Eleven Rings

Key Concepts

Jackson’s eleven leadership principles

1. LEAD FROM THE INSIDE OUT

“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.” (p. 11)

2. BENCH THE EGO

“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.” (p. 12)

“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.” (p. 12)

3. LET EACH PLAYER DISCOVER HIS OWN DESTINY

“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.” (p. 13)

4. THE ROAD TO FREEDOM IS A BEAUTIFUL SYSTEM

“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.” (p. 15)

5. TURN THE MUNDANE INTO 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.” (p. 16)

6. ONE BREATH=ONE MIND

“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.” (p. 17)

7. THE KEY TO SUCCESS IS COMPASSION 

“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.” (p. 19)

8. KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE SPIRIT, NOT ON THE SCOREBOARD

‘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.” (p. 20)

9. SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO PULL OUT THE BIG STICK

10. WHEN IN DOUBT, DO NOTHING

“Basketball is an action sport, and most people involved in it are high-energy individuals who love to do something—anything—to solve problems. However, there are occasions when the best solution is to do absolutely nothing.” (p. 22)

11. FORGET THE RING 

“And yet as a coach, I know that being fixated on winning (or more likely, not losing) is counterproductive, especially when it causes you to lose control of your emotions. What’s more, obsessing about winning is a loser’s game: The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome.” (p. 23)

Having to watch from the sideline while injured enabled him to view the game from the balcony

“This forced me to start thinking of the game as a strategic problem rather than a tactical one. As a young player, you tend to focus most of your attention on how you’re going beat your man in any given game. But now I began to see basketball as a dynamic game of chess in which all the pieces were in motion. It was exhilarating.” (p. 37)

“Three aspects of Zen have been critical to me as a leader:”

1. GIVING UP CONTROL (p. 52)

2. TRUSTING THE MOMENT (p. 53)

3. LIVING WITH COMPASSION (p. 53)

Having a structure enables improvisation

“What I love about Monk’s list is his basic message about the importance of awareness, collaboration, and having clearly defined roles, which apply as much to basketball as they do to jazz. I discovered early that the best way to get players to coordinate their actions was to have them play the game in 4/4 time. The basic rule was that the player with the ball had to do something with it before the third beat: either pass, shoot, or start to dribble. When everyone is keeping time, it makes it easier to harmonize with one another, beat by beat.” (p. 67)

“One thing I liked about Tex’s system, from a leadership perspective, was that it depersonalized criticism. It gave me the ability to critique the players’ performance without making them think I was attacking them personally. Pro basketball players are highly sensitive to criticism because almost everything they do is judged on a daily basis by coaches, the media, and just about anyone who owns a TV set. The beauty of the system—and this applies to all kinds of systems, not just the triangle—was that it turned the whole team into a learning organization. Everybody from Michael on down had something to learn, no matter how talented or untalented he was.” (p. 70)

Leaders need to delegate and provide room for everyone to develop 

“Needless to say, the coaching profession attracts a lot of control freaks who remind everyone constantly that they’re the alpha dog in the room. I’ve been known to do this myself. But what I’ve learned over the years is that the most effective approach is to delegate authority as much as possible and to nurture everyone else’s leadership skills as well. When I’m able to do that, it not only builds team unity and allows others to grow but also—paradoxically—strengthens my role as leader.” (p. 86)

“In The Tao of Leadership, John Heider stresses the importance of interfering as little as possible. ‘Rules reduce freedom and responsibility,’ he writes. ‘Enforcement of rules is coercive and manipulative, which diminishes spontaneity and absorbs group energy. The more coercive you are, the more resistant the group will become.’” (p. 121)

“Heider, whose book is based on Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching, suggests that leaders practice becoming more open. ‘The wise leader is of service: receptive, yielding, following. The group member’s vibration dominates and leads, while the leader follows. But soon it is the member’s consciousness which is transformed, the member’s vibration which is resolved.’” (p. 121)

Buddhist teachings applied to basketball

“I thought the teachings might help explain what we were trying to do as a basketball team.” (p. 220)

1. “RIGHT VIEW—involves looking at the game as a whole and working together as a team, like five fingers on a hand.

2. “RIGHT THINKING—means seeing yourself as part of a system rather than as your own one-man band. It also implies going into each game with the intention of being intimately involved with what’s happening to the whole team because you’re integrally connected to everyone on it. 

3. “RIGHT SPEECH—has two components. One is about talking positively to yourself throughout the game and not getting lost in aimless back talk (“I hate that ref,” “I’m going to get back at that bastard”). The second is about controlling what you say when you’re talking with others, especially your teammates, and focusing on giving them positive feedback. 

4. “RIGHT ACTION—suggests making moves that are appropriate to what’s happening on the floor instead of repeatedly showboating or acting in ways that disrupt team harmony. 

