Wooden on Leadership

It's written by former college basketball coach John Wooden. At UCLA during the 1960s and 1970s Wooden won ten NCAA championships in 12 years. During one stretch UCLA won 88 straight games and 35 straight NCAA tournament games. In Wooden on Leadership (McGraw-Hill, $22.95) the coach comes off as the anti-Welch. Please don't take this as a slight to Welch; it's merely proof that there's more than one path to the top.

For one, Wooden never uses the word "winning." He writes: "In all my years of coaching I rarely, if ever, even uttered the word win … or exhorted a team to be number one. Instead, my words and actions always reflected early advice: ‘Never cease trying to be the best you can become.'"

Too squishy? In 302 pages Wooden fills in the details. He'll convince you that success--plenty of it--will occur as a result of getting your organization and its people to do the right thing. Let's hang on to that thought. In these postmodern times only a Leader with moral gravity can talk about doing the right thing without provoking cynicism. The jerk style of leadership may also work, but only if the jerk is honest about his nastiness. Wooden is a throwback to an earlier, Norman Vincent Peale-era America. One of his better observations: "Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to stay there." Wooden admits he prayed daily for guidance. The Wizard of Westwood is candid about his own shortcomings, one of which was a fist-fighting temper in his early days.

Wooden is a stickler for detail. "Think Small. Work Hard. Get Good," he writes. "When occurs, blame rests with you, the leader, not with your team." Wooden liked to start every practice season with a lesson on how to put on … sweat socks! The point was to avoid blisters. You can imagine what thoughts were racing through the heads of superstar recruits such as Gail Goodrich, Lew Alcindor Jr. (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and Bill Walton when their mighty coach began the first practice with: "Men, you will now take off your shoes and socks."

Wooden says, "I derived great satisfaction from identifying and perfecting those ‘trivial' and often troublesome details, because I knew, without doubt, that each one brought UCLA a bit closer to our goal: competitive greatness. If you collect enough pennies you'll eventually be rich. Each relevant and perfected detail was another penny in our bank."