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LIVE FOR THE FUTURE, NOT IN THE PAST

When I came to the Celtics as head coach and president in the spring of 1997, I arrived with a vision. It was clear and direct. We wanted to be in the playoffs by the third or fourth year. We wanted to be a championship contender by the fifth or sixth year. That was the vision, our long-range plan. I was also becoming part of a franchise that had one of the most storied traditions in all of sports, sixteen world championships, including one stretch from the late fifties through the sixties when the Celtics won eleven world titles in thirteen years.

Yet it also was an organization that had grown stale. The Celtics were at the lowest point in their history. They had just concluded a season in which they only had won fifteen games and attendance was down. Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish—the cornerstone of the great Celtics teams of the eighties—were all gone, and the cheers seemed to have left with them. The glory days seemed far away. The year before, the Celtics had moved into the new FleetCenter, adjacent to the old Boston Garden, but it seemed as if all the good memories were in the old Garden next door.

This was the reality I was walking into and there were many people who thought I should just come in and clean house, simply wipe the slate clean and begin all over again. Their reasoning was that the organization was in such dire straits that it needed a symbolic overhaul: out with the old, in with the new.

But the new job was a balancing act. If it was obvious that the Celtics needed a reorganization, the problem was what to do. I was very cognizant of the great tradition of the Celtic past, that this was like some precious heirloom that had to be treasured. I had to honor the past, but I had to upgrade, too. You can’t live off tradition. That’s one of the things I learned at Kentucky, where the first thing I had to do was clean up the mess that had put them on NCAA probation.

It’s a fine line to walk as a leader. You must pay homage to the great tradition, because that’s one of the things that makes you special, but you have to be future-oriented, too. The worst thing you can do is get bogged down in the past and rest on laurels that have long since withered. We can learn from the past, but we can’t live in it.

BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE FUTURE

Before I came to Boston, one of the first things I did in my negotiations with Celtic owner Paul Gaston was to insist that if anyone in the organization were to be let go, he had to do it, and he had to do it before I arrived. I was not going to be placed in a situation where the first thing I did as the new leader was to change people. All that would have done was make the people who didn’t get fired extremely leery of me, so handling this prior to my coming aboard was essential.

While the organization has to take care of the past, a new leader has to take care of the future. Your message is about the future and how it’s going to be better for everyone. Your message is this is the start of a new era. It’s an uplifting message, one filled with hope and potential, and you don’t want it clouded by having to fire people as your first official act. Change is difficult enough for people without your being perceived as the Grim Reaper.

Yes, we needed to resurrect the franchise, but many of the changes had to be subtle and gradual before a total transformation could take place. When I first came on board with the Celtics, I soon realized that the people remaining in the organization were very good at what they did; there wasn’t any need for major change there. The marketing people, the promotional people, the business people—all these departments were operating well, so there was no reason to disrupt what they were doing.

An important key for leaders to help keep their eye on the future is to constantly be upgrading. This is the world of high technology. And just as the technology keeps changing, today’s computer becoming virtually obsolete by next year, you must always be looking for ways to make the parts of an organization better. That’s your game plan: short-term goals to manage the present, long-term goals for the future. And with your short-term goals your methods are going to change as the different obstacles appear before you.

For example, when I got the job in the spring of 1997, we figured that we would either get Tim Duncan or Keith Van Horn in the NBA draft. Since the Celtics had finished last in the league, we had the highest percentage of landing the first pick in the NBA draft lottery for my first season. Even if we didn’t get the first pick—which everyone knew would be Duncan, then having ended a great career at Wake Forest—we expected at least the second pick, which everyone knew would be Van Horn. Either one of them would have dramatically upgraded our talent level and would have given us a jump start on our vision of being in the playoffs by the third year, and being a championship contender by the fifth year.

That didn’t happen. By some mixture of fate and bad luck, we ended up with the third and sixth pick, which was a dramatic falloff. Would we be better now with either Duncan or Van Horn? No question. But that’s where the importance of flexibility comes in: You can’t feel sorry for yourself, just as you can’t sit around and lament what might have been. You simply must keep upgrading as much as you can, whether it’s with people, facilities, or technology. Your daily goals are to keep making things better, but your vision remains constant.

