by Phil Jackson
No question, the team that walked off the floor in Orlando after winning the championship finals in five games was different from the team that had fallen apart on the parquet floor of the TD Garden in Boston the year before. Not only were the players tougher and more confident, but they were graced by a fierce bond.
“It was just a brotherhood,” said Kobe. “That’s all it is—a brotherhood.”
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Most coaches I know spend a lot of time focusing on X’s and O’s. I must admit that at times I’ve fallen in that trap myself. But what fascinates most people about sports is not the endless chatter about strategy that fills the airwaves. It’s what I like to call the spiritual nature of the game.
I can’t pretend to be an expert in leadership theory. But what I do know is that the art of transforming a group of young, ambitious individuals into an integrated championship team is not a mechanistic process. It’s a mysterious juggling act that requires not only a thorough knowledge of the time-honored laws of the game but also an open heart, a clear mind, and a deep curiosity about the ways of the human spirit.
This book is about my journey to try to unravel that mystery.
2
THE JACKSON ELEVEN
You can’t break the rules until you know how to play the game.
RICKI LEE JONES
Before we go any further, I’d like to give you an overview of the basic principles of mindful leadership that I’ve evolved over the years to help transform disorganized teams into champions. You won’t find any lofty management theories here. With leadership, as with most things in life, the best approach is always the simplest.
1. LEAD FROM THE INSIDE OUT
Some coaches love to run with the lemmings. They spend an inordinate amount of time studying what other coaches are doing and trying out every flashy new technique to get an edge over their opponents. That kind of outside-in strategy might work in the short term if you have a forceful, charismatic personality, but it inevitably backfires when the players grow weary of being browbeaten and tune out or, even more likely, your opponents wise up and figure out a clever way to counter your latest move.
I am antilemming by nature. It goes back to my childhood, when I was force-fed religious dogma by my parents, both Pentecostal ministers. I was expected to think and behave in a rigidly prescribed manner. As an adult, I’ve tried to break free from that early conditioning and develop a more open-minded, personally meaningful way of being in the world.
For a long time, I believed I had to keep my personal beliefs separate from my professional life. In my quest to come to terms with my own spiritual yearning, I experimented with a wide range of ideas and practices, from Christian mysticism to Zen meditation and Native American rituals. Eventually, I arrived at a synthesis that felt authentic to me. And though at first I worried that my players might find my unorthodox views a little wacky, as time went by I discovered that the more I spoke from the heart, the more the players could hear me and benefit from what I’d gleaned.
2. BENCH THE EGO
Once a reporter asked Bill Fitch, my coach at the University of North Dakota, whether dealing with difficult personalities gave him heartburn, and he replied, “I’m the one who gives people heartburn, not them.” Fitch, who later became a successful NBA coach, represents one of the most common styles of coaching: the domineering “my way or the highway” type of leader (which, in Bill’s case, was tempered by his devilish sense of humor). The other classic type is the suck-up coach, who tries to mollify the stars on the team and be their best friend—a fool’s exercise at best.
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.
Some coaches insist on having the last word, but I always tried to foster an environment in which everyone played a leadership role, from the most unschooled rookie to the veteran superstar. 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.
Dialing back the ego doesn’t mean being a pushover. That’s a lesson I learned from my mentor, former Knicks coach Red Holzman, one of the most selfless leaders I’ve ever known. Once when the team was flying out for a road trip, a player’s boom box started blaring some heavy rock. Red went over to the guy and said, “Hey, do you have any Glenn Miller in your mix?” The guy looked at Red as if he were out of his mind. “Well, when you get some, you can play a little of my music and a little of yours. Otherwise, shut that damn thing off.” Then Red sat down next to me and said, “You know, players have egos, but sometimes they forget that coaches have egos too.”
3. LET EACH PLAYER DISCOVER HIS OWN DESTINY
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.
Most players are used to letting their coach think for them. When they run into a problem on the court, they look nervously over at the sidelines expecting coach to come up with an answer. Many coaches will gladly accommodate them. But not me. I’ve always been interested in getting players to think for themselves so that they can make difficult decisions in the heat of battle.
The standard rule of thumb in the NBA is that you should call a time-out as soon as an opposing team goes on a 6–0 run. Much to my coaching staff’s dismay, I often let the clock keep running at that point, so that the players would be forced to come up with a solution on their own. This not only built solidarity but also increased what Michael Jordan used to call the team’s collective “think power.”
On another level, I always tried to give each player the freedom to carve out a role for himself within the team structure. I’ve seen dozens of players flame out and disappear not because they lacked talent but because they couldn’t figure out how to fit into the cookie-cutter model of basketball that pervades the NBA.
