Wooden on Leadership -- 10

Wooden on Leadership -- 10 Most Significant Wisdoms

Five Intuitive Wisdoms

Industriousness -- Wooden explains that there is simply no substitute for hard work. Whether in the realm of sports or business management, Wooden suggests that it is impossible to achieve greatness without working hard. On one hand, it may very well be true that hard work is frequently an essential component for success. On the other hand, Wooden's conclusion is based on personal experience and on other anecdotal information rather than on empirical evidence. Moreover, even the author admits that there are also instances of successful teams whose members did not necessarily work hard. Joe Namath would be one of many example of a successful athlete (if one measures success by the achievement of the ultimate goal in his sport) who was notorious for hardly working at all in between games. Conversely, both sports and business are replete with examples of hard work that does not pay off in success. Although intuitive and often true, the principle of industrious is not always true in sports or in business.

2. Loyalty -- Wooden also argues that loyalty is a crucial cohesive force that turns a collection of individuals into a team. In that regard, he provides examples where loyalty between coaches and teams and among teammates became especially true during difficult times. Wooden's conclusions about loyalty are based on personal experience and other anecdotal information rather than on empirical data or analyses. While loyalty can often be important to success and disloyalty can undermine success, even Wooden acknowledges that various professional teams have achieved success even though some of their players detested one another. That counterexample would seem sufficient to disprove the rule, or at least, to relegate it to the realm of general observation rather than fact.

3. Cooperation -- According to Wooden, achieving important goals requires mutual cooperation of all team members and cooperation is necessarily reciprocal in that one must give it to receive it. While this principle may seem valid and may be supported by specific examples, there are just too many counterexamples to consider this principle to be true in any empirical sense. First, it is possible for sports teams and business organizations to achieve success even with inadequate cooperation or with only one-sided cooperation. Second, while cooperation certainly makes things smoother, it is also possible to achieve success without cooperation, although it may be much less likely. The author's conclusion that cooperation is beneficial is valid; his conclusion that it is absolutely necessary is not.

4. Intentness -- Wooden suggests that in order to be successful, one must be persistent, determined, and tenacious. This conclusion also provides helpful advice for individuals and teams that are already capable of achieving success in other respects. However, there are too many counterexamples of teams and businesses that achieved success through intermittent efforts and, certainly, without any comprehensive effort that included tenaciousness off the field during training. Like Wooden's other points, the argument about tenaciousness is true in an anecdotal sense but not necessarily in any empirical sense. Even where Wooden provides won-loss statistics, they are not scientifically rigorous because they only consider a single variable and they do not address myriad other relevant variables that may have changed the outcome without having anything to do with the particular principle at issue.

5. Condition -- Wooden believes that achieving moral and mental greatness is a necessary condition to achieving physical greatness. This may be one of Wooden's least supportable conclusions and any review of Newspaper Sports Section headlines might suggest the opposite is much more often the case. Sport (in particular) is a human endeavor in which natural ability and physiology are frequently much more important to success than anything the individual does to achieve success. Even in modern times where professional athletes typically invest much more time in training and physical conditioning than athletes did in Wooden's era, there is still little necessary connection between physical conditioning and either mental or moral greatness. Tiger Woods would provide the quintessential example of sports success based on physical conditioning in the absence of mental and moral conditioning.

Five Counterintuitive Wisdoms

1. Friendship -- Wooden suggests that in order to achieve success, individual team members must be able to establish genuine friendship. Further, Wooden believes that the elements of that friendship must be based in mutual esteem, mutual respect, and mutual devotion to one another. Possibly the reason this particular principle comes across as counterintuitive in the first place is precisely that it so often not the case at all. Few sports teams are devoid of internal factions or "cliques" and of antagonistic relationships among certain individuals who do not necessarily like one another. This is also true of members of coaching staffs. In business, it is more likely rare than common that all members of a successful team necessarily like one another. Therefore, this conclusion of Wooden's may be among the least supportable and the most dependent on conjecture, personal experience, and contrary to many counterexamples in sports and in business.

2. Enthusiasm -- Wooden maintains that individuals in positions of leadership must be highly motivated and that they must also be positive types of people. This seems counterintuitive because so many successful leaders in sports and in business are actually negative people who thrive on intimidation and, at least as much on the fear of failure that they cultivate as on any positive encouragement. It may be true that successful leaders tend to be enthusiastic; but that enthusiasm is not necessarily what Wooden has in mind. Wooden refers to enthusiasm in the sense that leaders should inspire their followers. In fact, many successful leaders represent only enthusiasm for their goals or for the success of their teams but not necessarily enthusiasm in terms of positively motivating and encouraging individuals.

3. Self-Control -- This principle is another example of Wooden "cherry picking" specific examples that support his conclusions while unscientifically ignoring the many available counterexamples. Again, Tiger Woods would represent the quintessential counterexample of the proposition that self-control is a requirement for success. In fact, there are many examples of success in the absence of self-control in sports and even more examples in contemporary business. Even some of the most successful entrepreneurs and business leaders are notorious for their periodic loss of control and their outbursts, including the late Steve Jobs. Jobs was highly successful as a leader of his organization despite being ell-known for berating and embarrassing team members in a manner that exemplified the antithesis of self-control. Again, Wooden's principle may provide a useful concept, but it is not scientifically supported by empirical evidence or analyses and it is contrary to numerous citable counterexamples that would disprove it as a necessity.