Eleven Rings

by Phil Jackson

In their groundbreaking book, Tribal Leadership, management consultants Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright lay out the five stages of tribal development, which they formulated after conducting extensive research on small to midsize organizations. Although basketball teams are not officially tribes, they share many of the same characteristics and develop along much the same lines: STAGE 1—shared by most street gangs and characterized by despair, hostility, and the collective belief that “life sucks.” STAGE 2—filled primarily with apathetic people who perceive themselves as victims and who are passively antagonistic, with the mind-set that “my life sucks.” Think The Office on TV or the Dilbert comic strip. STAGE 3—focused primarily on individual achievement and driven by the motto “I’m great (and you’re not).” According to the authors, people in organizations at this stage “have to win, and for them winning is personal. They’ll outwork and outthink their competitors on an individual basis. The mood that results is a collection of ‘lone warriors.’” STAGE 4—dedicated to tribal pride and the overriding conviction that “we’re great (and they’re not).” This kind of team requires a strong adversary, and the bigger the foe, the more powerful the tribe. STAGE 5—a rare stage characterized by a sense of innocent wonder and the strong belief that “life is great.” (See Bulls, Chicago, 1995–98.)

With leadership, as with most things in life, the best approach is always the simplest.

I’ve taken a different tack. After years of experimenting, I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became. I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority. Paradoxically, this approach strengthened my effectiveness because it freed me to focus on my job as keeper of the team’s vision.

If your primary objective is to bring the team into a state of harmony and oneness, it doesn’t make sense for you to rigidly impose your authority.

One thing I’ve learned as a coach is that you can’t force your will on people. If you want them to act differently, you need to inspire them to change themselves.

If you place too many restrictions on players, they’ll spend an inordinate amount of time trying to buck the system. Like all of us, they need a certain degree of structure in their lives, but they also require enough latitude to express themselves creatively. Otherwise they’ll start behaving like that penned-in cow.

On a deeper level, I believe that focusing on something other than the business at hand can be the most effective way to solve complex problems. When the mind is allowed to relax, inspiration often follows.

The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome.

“Practice doesn’t make perfect,” he used to say. “Perfect practice does.”

The assignment gave me an opportunity to look at the game the way a coach does. Red was a strong verbal communicator, but he wasn’t that visually oriented and rarely drew diagrams of plays on the board during pregame talks. Every now and then, to keep the players focused, he would ask them to nod their heads if they heard the word “defense” while he was talking—which happened about every fourth word. Still, the players drifted off when he was talking, so he asked me to break down the strengths and weaknesses of the teams we were facing and draw pictures of their key plays on the board. This forced me to start thinking of the game as a strategic problem rather than a tactical one. As a young player, you tend to focus most of your attention on how you’re going beat your man in any given game. But now I began to see basketball as a dynamic game of chess in which all the pieces were in motion. It was exhilarating. Another lesson I learned was about the importance of pregame rituals. The shootaround had yet to be invented, so most coaches tried to squeeze in whatever pregame instructions they had during the fifteen or twenty minutes before the players stepped out on the floor. But there’s only so much a player can absorb when his body is pulsing with adrenaline. This is not a good time for deep left-brain discussions. It’s the moment to calm the players’ minds and strengthen their spiritual connection with one another before they head into battle. Red paid a great deal of atten...

Mentorship

The best way to control people, he adds, is to give them a lot of room and encourage them to be mischievous, then watch them. “To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy,” he writes. “The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.”

“What you do for yourself—any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honesty and clear seeing toward yourself—will affect how you experience the world,” she writes. “What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.”

Loughery, who had won two ABA championships, had an exceptional eye for the game and was gifted at exploiting mismatches. But what I learned from him was how to push the envelope and get away with it.

Second key apprenticeship

this job was a chance for me to go to graduate school in basketball, with two of the best minds in the game: Johnny Bach and Tex Winter.

Apprenticeship

I had just spent the past five years as head coach of the Albany Patroons and had experimented with all kinds of ideas about how to make the game more equitable and collaborative, including paying all the players the same salaries one year.

Chance to experiment

I discovered that I had a gift for making adjustments during games and getting the most out of the talent on the roster. But after a while I realized that my biggest weakness as a coach was my lack of formal training.

