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“You do your job so everyone around you can do their job,” Tom Brady once said. “There’s no big secret to it.”
It’s the notion that the most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it.
In sports, any team that achieves this sort of dominance will have an extraordinarily difficult time sustaining it. Unlike the business world, where innovative new products and technologies can be developed in secret, sports does not allow teams to hide their techniques. They can hone them in practice, but they must display them during matches in full view of their opponents, who can keep rewinding the tape until they find vulnerabilities. Moreover, sports competitions are restricted to fields with set dimensions and are often governed by a clock.
I'm a sports fan so I get this
You can't maintain competitive advantage for long -- see Moneyball
What distinguished them was a style of play that erased specialization, forced players to subordinate their egos, and coaxed superior performances out of unlikely characters.
When economists stumble onto some entity that doesn’t conform to the usual trajectory of things and can’t be easily explained, they often describe it as a black swan. In Silicon Valley, the land of infinite possibilities, a tech company that emerges from its founder’s basement to earn a valuation in the billions of dollars is called a unicorn. This sort of thinking holds sway across the entire spectrum of the sciences. When researchers gather a sample of test subjects, one of their first steps is to eliminate the outliers. The logic is that these anomalies, with their exaggerated results,
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This book is divided into three parts. Part I will explain how I developed the criteria to identify the top 10 percent of the top 1 percent of teams in history and the process I used to zero in on their similarities. Part II will draw upon the stories of these freak teams, and a survey of scientific research, to explore the one component they shared and why it enabled them to make the turn toward greatness. Part III will examine why so many teams make poor decisions that impede their ability to create and sustain a winning culture, and how these mistakes can be avoided.
This may be interesting to you if you're a sports statistics nerd or even an enthusiastic sports fan. If you don't fit either of those descriptions, you can probably skip this part.
of guys in the office. The ones that did use numbers were often statistically dubious. The most common procedural error was something known as “selection bias,” a gaffe which has long plagued all kinds of polls, surveys, and scientific experiments. This occurs when researchers base their studies on samples that aren’t large enough, or random enough, to offer a representative cross section of the whole. The telltale sign was that most of these lists had a suspiciously regional flavor. Rankings from England, for example, were clogged with the names of soccer clubs like Liverpool and Manchester
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I decided that a group of athletes can only be considered a team in the fullest sense of the word if it meets the following three criteria:
A. It has five or more members. One thing we can say with certainty is that the smaller a team, the more its results depend on individual performances. If
B. Its members interact with the opponent.
C. Its members work together.
If the threshold for greatness in sports is simply winning lots of games over a lengthy period of time, then there is nothing distinguishing a multiple Olympic champion from a neighborhood beer-league frisbee team. To make sure only the most exceedingly credentialed teams were considered, I applied the following three rules:
A. The team played a “major” sport.
B. It played against the world’s top competition.
C. Its dominance stretched over many years.
Some statisticians will wrap several of these metrics into a “power rating” that rewards teams for their overall efficiency, regardless of their records. There are two problems with this concept: First, it can fail to account for the difference between playing well in crucial games and running up the score on patsies; second, if a team dominates everyone statistically all season but fails to win a championship, does anyone really care about its power rating?
The best statistic available for isolating a team’s ability to win, especially in consequential matches, is the Elo rating system, which was first adapted to sports in 1997 by a California software engineer named Bob Runyan. As a lifelong fan of World Cup soccer, Runyan had always wondered which historical soccer teams would rate the highest if their performances could somehow be fairly compared across time. He had grown weary of the official team-rating system of FIFA, the sport’s governing body, in which a team received three points for a victory and one point for a draw in any
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innovation -- Runyan didn't start from scratch, he had a model and adapted it
In the end, however, I decided to keep the statistics at the periphery. While I knew that Elo ratings and other available measures might be useful from time to time, I wouldn’t be able to rely on any one metric exclusively. I decided that to identify the genuine freaks among this pool of 122 finalists, I would have to take a more holistic approach. To determine my winners, I came up with two simple claims any team must be able to make if it is, in fact, one of the best of all time.
Claim 1: It had sufficient opportunity to prove itself.
Claim 2: Its record stands alone.
This concept leaped out at me so early in the process, and was so tantalizingly simple, that it made me uncomfortable. I had only started my research, and I didn’t believe that the secret component of the world’s greatest sports teams could be so easy to spot. Beyond this, I couldn’t understand how one member of a team could lift it so high and keep it there for so long. I thought of something H. L. Mencken once wrote: “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
leadership icons like Michael Jordan,
Speaking only for myself, I never considered Jordan a "leadership icon," just a great basketball player
I also notice that Walker doesn't give Jackson credit for any of his moves as a coach, perhaps because he's already decided that coaches don't matter
The men and women who led these sixteen Tier One teams were not what I expected. Although their careers neatly bracketed their teams’ winning streaks, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that I’d really discovered something else—that the most dominant teams in history had succeeded without traditional leaders. Though I hadn’t found any evidence to refute “captain theory,” my research had raised sufficient doubts. Before I went any further, I decided to explore some alternative hypotheses.