ACT, DON’T REACT

Poor leaders lack vision. They are too locked into the present tense, either bogged down in daily problems or simply reacting to past failures. They too often seem to bounce from crisis to crisis, always with an eye out for the next one around the corner. Their view of the future is hazy because they’re always too concerned about the present. They are more concerned with managing than leading.

There’s a difference between management and leadership: leaders lead; managers manage. Managers are the ones that oversee the rules and values of the organization. By definition, they function within the parameters of the organization and often, when faced with a situation outside of these parameters, they’re not sure how to act.

Leaders are not hampered by such restrictions. It’s their role to stretch the organization, change it. Leaders are the ones who provide the vision.

Take the bottom NBA teams, for example. In the past two decades it’s always the same story: A so-called tough coach leaves only to be replaced by a so-called player’s coach, only to have the cycle repeated over and over. The organization has waffled back and forth and when one coach leaves all the blemishes come out, leaving the new coach to always start at ground zero. The same repetitive cycle over and over again.

The problem with the Nets during this time was that there was never any vision, never any grand plan that exceeded hiring some new coach who was the philosophical opposite of the one who just left. Instead of trying to actualize a grand plan to find the perfect leader for their team, they always were reacting to what had been tried before, forever a yo-yo.

Many companies are just like this. One CEO leaves, another takes his place, only to be replaced by still another somewhere down the line. Management styles come and management styles go; yet when you talk to people in the actual workplace nothing really changes at all, at least not substantively. It’s all style, like constantly putting new paint on an old house. When all is said and done you still have the same old house. The same problems never really go away, they just get camouflaged for a while.

This is a common failing of leaders who don’t have a vision. The result is they always seem to be reacting instead of acting, always trying to fix the mistakes of the past. If plan A fails, they try plan B. If B fails, they try plan A again, and on and on it goes back and forth. When one plan fails the leader tries another one, but all the plans are short-sighted, designed solely to deal with the present problem at hand. It’s a little like trying to rake leaves in a windstorm: You can work very hard and have all the right intentions, but invariably you fail because you simply haven’t planned very well.

Poor leaders never seem able to transcend the past. They are forever wallowing in it, caught in its quicksand. Instead of moving everyone toward a different future, they seem unable to escape past failures and their ramifications.

A leader’s lack of vision also eventually cripples the people being led. Without a vision to inspire employees and see where their works fit into the big picture, all work eventually seems like a station on a bad assembly line, another numbing day at a boring task, with little understanding of where it can lead. Ultimately, it becomes work in all the negative aspects of the word and nothing more. People in these situations invariably begin working for themselves, their view of the future not extending beyond the next paycheck. These people have little loyalty and virtually no allegiance.

Why should they? They’ve been given no alternative. They become the kind of people that look at the highway and just see more highway, not where that highway can take them.

PUT YOUR TEAM IN “FUTURE THINK”

Shortly after I began coaching at Boston University, I learned that if I was going to put that carrot out there I had to tell my players where it was going to take them. I couldn’t just keep making them work hard because I said so, because eventually they would start questioning what all the hard work was for. I had to have a vision and I had to be able to impart that vision to my team. A leader has to tell the people he is leading where the vision is going to take them.

Let’s look at a failing company. The CEO is let go, another one comes in to take his place. What’s he do? Often, the script plays out like this: The new CEO immediately lays off 20 percent of the workforce, leaving the remaining 80 percent filled with doubt and anxiety. Their morale is awful. They fear the future. Their way of dealing with this is to become focused on themselves.

What that CEO should do is the opposite. The first thing new leaders have to do is explain their vision. Then they have to locate the talent in the company. Immediately reducing the workplace before becoming familiar with the talent available will hurt your potential. Don’t listen to hearsay. Determine it firsthand. The worst mistake you can make is to eliminate on other people’s impressions people who could have helped you.

New leaders can’t come into the workplace like a business version of some medieval chieftain, leaving bodies scattered in their wake. They can’t come in and instantly change everything. New leaders have to come in promising hope, come in with a vision of the future that doesn’t contradict the good aspects of the organization’s past.

In his book Think Like a Champion, Denver Broncos’ Mike Shanahan talks about one of this first coaching jobs, as an assistant at his alma mater, Eastern Illinois.