My approach was always to relate to each player as a whole person, not just as a cog in the basketball machine. That meant pushing him to discover what distinct qualities he could bring to the game beyond taking shots and making passes. How much courage did he have? Or resilience? What about character under fire? Many players I’ve coached didn’t look special on paper, but in the process of creating a role for themselves they grew into formidable champions. Derek Fisher is a prime example. He began as a backup point guard for the Lakers with average foot speed and shooting skills. But he worked tirelessly and transformed himself into an invaluable clutch performer and one of the best leaders I’ve ever coached.
4. THE ROAD TO FREEDOM IS A BEAUTIFUL SYSTEM
When I joined the Bulls in 1987 as an assistant coach, my colleague Tex Winter taught me a system, known as the triangle offense, that aligned perfectly with the values of selflessness and mindful awareness I’d been studying in Zen Buddhism. Tex learned the basics of the system as a student at the University of Southern California under legendary coach Sam Barry. As head coach at Kansas State, Tex refined the system and used it to lead the Wildcats to eight league titles and two Final Four appearances. He also relied on it when he was head coach of the Houston Rockets. (Tex’s USC teammates Bill Sharman and Alex Hannum used their own versions of the triangle en route to winning championships with the Lakers and 76ers, respectively.)
Despite Tex’s and my extraordinary success using the triangle with the Bulls and the Lakers, there are still a lot of misconceptions about how the system works. Critics call it rigid, outdated, and complicated to learn, none of which is true. In fact, the triangle is a simpler offense than most NBA teams run today. Best of all, it automatically stimulates creativity and teamwork, freeing
players from having to memorize dozens of set plays.
What attracted me to the triangle was the way it empowers the players, offering each one a vital role to play as well as a high level of creativity within a clear, well-defined structure. The key is to train each player to read the defense and react appropriately. This allows the team to move together in a coordinated manner—depending on the action at any given moment. With the triangle you can’t stand around and wait for the Michael Jordans and Kobe Bryants of the world to work their magic. All five players must be fully engaged every second—or the whole system will fail. That stimulates an ongoing process of group problem solving in real time, not just on a coach’s clipboard during time-outs. When the triangle is working right, it’s virtually impossible to stop it because nobody knows what’s going to happen next, not even the players themselves.
5. TURN THE MUNDANE INTO THE SACRED
As a boy I used to marvel at the way my parents created community, transforming the hardscrabble life on the plains of Montana and North Dakota into a sacred experience.
You know the hymn:
Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in Christian love;
The fellowship of kindred minds
Is like to that above.
That’s the essence of what it means to bring individuals together and connect them to something greater than themselves. I heard that hymn thousands of times when I was growing up, and I witnessed what happens when the spirit touches people and unites them. The rituals had a profound effect on me—and on my approach to leadership—even though later I drifted away from the Pentecostal faith and found a new direction spiritually.
Once when the Bulls were getting on the team bus after a close come-from-behind win, my trainer Chip Schaefer said he wished we could bottle that late-game energy like a magic potion so we could bring it out whenever we needed it. That’s a nice idea, but what I’ve learned is that the forces that join people harmoniously aren’t that clear-cut. They can’t be manufactured at will, though you can do your best to create the conditions that will promote that sort of transformation—very similar to what my parents tried to do every Sunday in church.
As I see it, my job as a coach was to make something meaningful out of one of the most mundane activities on the planet: playing pro basketball. Despite all the glamour surrounding the sport, the process of playing day after day in one city after another can be a soul-numbing exercise. That’s why I started incorporating meditation into practices. I wanted to give players something besides X’s and O’s to focus on. What’s more, we often invented rituals of our own to infuse practices with a sense of the sacred.
At the start of training camp, for instance, we used to perform a ritual that I borrowed from football great Vince Lombardi. As the players formed a row on the baseline, I’d ask them to commit to being coached that season, saying, “God has ordained me to coach you young men, and I embrace the role I’ve been given. If you wish to accept the game I embrace and follow my coaching, as a sign of your commitment, step across that line.” Wonder of wonders, they always did it.
We did this in a fun way, but with a serious intent. The essence of coaching is to get the players to wholeheartedly agree to being coached, then offer them a sense of their destiny as a team.
6. ONE BREATH = ONE MIND
When I took over the Lakers in 1999, they were a talented but highly unfocused team. They often fell apart in the playoffs because their attack was so confused and undisciplined and the better teams, such as the San Antonio Spurs and the Utah Jazz, had figured out how to neutralize the Lakers’ most potent weapon: Shaquille O’Neal.