CHAPTER TWO TAKEAWAYS • Every winning streak is bounded by two moments of transformation, the one where it begins and the one where it ends. For the most dominant teams in sports history, these moments had an uncanny correlation to one player’s arrival or departure—or both. This person not only displayed a fanatical commitment to winning, they also happened to be the captain. • Most of us have developed a model of what leaders of superior teams ought to be. We believe they should possess some combination of skills and personality traits that are universally considered to be superior. We don’t
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In 2010, four education researchers from two universities in Texas conducted an experiment to measure the impact of individual talent on team performance. The subjects of the experiment were 101 undergraduates enrolled in a large survey class.
The top-performing student groups in the study were the ones with a high number of skilled—though not necessarily star—students, whose abilities fell within a narrow range. In other words, the best teams had “clusters” of above-average performers. To figure out why this was the case, the researchers listened to recordings of the groups as they deliberated. On teams where there was a large ability gap, they wrote, “the superstar, or highest-performing team member, dominated the discourse.” As this person took charge, the other students showed a tendency to back off, even when they
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I have no doubt that the Texas researchers were onto something. Any elite team needs a passel of skillful players, and it’s probably better if their abilities are balanced. Nevertheless, my analysis of baseball in general, the Yankees in particular, and the experience of Real Madrid didn’t support the idea that a talent cluster is something teams have to have in order to achieve and sustain freakish success.
CHAPTER THREE TAKEAWAYS • One of the least controversial things you can say about a team is that its success is a function of its talent. To be one of the greatest teams in history, this reasoning suggests, a team should possess one of the greatest individual stars of all time or a group of players whose aggregated skill ranks higher, from top to bottom, than any other. Some of the sixteen teams in Tier One had many stars and superior athletes. But some had neither. • When an organization achieves astounding results, there is a temptation to look beyond the men and women who did the work.
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In business, the "scaffolding" or system matters a lot. There's a lot of research (Deming) and examples (Toyota Production System, NUUMI) that the system matters in business. It may not here because the zero sum nature of the industry and the fact that you can't hide secrets are unique to sports. In business, we don't do the work to make a good system work (known ways to succeed) because 1) it's too hard and 2) it doesn't pay off right away and 3) we're on to the next fad.
Management mattersm tii, Of course, we're talking about immiedate management, who are usually player-coaches.
So far this is mostly for sports, but you can take the lesson that talent's not all it's cracked up to be to business
Do Coaches Matter?
Walker eliiminated college teams from his sample and that's a place where coaching matters a lot. College coaches get men and women who are in their teams and developing in mind and body. The best college coaches develop players and mold them into teams.
said, “Coaches who can outline plays on a blackboard are a dime a dozen. The ones who win get inside their players and motivate.”
CHAPTER FOUR TAKEAWAYS • One of the first lessons we learn as children is to respect authority. We imbue our parents, and our teachers, with special powers. We believe it’s up to them to mold us. Sports fans project the same idea onto coaches. The conventional wisdom is that the coach, rather than the athletes who compete, is the primary force behind a team’s success. On an elite team, therefore, the coach must be a special kind of genius. On the sixteen teams in Tier One, this was simply not the case. • That said, there are coaches who seem to possess some dollop of magic. They have shown the
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PART II THE CAPTAINS The Seven Methods of Elite Leaders
All at once, the puzzle pieces of Russell’s confounding personality started fitting together. He didn’t score many points because his team didn’t need him to. He didn’t care about statistics or personal accolades and didn’t mind letting teammates take the credit. “It was never about contracts or money,” he once said. “I never paid attention to MVP awards or how many endorsements I had lined up. Only how many titles we won.” Russell devoted himself instead to defense, and to doing whatever grunt work fell through the cracks. It occurred to me that Russell’s radically defensive, team-oriented
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This is what Andy Grove called "the right kind of ambition."
The results were stark: Eighty percent of these “mastery-oriented” children maintained the same level of problem-solving ability on the tough questions as they had on the easy ones. And a smaller portion, about 25 percent, actually improved their strategy levels. These children weren’t any smarter, but they outperformed the children who felt helpless. Dweck went on to show that the two types of children had different goals. The helpless kids were preoccupied with their performance. They wanted to look smart even if it meant avoiding the difficult problems. The mastery-oriented children were
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While common sense suggests that a person’s natural ability should inspire self-confidence, Dweck’s research showed that in most cases, ability has very little to do with it. A person’s reaction to failure is everything.