“There was some talk that the school was going to drop its football program, particularly since it hadn’t had a winning season in seventeen years,” Shanahan writes. “Twenty-one of the twenty-two players from the team that had finished 1-10 the previous season were returning for the next season. They were the laughingstock of the state. But why let the past determine the future? With an expanded coaching role for me and with new leadership in place—Eastern Illinois had hired former University of Arizona and Florida State head coach Darrell Mudra, who, for good reason, was nicknamed ‘Dr. Victory’—it was time to believe anything was possible.

“‘Men,’ he told our players and coaching staff, ‘you are going to be winners. I’ve looked at a lot of film and know the talent we have and I know we will get to the (Division II) playoffs with the right plan and the right attitude. There is no reason why we can’t win a national championship.’

“Everyone looked at him as if he was high on drugs, including me. I thought we definitely could win, but he was talking about a national championship when we hadn’t had a winning record in nearly twenty years. But in the end of the season, he was right. . . .We won the national championship. . . .And now that I look back on it I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Coach Mudra had a vision and he would not be denied.”

Shanahan’s story is a classic example of vision.

As we talked about in the first chapter, establishing the vision from the beginning is essential, because it makes you immediately deal with the future. It moves the focus away from the past. It makes everyone start to look forward instead of behind. It establishes the dream and that’s the environment you are trying to create: everyone pursuing the dream of a better future.

SELL POSSIBILITY

Creative people are valuable to any group. They are innovative and have many ways to make things better. But being creative doesn’t necessarily mean that they know how to execute those ideas. And execution is the key. How do you get your product out there? How do you get people to be aware of your message? How do you get people to believe in you? How do you deliver? How do you win?

These are the questions that will determine whether you ultimately succeed or fail. Execution is what victories are made of.

If you believe in some new idea or strategy, you have to market that belief and sell it. Sell it to your management team. Sell it to your employees. Sell it to the world that’s watching you. And you do this by the step-by-step execution of your game plan into a real-life program. What you are looking for is a greater percentage of the marketplace. But you must market your program to everyone. Nothing is more significant than this. Every person involved is important, because you are trying to sell them all. You market your message to everyone and hope you get your percentage. That’s why when I’m out in public I never mind signing autographs. My job is to create more Celtics fans, so everywhere I go I market the Boston Celtics.

Why do I do this? Why is this important when the Celtics are as much a Boston institution as the Freedom Trail and the Old North Church?

I know how important a constant marketing program is because I personally witnessed the Yankees and Kentucky basketball floundering and saw them go through their bad times, these two sports giants that no one thought could flounder. We are in a very competitive business, where not everyone can be successful. If the Roman Empire can fall, the Boston Celtics certainly can fall.

In the fall of 1999, following the NBA lockout, we were down one thousand season tickets from the year before at the same time. So I wrote a letter to every season ticket owner who did not reapply. My message to them?

“I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t renew either. Last year’s team didn’t play with Celtic Pride. But. . .”

Then I listed how the upcoming year was going to be different. How we had learned from the year before, that there was going to be a significant turnaround and they were not going to want to miss it.

The letter was successful. It was simple, it was low cost, and it addressed the issue of concern to fans.

For the same reason the FleetCenter had a cruise for season ticket holders, as well as parties for season ticket holders and parties for sponsors. Our strategy is to bring the Celtics to people, for we must keep the Celtics out there in the public eye. In a sense we’re competing with the Red Sox, the Patriots, the Bruins. We’re competing with the movies and videos. It’s all the entertainment dollar and we are trying to maintain our percentage.

We can’t take anything for granted. We must keep looking to create new fans—more season ticket holders—to increase our fan base. They are the future. Without them, we won’t have a future.

MARKET TO YOUR FUTURE

There is a book called The Servant As Leader by Robert K. Greenleaf, and its contention is that in today’s business climate everything must be geared to the customer and to the people who service those customers. This idea has reached a point where in some companies now it’s the customers who get the prized parking spot, not the CEO or the executives. The premise is that leaders have to be servants because the key people are 1) the customers, and 2) the people who service the customers’ needs.

That book is right on target. Look at many of the large food chains, the ones that deal in volume. Their profit margin on what they sell is so slim that they need a steady flow of customers. They can’t afford to take their success for granted. They can’t afford to get complacent. They must continue to deal in volume. They must continue to generate new customers, as well as keeping the ones they have satisfied. So even with all their success there is always pressure to keep marketing their product, keep adding new customers.

