Chapter 19

Farewells

“Parting is such sweet sorrow, / That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.”

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

In a perfect world you’ll always go out on top, but regardless of how it ends, the wins are what are remembered. Before you choose your next adventure, take time to reevaluate your goals and your definition of success.

BYRON: NEVER CHANGE

Relationships change over the course of a lifetime. As I moved from player to assistant coach to head coach I always wanted to make sure I stuck to my core values and treated people with the same respect regardless of my position with the team. If I do that, and the other person can do that as well, relationships can grow into even deeper, more meaningful bonds.

Gary Vitti, for example, was still the head trainer with the Lakers when I returned to coach. This time around we were much older and in different places in our lives—married, then divorced, and now in new relationships. He’d call me the big kahuna or head honcho, because I was the coach now. But the relationship between us was still the same.

There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do for Vitti. We go to dinner with James Worthy and the wives and girlfriends and tell stories about back in the day when he was a young Gary Vitti and James and I looked exactly the same as we do today. The fact that all these years later we can still get together and talk like that is proof that relationships matter.

On the court it was the same way. He’s gotten much more blunt in his old age, but the players respect it, because they know he’s seen and done it all in his career. In his first four years with the Lakers he won three championships, so thirty years later he’d be the first to tell the current team they ain’t nothing compared to the players we had back in the day. He’d say it casually and I would crack up laughing because that’s Gary Vitti.

That’s just the way he is; he’s going to tell you like it is. He’s not going to pull any punches—and that’s even with me. He’s just as straight up with me as he always has been, and that’s what I love about him.

That’s part of what’s special about being a Laker. The trainer has eight championships in his thirty years. Magic and Worthy are in the building all the time. You don’t get that anywhere else. Often I told guys over the course of the most recent two years that this uniform is like no other uniform that you ever put on. The team is like no other team that you’ll ever be a part of. The legends and Hall of Famers who walk through these halls still got mad love for this organization. They know what it’s all about, so it takes a different type of person with a different level of pride to put on the Lakers uniform and walk the halls with them.

Once you put it on, as Magic Johnson says, there are no excuses. I don’t want to hear that you’re sick or your knee hurts. I don’t want to hear that garbage. If you put the uniform on, you better be ready to play. Period.

That’s how I felt. That’s how Gary Vitti felt. That’s how everyone who bleeds purple and gold feels. It took some time, but that’s how the guys on the team started to feel as well.

Larry Nance Jr. went to Vitti a few times for advice. Lou Williams would go to him. They knew, as I did as a player, that the winning mentality in the organization flowed through Gary Vitti, and whether he was solving a life problem or teaching you how to properly lift weights, he was making you a better winner.

Of course, he stuck by his core values too, which is why he’d never tell me what he and the players talked about.

“That’s between me and them,” he’d tell me when I’d try to squeeze it out of him. “Big kahuna, I got to keep this to myself, because I told them it was between me and them.”

That’s the code and I respect that. The fact that he never wavers in his beliefs is what makes him a winner. In fact, it’s what made all of us winners. For us to win championships the training staff had to be doing its job, the medical staff doing its job. It’s not just the coaches and players on the floor. It’s everyone. That’s why everyone gets a ring.

CHARLIE: FINISH LINES

Companies are defined by the people who work for them. From top to bottom, it’s the team that makes it a success. At Deer Park I had to manage up to Nestlé. I had to manage out to the unions. I had to manage and get the best pricing and service quality from the copackers who were bottling the water. My job was really to get the resources I needed from Nestlé, keep it apprised of the issues I had so it didn’t have any angst about what I was doing, and find the resources and the talent to let that company grow. Those people were the difference makers.

When Clorox bought Deer Park from us after we had bought it from Nestlé, it had two other water companies based in Florida, and eventually my role was to coordinate all three water companies and bring them together as one.

The managers at the water companies owned by Clorox were very different managers and very different people. Once again I was the young marketing guy, and they thought marketing wasn’t worth its salt, and they questioned my knowledge on running routes. They had more routes than we had, and just getting these industry old-timers to buy into what I wanted to do was a huge challenge.

But to me, if you’re following the same path as everybody else, you’re not going to be better than the competition. To be better, you have to try out different things. But we weren’t always on the same page, so the consolidation wasn’t easy.

We had to make a lot of decisions about who should get what jobs. In one case the founder had a son who was a very competent guy. We tried to get the son to stay, and he stayed for a while, but then he left, and that was a bad outcome for us, because we didn’t have a backup internally. We had to go outside.

In the other case it was a smaller company, and the former owner did not have a strong number two, but he needed to be moved out of the day-to-day in that business. Again we needed to search.

In both cases the process took longer because of our cultural differences. The people I wanted—people with a marketing background—didn’t mesh with what the other companies were looking for. They wanted leaders with a sales background. They didn’t believe marketing worked, but I knew it had with Deer Park.

