But "marginal gains" have not been a blinding success for Brailsford either. "Marginal gains" is a concept from the pseudo science world of business management, thus if you manage to find a way of sticking a label on a can of beans slightly quicker then you will produce more cans, and make more money. Once you depart from the the simple process world of the production line, then the real worth of "marginal gain" becomes more fictional.
Thus, in cycling business management worked very well in the highly controlled and relatively predictable world of the track. Once he took a team to the Tour it began to fall apart. One example was the screening of riders from the public when warming up prior to a stage start. The marginal gain was meant to be that the riders would have a slightly more focussed warm up than others. The surprisingly unforeseen result was the negative public and press coverage from what was seen as an afront to Tour culture. And the riders didn't like it either. So, to his credit, Brailsford realised that such concepts had limitied value in a more complicated world and ditched this approach in 2012, with known results. Simply, a point passes when it make sense to treat athletes as means of production.
"Marginal gains" have been tried in football management. Such well known and successful names as ... err ... Sam Allardyce and Craig Levine come to mind. That is not to say that there is no value in understanding what happens during a football match and how best to use your players, but on learing that Allardyce spent 100s of hours studying tape to work out where best to place a player to deal with a near post corner clearance, you do wonder.
(The answer was 2 yards out from the corner of the penalty box at the side where the corner was taken).
The most interesting example of cross over is Clive Woodward, highly successful in applying business management ideas to the set play dominated world of rugby, yet a failure at Southampton FC.
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