There’s a lesson there for anyone who is leading an organization. In January of 1999, shortly after the NBA lockout ended, the Celtics traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, and Worcester, Massachusetts, to hold a free workout for the public. It was our way of trying to win the fans back, our version of the olive branch. In both places we had the players greeting the fans as they entered the building, plus signing autographs.

I did this, too. In Providence, I was asked by a sports writer why I continued to stand in the lobby signing autographs until all the people were gone.

“Because they’re our customers,” I answered. “And you don’t shut the door on customers and tell them the door’s closed. All the people I was signing autographs for were either customers or potential customers.”

A good example of this is 76ers owner Pat Croce, who stands outside and greets people as they walk into the arena. Here is someone who understands public relations, and that people will leave the arena feeling good about the 76ers, and the way thet were treated.

The real question is: Why did it take a lockout for us in the NBA to realize this? Why didn’t we realize that professional sports, like any other business, is about marketing?

Take the Celtics, for example. Back in the eighties, when they had Larry Bird, they really didn’t have to market themselves. They were one of the elite teams in the game. They sold out every night. Who needed marketing? But we don’t have Larry Bird anymore. We have a new building with roughly six thousand more seats than the old Boston Garden and we have to market our product. It’s not enough just to announce the schedule and wait for the people to flock into the building the way it was done in the Bird era. It’s all in the marketing of the team to keep us focused on what will work in the future, not on what worked in the past.

It’s a lesson I learned at Boston University.

When I got that job in 1977 they were probably drawing fifty to seventy-five people a game, so our plan was to do whatever it took to get more people to come to the games. I visited dormitories. We had raffles. We passed out pamphlets.

The first year I decided to do a “Midnight Madness” party, to celebrate the start of our first practice at the stroke of midnight on October 15th, the first day you’re allowed to practice. Lefty Dreisell had originated the idea a few years earlier at Maryland, and I thought it would be a great way to generate some interest. Our plan was to get a lot of people, have champagne toasts, and introduce everyone to the new era that was beginning at Boston University. That was the plan, anyway, and we were psyched. We passed out pamphlets. We spread the word around. We expected between five hundred and a thousand people. We even had about thirty bottles of champagne. This was going to be the start of something special.

Thirty-six people showed up.

Sixteen were family and close friends. Another ten were our boosters. And the other ten? Guys with a strong affinity for alcohol who cared very little about basketball. Guys who had wandered in searching for the free champagne. I was crushed.

What was I going to tell my team who were in the locker room thinking they were about to run out before a cheering crowd? What were we going to do with all the champagne?

In the beginning, nothing seemed to make any difference at BU. I would speak at dormitories that had maybe a thousand kids in them and six would show up to hear me speak. We would pass out thousands of pamphlets and get a dozen extra people to a game. We would ask ourselves, Why? What were we doing wrong? We told ourselves our potential fans were out there; we just weren’t reaching them.

I was told not to worry about it, that BU was an apathetic campus, that there were just too many other things to do than go to a college basketball game to see a team that hadn’t had a winning season since anyone could remember.

But I wasn’t satisfied with this attitude. I wanted to see this program have a promising future, not be saddled with the indifference of the past years. So I began to learn what customers are all about.

We had to identify a BU fan, to try and get a good solid core of seven hundred people who would come and support us. That became our aggressive goal, and even though they still left us with about thirteen hundred empty seats, we couldn’t worry about that. We had to respect the seven hundred people who were there. We had to make sure they kept coming back. That was our job. Respect the seven hundred who were coming, while all the time trying to add to that number. That became the goal. Eventually, we got to fifteen hundred people. But it took four years.

In retrospect, I know this is where I developed my philosophy of marketing. If you keep selling your product and don’t take anything for granted, you can transform an organization even when the odds say you can’t.

Just because you’ve been successful in the past is no guarantee of anything in the future. No matter what your résumé says, you can very quickly demolish the past, whether at an organizational level or an individual one. We can all name countless once-successful companies that have fallen off the earth, companies that once were thought to be untouchable. When I was a kid every serious basketball player wore Converse sneakers. Everybody. They dominated the marketplace. Now? They’re fighting to survive in an industry where it often seems that Nike rules the world.