Yes, we could make a number of tactical moves to counter these weaknesses, but what the players really needed was a way to quiet the chatter in their minds and focus on the business of winning basketball games. When I was head coach of the Bulls, the players had to deal with the Michael Jordan media caravan. But that was nothing compared to the distractions the Lakers faced in the belly of celebrity culture. To get the players to settle down, I introduced them to one of the tools I’d used successfully with the Bulls: mindfulness meditation.
I’ve taken a lot of ribbing from other coaches for my experiments with meditation. Once college basketball coaches Dean Smith and Bobby Knight came to a Lakers game and asked me, “Is it true, Phil, that you and your players sit around in a dark room before games and hold hands?”
All I could do was laugh. Though mindfulness meditation has its roots in Buddhism, it’s an easily accessible technique for quieting the restless mind and focusing attention on whatever is happening in the present moment. This is extremely useful for basketball players, who often have to make split-second decisions under enormous pressure. I also discovered that when I had the players sit in silence, breathing together in sync, it helped align them on a nonverbal level far more effectively than words. One breath equals one mind.
Another aspect of Buddhist teachings that has influenced me is the emphasis on openness and freedom. The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki likened the mind to a cow in a pasture. If you enclose the cow in a small yard, it will become nervous and frustrated and start eating the neighbor’s grass. But if you give it a large pasture to roam around in, it will be more content and less likely to break loose. For me, this approach to mental discipline has been enormously refreshing, compared to the restricted way of thinking ingrained in me as a child.
I’ve also found that Suzuki’s metaphor can be applied to managing a team. 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.
7. THE KEY TO SUCCESS IS COMPASSION
In his new adaptation of the Chinese sacred text Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell offers a provocative take on Lao-tzu’s approach to leadership:
I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are the greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.
All of these “treasures” have been integral to my coaching, but compassion has been the most important. In the West we tend to think of compassion as a form of charity, but I share Lao-tzu’s view that compassion for all beings—not least of all oneself—is the key to breaking down barriers among people.
Now, “compassion” is a word not often bandied about in locker rooms. But I’ve found that a few kind, thoughtful words can have a strong transformative effect on relationships, even with the toughest men on the team.
Because I started as a player, I’ve always been able to empathize with young men facing the harsh realities of life in the NBA. Most players live in a state of constant anxiety, worrying about whether they’re going to be hurt or humiliated, cut or traded, or, worst of all, make a foolish mistake that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. When I was with the Knicks, I was sidelined for more than a year with a debilitating back injury. That experience allowed me to talk with players I’ve coached from personal experience about how it feels when your body gives out and you have to ice every joint after a game, or even sit on the bench for an entire season.
Beyond that, I think it’s essential for athletes to learn to open their hearts so that they can collaborate with one another in a meaningful way. When Michael returned to the Bulls in 1995 after a year and a half of playing minor-league baseball, he didn’t know most of the players and he felt completely out of sync with the team. It wasn’t until he got into a fight with Steve Kerr at
practice that he realized he needed to get to know his teammates more intimately. He had to understand what made them tick, so that he could work with them more productively. That moment of awakening helped Michael become a compassionate leader and ultimately helped transform the team into one of the greatest of all time.
8. KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE SPIRIT, NOT ON THE SCOREBOARD
Management guru Stephen Covey tells this old Japanese tale about a samurai warrior and his three sons: The samurai wanted to teach his sons about the power of teamwork. So he gave each of them an arrow and asked them to break it. No problem. Each son did it easily. Then the samurai gave them a bundle of three arrows bound together and asked them to repeat the process. But none of them could. “That’s your lesson,” the samurai said. “If you three stick together, you will never be defeated.”
This story reflects just how strong a team can be when each of its members surrenders his self-interest for the greater good. When a player isn’t forcing a shot or trying to impose his personality on the team, his gifts as an athlete most fully manifest. Paradoxically, by playing within his natural abilities, he activates a higher potential for the team that transcends his own limitations and helps his teammates transcend theirs. When this happens, the whole begins to add up to more than the sum of its parts.
Example: We had a player on the Lakers who loved to chase down balls on defense. If his mind was focused on scoring points at the other end of the floor instead of on making steals, he wouldn’t be able to perform either task very well. But when he committed himself to playing defense, his teammates covered for him on the other end, because they knew intuitively what he was going to do. Then, all of a sudden, everybody was able to hit their rhythm, and good things began to happen.
Interestingly, the other players weren’t consciously aware that they were anticipating their teammate’s behavior. It wasn’t an out-of-body experience or anything like that. But somehow, mysteriously, they just sensed what was going to happen next and made their moves accordingly.