read this only as a compliment to Curry. The rest of that night is more telling. Toronto chased Curry and Thompson and left the Warriors’ other perimeter players alone, and those players went 1-for-8 from outside the paint.⁵ The defence could afford to spend that much attention on one man because it judged the risk from the others to be acceptable.

For an operator, the useful question is therefore about the team around the exceptional individual: can everyone else turn the attention that person attracts into an advantage?

A company can have a brilliant founder who brings in opportunities and an operation that cannot deliver them. It can have an excellent product and a single sales channel. It can run several major projects while depending on one supplier whose decisions it does not control.

Each case invites the same question: Which single blockage could stop a disproportionate share of the business?

The answer is not to launch ten unrelated ventures or become average at everything. That can dilute the very capability that made the company valuable.

The better goal is to keep the concentration of advantage while reducing the concentration of vulnerability.

That may mean a second person who understands a key client relationship, knowledge that exists outside one person’s head, an alternative supplier, or clear ownership of the assets the business depends on. It may mean an operating team strong enough that another sale does not create another crisis.

Business gravity is useful only if the organisation can turn the opportunities it attracts into results.

If the founder brings in every opportunity and must then deliver each one personally, the source of the company’s advantage also becomes a constraint on its growth.

Conditioning is what survives the fourth quarter

A 2022 NBA.com report described Curry’s preparation: timed shooting drills, sprints between shots, planned sleep and recovery.⁶

That is a more useful model than the romance of exhaustion.

For an operator, I would define conditioning as the ability to preserve good judgement when conditions stop being ideal.

Can you negotiate without conceding on impulse when a deadline is close? Can the team maintain quality when three projects arrive together? Do your rules for setting priorities survive an urgent request from an important customer?

Those are poor things to discover for the first time in a crisis.

Practise the sales conversation against the hardest objection, not just the ideal buyer. Test the process on an awkward exception, not only the simple case. Run incomplete and contradictory data through the automation before trusting it with important work.

The point is to learn whether the capability holds up outside the demonstration.

It is also worth distinguishing training from repeatedly rescuing the same mistake. Solving the same emergency every week does not necessarily mean we are improving. We may simply be becoming more skilled at keeping a badly designed operation alive.

This is where efficiency matters. Revenue growth that requires disproportionately more people, capital and founder attention is a different achievement from growth that makes better use of an existing capability. The size of the result is only part of the assessment.

Alongside revenue, I would track what it took to produce it: margin, delivery time, rework and the number of situations that required the founder’s intervention.

A business should not need permanent heroics to honour its ordinary promises. Good work at a sustainable load is a more useful ambition than an organisation that keeps proving how much exhaustion it can survive.

What to take from the Chef

Return to Paris. The spectator remembers four makes. The business question concerns everything that had to exist before that finish became possible.

One successful outcome does not prove that every similar attempt is a good decision. A good decision can end badly; a bad one can work out. Curry’s finish is not an argument for taking more risks indiscriminately. It is a reason to examine the ability, preparation and conditions behind the risk.

So I would not finish this essay by opening five new projects. I would start with one existing offer and ask: what are we genuinely good enough at to change the customer’s economics?

Then I would look for evidence that demonstrates the value without requiring a long explanation from me. Where that evidence is missing, the next task may be measurement rather than another marketing message.

After that comes the less glamorous question: what happens when the customer says yes? Can the team deliver the promise? Where does everything still depend on me? What could interrupt the work?

Those questions distinguish an interesting advantage from a durable business. Before scaling the promise, check that the operation can keep it. More visibility can otherwise bring you faster to problems you have not solved.

That is my translation of the Chef’s recipe: build a capability that changes the economics of a decision, make its value visible, and give the team what it needs to turn that value into a repeatable result.

The hardest part may be accepting that your contribution will not always be the most visible one. You do not need the last word in every conversation or your fingerprints on every piece of work.

A real business advantage is not only what you can do better than others. It is what others can do better because you built the right system.

The practical question is whether the whole team gets more good opportunities, not whether you keep producing more difficult individual successes.

After his fourth three in Paris, Curry brought his hands together beside his cheek: night night. Thirty-five seconds remained on the clock.⁷

The shot is the last thing that happens. The advantage is built long before.

Sources

1. FIBA, It’s Steph’s world: Curry’s hot shooting gets USA another gold, 10 August 2024. ↩

2. FIBA, Forget the threes — This is Steph’s real secret weapon, reporting the conversation between Curry, LeBron James and Steve Nash on Mind the Game. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. NBA Communications, Warriors’ Stephen Curry wins 2015–16 Kia NBA Most Valuable Player Award, 10 May 2016. ↩

4. NBA.com, Shaun Powell, Stephen Curry reached ‘his own level’ and left behind a new-look NBA, updated 22 September 2022. ↩

5. NBA.com, John Schuhmann, Film Study: Raptors ignore the non-shooters in Game 4, 9 June 2019. ↩ ↩²

6. NBA.com, Mark Medina, ‘He’s in love with getting better’: How Stephen Curry has maintained peak conditioning, 13 June 2022. ↩

7. Sports Illustrated, Tom Dierberger, Steph Curry Brought the Perfect Hoodie to Wear in France After Winning Gold Medal, 11 August 2024; updated 12 August 2024. ↩