The point is that all companies are fragile, even the so-called giants. There is so much competition. Individual trends and fashions are constantly in motion. The marketplace is always changing. It’s hard enough to get to the top, but it’s harder to stay there. The talent is so close, the difference between winning and losing is so thin. Things can change in a heartbeat. Yes, we have a national championship at Kentucky. Yes, we went to three Final Fours in five years. Yes, we won in the pros with the Knicks.

But it’s all meaningless as far as how I’m judged today.

If I don’t win with the Celtics, none of these accomplishments will be anything other than nice items on a biography page. In today’s culture, we’re all being judged on how we do now. Coaches always have known that. The realities of their profession convince us very early that the past is for scrapbooks, that if you are not successful it doesn’t matter what your résumé says, you will be let go.

That’s the way it is today in business also. You’re a new CEO and you have a five-year plan? Well, your stockholders want to see results now. They want to make money now. If there’s no success in two years, odds are that CEO won’t be around in that fifth year.

We live in a very impatient society. Intellectually, people understand that rebuilding takes time. Emotionally? They don’t have the patience for it. So you must always trying to make the future arrive sooner.

LOOK FOR LEADERS AROUND YOU

One of the great models for any organization is a professional football team. Football is the sport which most closely mirrors a company. In football, more than any other sport, there is a definite chain of command. There is the head coach. Then there is an offensive coordinator and a defensive coordinator and the respective coaches who work underneath both. So the head coach is not so much coaching the players as he is coaching the other coaches. He imparts his daily vision to his assistant coaches. They, in turn, impart it to the players.

This is the blueprint that most companies follow. It is also the model I follow, both as the president of the Celtics and as the coach. I rely on others to help us become more successful.

Jim O’Brien, who was with me when I coached the Knicks and also at Kentucky, is in charge of the defense and how the other team plays. He breaks down the other team’s film, formulates a game plan on how to play them. Lester Connor, another assistant, is in charge of the offense.

After each game, we break down the film and grade everything. How we fought over screens. How many loose balls we got. How many deflections we got. How many rebounds. Where our shots came from. Everything is broken down; everything graded. We do this on both offense and defense. There is nothing left to memory, nothing left to interpretation.

Then we show it to the players. Seeing it on film is powerful. It allows the coaches not to be endlessly harping on the transgressions, something which has the potential to be resented by the players. Instead, the players can see it for themselves.

We also have two video people who help the team. Let’s say we’re going to play Portland, for example. One person would be responsible for putting together a video on Scottie Pippen. It would show where he scores from. What side does he usually go on the floor? Where does his shot come from? What side does he like to post up on? The point is to tell the people who are likely to guard Pippen all his tendencies, although we only will give the players about 50 percent of the information we get, because we want them to be able to assimilate what we give them, not be overloaded with it.

But it is not enough just to have your staff on board.

Ever since I came to the Celtics in May of 1997 I have been looking for some players who are going to become leaders. If you look at all great athletic teams, one of the constants is good veteran leadership. From the great Celtics teams of the eighties with Larry Bird, to the Lakers of the same era, to the Chicago Bulls with Michael Jordan, a common thread running through these teams was the presence of great leadership on the court. Bird, Magic, and Jordan were not just great basketball players. They were great leaders as well—to the point that if teammates did not work hard in practice they would get on them, not just the coach. In a sense, these teams didn’t really need a strong leader as the coach, for the coach’s principles and strategies were constantly being reinforced by these great players. This is the perfect scenario.

For I know that my voice can’t always be the only voice they hear. That simply won’t work over the long haul. Eventually, that one voice will get tuned out, like so much loud music that you can’t wait to turn the volume down on. So my message must be constantly reinforced by others.

In my first season in 1997–’98 I knew that my voice was not there the minute I left the locker room. The players were either too young or didn’t possess proper leadership traits to continue my voice—my message—when I wasn’t physically there.

That’s why I signed Popeye Jones at the start of my second year, the shortened season in 1999. He is old by NBA standards and was coming off injuries, so I knew it would be a period of time before he would be able to regain his physical skills. But I know his leadership skills hadn’t disappeared. He is a voice of experience, someone who not only has been through the NBA wars, but has a perspective on them. With Popeye I knew I didn’t always have to be physically present for my message to be heard. So I was paying him more for his leadership than for his talent and that leadership is something the Celtics so desperately need.

That leadership is something I need.