Understanding self

What I love about Monk’s list is his basic message about the importance of awareness, collaboration, and having clearly defined roles, which apply as much to basketball as they do to jazz.

The point I wanted to make by showing the players The Mystic Warrior video was that connecting to something beyond their individual goals could be a source of great power.

Showing videos to inspire. Team culture most important

Some coaches limit staff input because they want to be the dominant voice in the room. But I encouraged everyone to take part in the discussion—coaches and players alike—to stimulate creativity and set a tone of inclusiveness. This is especially important for players who don’t get a lot of playing time. My favorite poem about the power of inclusion is Edwin Markham’s “Outwitted”: He drew the circle that shut me out— Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in!

When I’m hiring coaches, my strategy is to surround myself with the strongest, most knowledgeable people I can find and give them a lot of room to express themselves.

Each assistant coach had a clear role. Tex was in charge of teaching everyone offensive skills as well as the basic fundamentals of the triangle system. Johnny oversaw the defense and specialized in getting the players revved up for each new opponent. And Jim worked one on one with the players who needed more instruction. Every morning the coaching staff and I would meet for breakfast and discuss the fine points of the practice plan, as well as the latest scouting reports. That allowed us to share information with one another and make sure we were all on the same page in terms of day-to-day strategy. Each coach had a high level of autonomy, but when we talked to the players, we spoke as one.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it. ROALD DAHL

I often reminded the players to focus on the journey rather than the endgame, because if you give the future all your attention, the present will pass you by.

In Rogers’s view, it’s virtually impossible for anyone to change unless he thoroughly accepts who he is. Nor can he develop successful relationships with others unless he can discover the meaning of his own experience.

One of the hardest jobs of a coach is keeping the role players from undermining team chemistry. New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel used to say, “The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.

Michael loved challenges. So I challenged him to imagine a new way of relating to his teammates. He expected his teammates to perform at his level, even though there were only a handful of players in the league who could meet that standard. I encouraged him to take a fresh look at his role on the team and try to envision ways he could serve as a catalyst to get all the players to work together. I didn’t dictate to him what I wanted; I simply pushed him to think about the problem in a different way, mostly by asking him questions about the impact that this or that strategy might have on the team. “How do you think Scottie or Horace would feel if you did this?” I would say. I treated him like a partner, and slowly he began to shift his way of thinking. When I let him solve the problem himself, he was more likely to buy into the solution and not repeat the same counterproductive behavior in the future.

But the most effective way to deal with anxiety, I’ve discovered, is to make sure that you’re as prepared as possible for whatever is coming your way.

In The Tao of Leadership, John Heider stresses the importance of interfering as little as possible. “Rules reduce freedom and responsibility,” he writes. “Enforcement of rules is coercive and manipulative, which diminishes spontaneity and absorbs group energy. The more coercive you are, the more resistant the group will become.”

“It’s all about being present and taking responsibility for how you relate to yourself and others,” says George. “And that means being willing to adjust so that you can meet people where they are. Instead of expecting them to be somewhere else and getting angry and trying to will them to that place, you try to meet them where they are and lead them where you want them to go.”

“Think of sunlight,” replied the master. “The sun nurtures and vitalizes the trees and flowers. It does so by giving away its light. But in the end, in which direction do they grow? So it is with a master craftsman like Liu Bang. After placing individuals in positions that fully realize their potential, he secures harmony among them by giving them all credit for their distinctive achievements. And in the end, as the trees and flowers grow toward the sun, individuals grow toward Liu Bang with devotion.

There’s a Zen saying I often cite that goes, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” The point: Stay focused on the task at hand rather than dwelling on the past or worrying about the future.

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron talks about letting go as an opportunity for true awakening. One of her favorite sayings is “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke eloquently about this phenomenon. “In a real sense, all of life is interrelated,” he said. “All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

Sometimes you have to pull out the big stick.)