They called it social loafing. Since then, the experiment was rediscovered and psychologists set out to replicate it. In 1979, a group of scientists at Ohio State University asked their test subjects to shout as loud as they could and recorded the decibel levels they produced. Next the subjects were put in groups and asked to repeat the shouting. The results mirrored Ringelmann’s: Each person’s group shouts were up to 20 percent less loud than their individual ones. Time and again, researchers tried some variation of Ringelmann’s rope test and got the same results. It was a fact of human
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CHAPTER FIVE TAKEAWAYS • One of the most confounding laws of human nature is that when faced with a task, people will work harder alone than they will when joined in the effort—a phenomenon known as social loafing. There is, however, an antidote. It’s the presence of one person who leaves no doubt that they are giving it everything they’ve got. • The captains of the greatest teams in sports history had an unflagging commitment to playing at their maximum capability. Although they were rarely superior athletes, they demonstrated an extreme level of doggedness in competition, and in their
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Berating people over their shoddy work and making them cry is undoubtedly at the outside limit of what’s acceptable in the workplace, the stuff lawsuits are made of. While Jobs didn’t break any laws, per se, he clearly disregarded the prevailing rules of interpersonal relations. And he didn’t seem to care. Much has been made of Jobs’s character flaws. These incidents are the proof his critics cite when they dismiss him as a jerk and a bully and suggest that Apple’s freakish success was somehow tainted and unrepeatable. What isn’t often noted, however, is that in many cases people responded to
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This is a false equivalency. In sports there are rules and governing bodies to punish you if you break them. There's no such thing in business. In the situation Walker just described, Jobs is not doing what captains do. He's being a bully, using his position as CEO and founder to browbeat others. It's worth noting that firing the guy in charge of the project didn't make the product any better. It failed. So he didn't get the oucome he says the captains get.
In 1961, Arnold Buss, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh, published one of the first comprehensive books about human aggression. He concluded, based in part on laboratory experiments, that people exhibit two distinct flavors of aggression: The first is a “hostile” one driven by anger or frustration and motivated by the reward of seeing someone hurt or punished; the second is an “instrumental” one that isn’t motivated by a desire to injure but by the determination to achieve a worthwhile goal. Buss believed that these instrumental acts—which were task-specific, didn’t blatantly
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an example of something scientists describe as “surface acting.”
CHAPTER SIX TAKEAWAYS • The most universal tradition in sports is the code of sportsmanship. In every country and culture, there is a form of judgment that supersedes the one displayed on the scoreboard. We believe that there is a right way to win and a wrong way, and that a person’s character is revealed in moments when their morals are tested. On sports teams, the one player who is held to this standard more than any other is the captain. On the sixteen greatest teams in history, however, the captains were not immune to pushing the rules to the breaking point. In fact, they often did so
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Aversive Interpersonal Behaviors, there is a chapter titled “Blowhards, Snobs, and Narcissists: Interpersonal Reactions to Excessive Egotism.” The authors were a Wake Forest University professor and a handful of his undergraduate students. The paper concluded that self-centered people who project arrogance through their speech and body language tend to be viewed less favorably by others and can weaken a group’s cohesion. The most significant thing about this paper was the identity of one of its student co-authors, a twenty-one-year-old named Timothy Duncan. Duncan wasn’t just another
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One of the great paradoxes of management is that the people who pursue leadership positions most ardently are often the wrong people for the job. They’re motivated by the prestige the role conveys rather than a desire to promote the goals and values of the organization.
The late J. Richard Hackman, a professor of social and organizational psychology at Harvard, spent much of his academic career out in the field, where he logged hundreds of hours embedded with many different kinds of teams as they worked—basketball teams, surgical teams, airplane cockpit crews, musical ensembles, and even elite U.S. intelligence-gathering units inside the CIA.
The Fordham study of shouters (see Chapter Five) showed that hard work is contagious and that one player’s exertion can elevate the performances of others.
others. On the French national team, his primary focus was putting the ball at the feet of the spectacularly gifted goal-scoring midfielder Zinedine Zidane. “For every ten balls that I played, I gave nine to him,” Deschamps said. Though he wasn’t familiar with the writings of Harvard’s Richard Hackman, Deschamps’s approach to leadership was as functional as it gets. On a team, he said, “you can’t only have architects. You also need bricklayers.”
In Hollywood, the big speech became the preferred motivational plot device—not only for fictional political and military leaders but sports figures, astronauts, even poetry teachers. To prepare a group to meet some prodigious challenge, a leader is supposed to draw its members together and talk to them. But it was here, in this regard, that the captains of the sixteen teams in Tier One deviated the furthest from our image of what makes an eminent leader. These men and women were not silver-tongued orators or fiery motivators. They didn’t like giving speeches.
When it came to team productivity, the MIT researchers found that a key factor was the level of “energy and engagement” the members displayed in social settings outside formal meetings. In other words, teams that talked intently among themselves in the break room were more likely to achieve superior results at work. How much time every member of the group spent talking also proved to be crucial. On the best teams, speaking time was doled out equitably—no single person ever hogged the floor, while nobody shrank from the conversation, either. In an ideal situation, Pentland wrote, “everyone on
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The researchers were also able to isolate the data signatures of the “natural leaders” of these productive units, whom the scientists called charismatic connectors. “Badge data show that these people circulate actively, engaging people in short, high-energy conversations,” Pentland wrote. “They are democratic with their time—communicating with everyone equally and making sure all team members get a chance to contribute. They’re not necessarily extroverts, although they feel comfortable approaching other people. They listen as much as or more than they talk and are usually very engaged with
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