And even if I eventually traded Popeye to Denver in the summer of 1999, as part of the deal that sent Ron Mercer to the Nuggets for Danny Fortson and Eric Williams, I always appreciated Popeye’s veteran leadership.

In my first year with the Celtics, the 1997–’98 season, I made Pervis Ellison a captain. Pervis is a veteran whose career had been hampered by injuries and the perception was that he doesn’t want it enough, that he’s content to do the minimum and coast. He is virtually a poster child for this perception, even though in many ways he’s a delightful man. So I named him captain as a motivational tool, hoping that the honor would make him play through his nagging injuries and begin to reach his full potential.

Unfortunately, Popeye experienced further injuries and never had a chance to showcase his leadership abilities. But I still believe that this is a useful tool to help determine who’s got what it takes to be a future leader.

I also named Antoine Walker as another captain. He is our best player, one of the most talented young players in the NBA, someone who I recruited out of high school and someone who played two years for me at Kentucky. Now Antoine is a great talent. He had come to Kentucky from Chicago where he was a talented high school player who was creative with the ball, the kind of player who never met a shot he didn’t like. That never bothered me at the time, because a lot of great high school players think shot first. I recruited him because he was a great competitor, was an extremely versatile player, and because his first college choice had been to come to Kentucky.

When I coached him at Kentucky my task was to make him more team-oriented, while not inhibiting either his talent or his competitiveness. It’s a delicate balance. You want him to think “team” first, but you also don’t want to put too many reins on his talent. It’s a little like having a great salesman whose personality tends to turn off many people in the office. You want him to soften his personality for the sake of the group, but you also don’t want him to lose that certain swagger that makes him such a good salesman.

So whenever Antoine used his excellent passing skills while at Kentucky and began playing less selfishly, I publicly pointed this out. Whenever I had the chance I would publicly acknowledge Antoine’s willingness to become more team-oriented at the expense of his individual stats as one of the keys to our success. At the large press conference on the day before the national semifinals in the Meadowlands in New Jersey—with Antoine being one of the players with me at the press conference—I again stressed that Antoine’s transformation as a player was one of the reasons why we had been so successful, for what you have to do with young people is constantly reinforce the kind of behavior for which you’re striving. You can’t take it for granted. You can’t let it go unnoticed. You have to acknowledge it as much as you can.

Antoine left Kentucky after his sophomore year to enter the NBA draft. It was the year we won the national title, and Antoine parlayed that and his great potential to become the sixth pick in the draft.

His first year with the Celtics he had been one of the impact rookies in the league, a future star in the making. When I began coaching him with the Celtics it was quickly apparent to me that Antoine was still much like what he’d been in his two years in Kentucky—very talented, but still immature as a player. I was hoping that making Antoine a captain would escalate the maturation process, make Antoine be more of a leader. It’s what the Seattle SuperSonics did with Gary Payton, another extremely talented young player with a reputation for being extremely volatile. The Sonics were publicly asking Payton to mature, and he did, to a point.

But I have learned that before you can change someone you must build a trust. My message to Antoine going into the 1999–2000 season was that, even though he might read things in the newspaper attributed to me that he might not like, the reality is that I recruited him to Kentucky, we won a national championship at Kentucky together, and I gave him a contract worth $12 million a year. So that the reality is Rick Pitino is behind Antoine Walker, and that Antoine Walker has to be behind Rick Pitino; that we’ve already had some great times together and now we have to have great times with the Celtics together. What I’m trying to do with Antoine is to convince him that we need each other.

So far, the jury is still out, but I still believe in his talent and his ability to be loyal to the organization.

I also have learned that as a leader I must delegate. I have to trust the people I have working for me. I have to believe in their leadership abilities and I must institute a system of checks and balances to make sure they can be as successful as possible. By showing confidence in others, I am placing a bet on their abilities and how they contribute to our organization in the future, rather than limiting their role to how they’ve performed in the past.

Where is your group going to be down the road?

What are your people going to be down the road?

Can you get them to reach their potential and if you can, how long is that going to take?

The mistake many people make is they give up on people too soon. They either can’t see the potential or they feel they can’t afford to wait for it.

But it’s a fine line. It’s the problem I have with Antoine Walker heading into the 1999–2000 season. Yes, he’s a great talent. Someday he’s going to mature. But is someday going to be your day? That’s the tricky question. His true greatness as an NBA player will probably come in his seventh or eighth year as a pro. But will I be there then?