Kobe bryant needed a different tactic

In a nutshell, the Buddha taught that life is suffering and that the primary cause of our suffering is our desire for things to be different from the way they actually are.

the Buddha also prescribed a practical way for eliminating craving and unhappiness by following what he called the Noble Eightfold Path. The steps were right view, right thinking, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

I generally prefer taking a page from the playbook of the other Chicago Jerry—Jerry Reinsdorf. He once said that the best way to handle most flare-ups is to sleep on them. The point is to avoid acting out of anger and creating an even stickier mess. And if you’re lucky, the problem may resolve itself.

I was relieved that this crazy season was finally over. Yet when I reflect back on it, I realize that I learned an important lesson that year about transforming conflict into healing. Gandhi once said, “Suffering cheerfully endured ceases to be suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy.” If we had tried to squelch the strife instead of letting it play itself out naturally, this young, growing team might never have come together the way it did in the end. Without the pain, the Lakers would not have discovered their soul.

Feud with kobe and shaq

always welcomed debate, even if it disrupted team harmony temporarily, because it showed that the players were engaged in solving the problems. The big danger was when a critical mass of players jettisoned the principle of selflessness upon which the team was founded. That’s when chaos ensued.

The key to sustained success is to keep growing as a team. Winning is about moving into the unknown and creating something new.

As Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman writes, “Our goal surely is to conquer anger, but not to destroy the fire it has misappropriated. We will wield that fire with wisdom and turn it to creative ends.” In fact, two recent studies published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology demonstrate a link between anger and creativity. In one study, researchers discovered that feelings of anger initially improved the participants’ ability to brainstorm creatively. In another study, the same researchers found that subjects who were prompted to feel angry generated more creative ideas than those who experienced sadness or a nonemotional state. The conclusion: Anger is an energizing emotion that enhances the sustained attention needed to solve problems and leads to more flexible “big picture” thinking.

Forget mistakes, forget failures, forget everything, except what you’re going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day. WILL DURANT

In my view, the key to becoming a successful NBA player is not learning the coolest highlight-reel moves. It’s learning how to control your emotions and keep your mind focused on the game, how to play through pain, how to carve out your role on the team and perform it consistently, how to stay cool under pressure and maintain your equanimity after crushing losses or ecstatic wins. In Chicago we had a phrase for this: going from a basketball player to a “professional” NBA player.

found myself being less authoritarian and a more patient father figure than usual. This was a team that was crawling its way up from infancy—a new experience for me—and I had to nurture the players’ confidence with care.

Younger team to build up from the ground. Different leadership role

Not only did the team have some weaknesses, but so did I—a serious hip problem. I had hip replacement surgery just before the start of our 2006–07 training camp. This restricted my ability to move up and down the floor to monitor each player’s performance during practice, and I had to learn to coach games from a specially designed chair. Interestingly, though I worried that my limited mobility might diminish my authority, just the opposite occurred. I learned to be forceful without being overbearing—further lessons in the school of less is more.

Adapt coaching under constraints

Leadership is not about forcing your will on others. It’s about mastering the art of letting go.

During a practice session I suggested to Ron that he select one style of shooting and stick with it, but he took it the wrong way. “Why are you always picking on me?” he said. “I didn’t know I was picking on you,” I replied. “I’m just trying to help you along.” Neither of us was speaking in anger, but assistant coach Brian Shaw pulled me aside and said, “You’re walking a dangerous line there, Phil.” I was stunned. I thought I was trying to be supportive. However, Brian worried that Ron might misinterpret my body language—moving in closer and talking in a low tone of voice—as a form of aggression. After that incident, I realized that the best way to communicate with Ron was to couch everything in a positive way—not just with the words I used, but with my gestures and facial expressions as well.

Adapt body language as well as speech to influence behaviour

Zen teacher Jakusho Kwong suggests becoming “an active participant in loss.” We’re conditioned to seek only gain, to be happy, and to try to satisfy all our desires, he explains. But even though we may understand on some level that loss is a catalyst for growth, most people still believe it to be the opposite of gain and to be avoided at all costs. If I’ve learned anything in my years of practicing Zen and coaching basketball, it’s that what we resist persists. Sometimes the letting go happens quickly; other times it may take several sleepless nights. Or weeks.

As a leader your job is to do everything in your power to create the perfect conditions for success by benching your ego and inspiring your team to play the game the right way.