While with Nestlé, we took Deer Park from $5 million to $8 million; then as a private company we took it to $12 million. Then when we merged we were doing more expansion to new locations as well as merging these two other companies, so when we were done, ten years later, it was a $65 million company.

Eventually I got the right people in place, and while there was definitely organic growth, having the right leaders working with me was a big reason for the success. The people put in positions of leadership create the success.

In this case, because there was a lot of resistance the growth took longer. We eventually did it, and there was a great satisfaction to making it all work. By the time I moved on to McKesson I was ready for greater challenges. You can’t compare it to a championship, because the business world isn’t a competition where one team is crowned. But my time at Deer Park was definitely a victory.

Leaving is always difficult, but feeling the job is done makes it easier. I appreciate the leaders who spend a lifetime at a company and help it continue to grow over the course of their careers. But that’s not for everyone. In this case I knew there were other challenges to tackle, so I happily left with a sense of accomplishment.

BYRON: THE FAREWELL TOUR

A month or so into the 2015–16 season Kobe Bryant announced that he was ending his twenty-year career and retiring from the NBA at the end of the season. It changed the dynamic of the season for me as a coach, and it also changed management’s plans for the future of the Lakers.

Just as I tell my players not to think too far ahead and not to play for that next contract, I too wanted to stay focused on winning that season, not thinking about what the team would have to do without Kobe Bryant. He’d been a Laker since my final year as an NBA player in the 1996–97 season.

The season quickly changed course, though, as it became more a farewell tour for Kobe than anything else. Every arena we went to was completely sold out. Ticket prices tripled because fans wanted to see Kobe play his last game in their city. He got gifts and tribute videos and standing ovations, and the game itself became the sideshow in a sense.

The irony was that Kobe just wanted to go out there and win games. He wasn’t someone who could ever be distracted. As for the rest of us—myself included, from time to time—it was a different story.

It was difficult trying to go out every single night and win. We had so many young players I was trying to develop into winners while all of this was going on. Publicly I was saying my number one job was to develop those players and win ball games, but in my head I was also trying to make sure Kobe played the right number of minutes each night so that his body would hold up and make it to the last game of the season.

He wanted to play every minute of every game possible, but it was on me as coach to sit him when necessary so his legs would still be working for that last game against the Utah Jazz at home on April 13. We wouldn’t play Kobe in back-to-back road games unless it was his last time in a particular city. And if his minutes were up, I’d take him out late in the game, even if we had opportunities to win. If he’d played his limit, I couldn’t put him back in.

It was a game plan unlike anything I’d ever had to deal with in New Jersey, New Orleans, or Cleveland, where we’d just been trying to win games. Winning while developing players and managing a legend’s time turned the job in LA into a totally different monster. I was going against my normal coaching style to cater to the fans and management and basically everyone but myself, since the losses landed on my shoulders regardless of the circumstances. Wins became hard to come by, which was something we’d expected, but it was still tough to handle.

It was extremely hard to lose games. After losses I’d wake up two or three times during the night wondering what had happened and what I could have done better. The Kobe factor and the rookie play didn’t keep me up at night, but the losing did. I’d get up in the morning and push myself to keep managing and keep going forward in my efforts to make sure these guys continued to get better.

I took every loss hard, and I looked around and wasn’t sure it was bothering anyone else. That didn’t make it easier. I would tell the guys in practice that if it wasn’t bothering them as much as it was bothering me, then something was wrong. Losing got in our heads, and it led to a seventeen-win season.

CHARLIE: SALE OF THE CENTURY

The departure from McKesson Water was a bit different from my exit from Deer Park. I was older, wiser, and probably a bit run down. The stress of turning a company around and dealing with the ups and downs can get to you. You try your hardest to compartmentalize, but it’s not easy. In the end it leads to a roller coaster of emotions.

When we sold McKesson Water to Groupe Danone for $1.1 billion dollars, it was a pretty awesome sale. It was the largest sale ever in the bottled water industry. It was Danone’s largest purchase ever.

For the sale I worked with McKesson Co. and we hired a great mergers and acquisitions group from Lehman Brothers that was directly involved in helping to sell the company. Nestlé, which owned Arrowhead and quite a number of other home and office delivery companies in the US at the time, was the logical buyer. It wanted to buy the company and would have had the most synergies, but I was afraid that if we sold to Nestlé most of our employees would lose their jobs because there was a tremendous overlap between our head office in LA and Arrowhead’s head office in LA.

Danone had very large water holdings outside the US, with Evian and a whole series of other water brands, and a small home and office business in Latin America and in Canada, and that was it. It wanted to become a much larger player in that home and office business, and we were able to maximize the purchase price because we had developed incredible systems and had access to data in real time. If we bought a direct response advertising spot on a Wednesday, we knew whether that commercial had paid out before the next airing on Thursday. If it didn’t work, we could cancel Thursday in time. We knew that quickly how well the advertising was doing.