That’s the question you eventually have to answer: Are you going to stay the course or are you going to change? Is it failure or just adversity? You are the captain of the ship and you have to decide whether it’s a storm or just choppy seas. But you have to surround yourself with creative people and you must build alliances with them.

DON’T SURROUND YOURSELF WITH “YES” MEN

The people who work for you must be dependable and trustworthy. Hopefully, you will be able to depend on them during difficult times. But they must be creative, too. You must allow people around you to express themselves. You don’t want “yes” men, people who are always going to tell you want you want to hear. They must be able to tell you when they think you’re wrong.

I learned this from Hubie Brown, whom I worked for two years with the New York Knicks in the early eighties. I was amazed at how much teaching he allowed me to do. He always allowed me to express myself. He listened to my ideas. He let me have great input in practice. He sought my advice during games. His main objective as a leader was to make things better, not to be unquestioned. That’s an important distinction. Leaders who are not secure in their role don’t want their authority questioned. Leaders who are secure always want to make things better, whatever it takes.

The more responsibility you give your lieutenants the stronger you make them. And the stronger they are the stronger you are.

If you watched us practice with the Celtics you would see that all my assistant coaches have a role. There’s no question I’m in charge, but everyone has their job to do. They all have their own areas of responsibility. I want their input, their ideas. I want them to make decisions and I also want their feedback. I not only want it, I need it.

You must be willing to be evaluated by people for without constant feedback, you can’t be a great leader. When I’m in staff meetings I am forever asking my staff what they think about things, constantly challenging them for more feedback. Otherwise, it’s like living inside a hothouse, unrealistically sheltered from all cold, hard facts of the world. The more observations and insight you get from the people around you, the better able you are to make better decisions.

You must be able to listen. As a young coach I didn’t do that very well. In retrospect, I’m sure some of my assistants were afraid to question me, convinced I wouldn’t handle their feedback very well, that I would snap at them. They were probably too intimidated to challenge me and that was my failing. But I couldn’t coach that way now, even if I wanted to. It simply wouldn’t work. I have come to learn that the more feedback the better.

If I can get one or two things from the variety of books I read, then reading that book helped me. That’s really all I’m looking for, one or two things. The more things you learn from the people around you, the better you’re able to execute.

I also want feedback from my players. I want to know what bothers them, what makes them go sideways. I want to know as much about them as possible. Their moods, their frustrations, their hopes and dreams. I want to know what they want, what they expect. In short, I am in search of the truth. And the only way you start to get as close to that as you possibly can is to receive as much information as possible.

What I’m also in search of is providing the environment in which potential can flourish. That’s always your bottom line. As a leader, you’re always looking toward the future, an environment where the past is buried and present-day problems are solved in ways that do not get in the way of your long-term goals. You have to stick close to your vision of where you’re going. That’s the beacon you always are moving toward and you must never lose sight of it.

KEY CHAPTER POINTS

• Bridge the Gap Between the Past and the Future You must respect an organization’s histories and traditions, but you always must be upgrading, too. The key is to always be making it better. Your game plan is short-term goals to manage the present; long-term goals for the future. The emphasis, though, always has to be on the future.

• Act, Don’t React Poor leaders lack vision. They are too locked into the present tense, endlessly being bogged down by either daily problems or past failures. This is not acting, this is reacting. Leaders act. You must forever be using people toward the future.

• Put Your Team in “Future Think” You can never let people lose sight of your vision, what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization and where you’re trying to go. This is the flag you always have to be waving, even during those times when everyone seems immersed in the present tense.

• Sell Possibility You always have to be selling the future. You can’t be satisfied with what you’ve already accomplished, you always have to be pushing forward, making people aware of the possibilities.

• Market to Your Future You also always have to be selling your product, no matter how successful it is. You can’t take anything for granted. You must understand that all organizations are fragile and that today’s success can instantly become tomorrow’s failure.

• Look for Leaders Around You You must always be looking for future leaders, the ones who are going to spread your message. You can’t be the only voice people hear. You must surround yourself with creative people and build alliances with them.

• Don’t Surround Yourself with “Yes” Men You need feedback from people. You need to create an environment where creativity can flourish. Surrounding yourself with people who are afraid to tell you what they feel—for whatever reason—gets in the way of this.