We had developed enterprise software that gave us user-ready data as we were going out to the field on the second day after we closed the books, which was unheard of. We had spectacular systems. Nestlé wanted those systems. Danone wanted those systems. Danone wanted very desperately to have a foothold in the United States for home and office, and we were the biggest one in the country. It was an ideal way for it to really make a statement. So we were able to get the two companies to compete with each other to buy our business, and we got a price that was terrifically high.

It was a good feeling, especially considering the struggles at the beginning. There was a sense of accomplishment not just for me, but also for the entire team of people within the company who knew they’d contributed to this success. By that point we felt like a family, and there was an emotional tie to the sale of the company that almost everyone felt.

Of course, when you are that emotionally invested the pendulum can swing pretty quickly after the sale. You look at the company as your baby, and when someone else is in control it’s easy to let emotions get the best of you when decisions are made that you don’t agree with.

Part of the deal with the sale of McKesson Water was that I stay on as CEO for at least six months, along with the rest of my senior staff. During that time the executives at Danone ran the company the way they ran their other businesses. They never asked what we had done to make our business so successful. Instead they folded us into the blueprint that they had for running a water company globally, and it didn’t work in the United States. They made a number of poor strategic decisions, and it really bit them badly. Ultimately they lost a lot of money and had to sell the company.

I had to stay six months and at six months and one day I called the CEO of the parent company and told him I was going to leave. He asked why and I told him.

“Because the person who’s running your water group is going to kill this business, and I don’t want to be part of it.”

“Would you stay on as a consultant to help us?” he asked.

“Nobody is listening to me as an employee, so why would you listen to me as a consultant?”

There wasn’t much to say after that. I told him I wanted out, and that was the end of it.

I didn’t know Byron yet when I left McKesson, but all these years of talking to him about his experiences, and watching what happened with the Lakers, changed my perspective a bit on those final months with the company. When I was in the weeds, I felt a strong tie to McKesson Water, and it hurt to watch changes get made, but the truth was that it wasn’t the same company anymore. The water might have had the same label on the bottle, but it wasn’t the water company I knew and loved.

The same was true with the Lakers team that Byron was coaching. The jerseys were the same, but the culture had changed. It was a different era. You could see it in that meeting with LaMarcus Aldridge, where Lakers management talked about everything but basketball. That foreshadowed Byron’s unfortunate departure, which occurred the following summer.

When Byron was playing, owner Jerry Buss had been all about winning. He did whatever it took to have a winning team. If that meant trading Norm Nixon for Byron, he was ready to do it. Back then, when they brought someone in, they sold the winning Lakers culture. Now they were selling Hollywood. In my opinion they’d lost what had made them the great franchise they were in the eighties.

What’s great about Byron is that he saw that right away. He was able to compartmentalize and not let his most recent experience with the Lakers sour his great memories and love for the team. I watched him turn the corner and almost immediately move on to his next venture without an ounce of regret or remorse. I wish I had known Byron when I left McKesson, because it took me quite a bit longer to get on his page.

BYRON: OUT WITH A BANG

While it was likely the roughest season of my coaching career, ten years from now the one thing that people will remember most is that seventeenth and final win. No matter where you sat—on the second level of the arena, in the front row next to Jack Nicholson, or at home on a couch somewhere—the last game of the 2015–16 season was a special one for Lakers fans everywhere.

In Kobe Bryant’s final NBA game he went out there and left it all on the court. The man played his heart out, turned his game up to a championship level, and gave the fans something they will talk about forever.

As the coach I would just tell the guys to give him the ball. Not just because he was Kobe Bryant and it was his last game, but because he had that Mamba look in his eyes. He had the hot hand, and as I tried to explain to the guys all season, you have to feed the hot hand.

I also had to remind the rest of the team from time to time to keep their spacing and not just stand out there and watch the show, because if they doubled Kobe at any point they needed to be open for a shot. They needed to spread the floor and be ready if the ball came their way. That’s always a problem for young guys when there’s a figure like Kobe on the team, but in this final game it was even more of an issue because it was a spectacular game to watch.

Through it all I don’t think I drew up one play. During time-outs I would name the play we were running and remind Kobe where he’d be catching the ball. It was really that simple. Once he got it going it was just “Get him the ball.” It took them eighty-two games to do it, but our young guys realized he had the hot hand.

I guess that’s something I can take away from that experience with the Lakers. Those guys grew up a lot over the two seasons and I think they’ll be better for it down the road. Kobe’s last game was also Gary Vitti’s last game with the organization, and as it turned out it was my last game too.

The two years didn’t go how I’d wanted them to, and I didn’t get another year to see what I could do with the team. That’s just the way it goes sometimes. Charlie thought I got a raw deal. I think he was angrier than I was when he found out they’d called me in on a Sunday night to tell me it was over. Earlier in the week I had been with Mitch Kupchak and Jim Buss at a meeting at UCLA, discussing a partnership with the school’s medical staff, and by Sunday my time with the team was over. Clearly they’d known I was on my way out, but they hadn’t felt the need to be up front about it. That was the new culture in the Lakers organization, and Charlie was quick to point that out to me. Even if they had kept me on, similar issues would have continued to arise throughout my time there.

Being around Charlie and seeing how he conducts business is a reminder that there are people out there leading the right way. As an honest leader, Charlie was angry when he heard the news. I could see that vein in his head pop out when he would talk about it, which actually made me smile a bit. I have the same passion for my job, but I have no hard feelings, and in the end coaching the Lakers was still a dream come true even if at times the job was a nightmare.

At least the two-year run had a magical ending, with a final game by Kobe that I was happily the head coach for. He finished the night with sixty points (the most of any player in that season), including thirteen unanswered points in the fourth quarter, to give us the victory when we had been down by ten points. During time-outs he was breathing heavily and I could see on his face that he was giving it everything he had. It was pure adrenaline keeping him going at the end.

At one point I was worried that it was too much. I didn’t need him falling over in his final game, but I knew his mentality was that he had the rest of his life to rest, so he wanted to be out there.

What makes him a winner isn’t the sixty points. It isn’t the thirteen unanswered. It isn’t the nineteen thousand fans in the arena who went nuts with every shot. It wasn’t even the 5.2 million who tuned in to watch the game on ESPN2 (since the Golden State Warriors were going for a record of their own on ESPN).

The number that makes Kobe a legend is the number seventeen. That win—in a season when wins were hard to come by—was the only thing that mattered. He didn’t score sixty because he wanted to score sixty. That’s what he needed to score for the team to win the game.

From day one when he entered the league and wasn’t even a starter, all that mattered to Kobe was getting the win. Now at his last game it was still the only thing that mattered. That’s why he’s a future Hall of Famer, and I’m glad the other guys on the team were watching.

CHARLIE: CLEAR THE MIND

The day I announced that I was leaving Groupe Danone, Ric Kayne called me and wanted to have lunch to get me involved with Glacier Water Vending. He was the primary owner of Glacier Water Vending at the time, and he called me every day for nearly a year to get me involved.

On that first day I was honest with him and told him I didn’t want to do anything. I had gone through a very stressful period for ten years at McKesson Water, and when I left I was really burned out.

My time at McKesson was mostly positive. By the end I didn’t just have the respect of the employees, there was actual love there. I got cards and letters and well wishes from many—a far cry from the hate mail early on—and most were genuinely sad to see me go.

I felt the same way. They were all such a big part of my life. The company was a big part of my life, maybe too big.

For a long time after I left I was holding on to an annoyance about what the acquirer of our business was doing to the company, and a lot of the senior managers who remained were calling me and complaining about what had happened since I left. I was carrying it for longer than I would’ve liked.

I needed a true sabbatical after leaving to really clear my head, remove business thoughts from my mind, and breathe a little before making decisions about my future.

I got a number of proposals to do consulting, and people were throwing ridiculously high dollar figures at me, and I just didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted to chill out. It really was important to just get my balance, and during that period, Peggy and I set up a donor-advised trust with the California Community Foundation, and we started to get much more involved in philanthropy.

I was looking to balance my life more by giving back to the community while I was also gainfully employed. I taught a seminar on corporate communication from the CEO perspective at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. I got involved with the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. And we started to look for charities that Peggy and I, as well as our children, Emi and Mike, were passionate about.

We found organizations that we could contribute to financially and in other ways. I was hardly doing nothing during my time off, but I was able to stay away from worrying about quarterly earnings statements, employee problems, and everything that had really been occupying my time for over thirty years.

Once I was truly released from that world I was able to focus on what I wanted to do in this next stage of my career. Ultimately I decided I did not want to work full time, because I wanted to spend more time on philanthropic areas, travel, and other things that gave me more fulfillment.

When you are between jobs or looking to make a major change, you have to ask yourself, “Is the skill set that I possess today good enough for me to continue to be competitive in the marketplace in my area? If not, what education do I need?” The process of looking for a new job is a full-time job in itself, so you should lay out your plan in the same way you would lay out a business plan for running a company.

I was fortunate enough that I didn’t have to work. So for me it was more about finding balance. That took me the better part of a year, and when I’d done it I called Ric and began investing in Glacier and many other companies. I took my skill set to the boardroom and built a portfolio of companies where I invested and held a board seat, including Freshpet, which excites me as much as any company that I have worked with throughout my career.