5. RIGHT LIVELIHOOD—is about having respect for the work you do and using it to heal the community rather than simply to polish your ego. Be humble. You’re getting paid a ridiculous amount of money to do something that’s really simple. And fun. 

6. “RIGHT EFFORT—means being unselfish and exerting the right amount of energy to get the job done. Tex Winter says that there’s no substitute for hustle, and my addendum is, if you don’t hustle, you’ll get benched. 

7. “RIGHT MINDFULNESS—involves coming to every game with a clear understanding of our plan of attack, including what to expect from our opponents. It also implies playing with precision, making the right moves at the right times, and maintaining constant awareness throughout the game, whether you’re on the floor or on the bench

8. “RIGHT CONCENTRATION—is about staying focused on what you’re doing at any given moment and not obsessing about mistakes you’ve made in the past or bad things that might happen in the future.” (pp. 220-1)

Continuous learning is required to stay at the top

The mistake that championship teams often make is to try to repeat their winning formula. But that rarely works because by the time the next season starts, your opponents have studied all the videos and figured out how to counter every move you made. The key to sustained success is to keep growing as a team. Winning is about moving into the unknown and creating something new. Remember that scene in the first Indiana Jones movie when someone asks Indy what he’s going to do next, and he replies, “I don’t know, I’m making it up as we go along.” That’s how I view leadership. It’s an act of controlled improvisation, a Thelonious Monk finger exercise, from one moment to the next. (p. 251)

It’s better to channel anger than to try to suppress it

“Managing anger is every coach’s most difficult task. It requires a great deal of patience and finesse because the line between the aggressive intensity needed to win games and destructive anger is often razor thin.” (p. 268)

“In Western culture we tend to view anger as a flaw that needs to be eliminated. That’s how I was raised. As devout Christians, my parents felt that anger was a sin and should be dispelled. But trying to eliminate anger never works. The more you try to suppress it, the more likely it is to erupt later in a more virulent form. A better approach is to become as intimate as possible with how anger works on your mind and body so that you can transform its underlying energy into something productive. As Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman writes, ‘Our goal surely is to conquer anger, but not to destroy the fire it has misappropriated. We will wield that fire with wisdom and turn it to creative ends.’” (p. 269)

Quotables

“Circle of love. That’s not the way most basketball fans think of their sport. But after more than forty years involved in the game at the highest level, both as a player and as a coach, I can’t think of a truer phrase to describe the mysterious alchemy that joins players together and unites them in pursuit of the impossible.” (p. 3)

“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.” (p. 10)

“That’s why I subscribe to the philosophy of the late Satchel Paige, who said, ‘Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.’” (p. 23)

“The greatest carver does the least cutting.” LAO-TZU (p. 25)

“‘On a good team there are no superstars,’ Red insisted. ‘There are great players who show they are great players by being able to play with others as a team. They have the ability to be superstars, but if they fit into a good team, they make sacrifices, they do things necessary to help the team win. What the numbers are in salaries or statistics don’t matter; how they play together does.’” (p. 31)

“Suzuki writes, ‘If you want to obtain perfect calmness in your zazen, you should not be bothered by the various images you find in your mind. Let them come and let them go. Then they will be under control.’ The best way to control people, he adds, is to give them a lot of room and encourage them to be mischievous, then watch them. “To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy,’ he writes. ‘The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.’” (p. 52)

“Former UCLA head coach John Wooden used to say that ‘winning takes talent, to repeat takes character.’” (p. 110)

“To make your work meaningful, you need to align it with your true nature. ‘Work is holy, sacred, and uplifting when it springs from who we are, when it bears a relationship to our unfolding journey,’ writes activist, teacher, and lay monk Wayne Teasdale in A Monk in the World. ‘For work to be sacred, it must be connected to our spiritual realization. Our work has to represent our passion, our desire to contribute to our culture, especially to the development of others. By passion I mean the talents we have to share with others, the talents that shape our destiny and allow us to be of real service to others in our community.’” (p. 125)

“Zen teacher Lewis Richmond tells the story of hearing Shunryu Suzuki sum up Buddhism in two words. Suzuki had just finished giving a talk to a group of Zen students when someone in the audience said, ‘You’ve been talking about Buddhism for nearly an hour, and I haven’t been able to understand a thing you said. Could you say one thing about Buddhism I can understand?’ After the laughter died down, Suzuki replied calmly, ‘Everything changes.’” (p. 168)

“Looking back, I think my struggle with Jerry taught me things about myself that I couldn’t have learned any other way. The Dalai Lama calls it ‘the enemy’s gift.’ From a Buddhist perspective, battling with enemies can help you develop greater compassion for and tolerance of others. ‘In order to practice sincerely and to develop patience,’ he says, ‘you need someone who willfully hurts you. Thus, these people give us real opportunities to practice these things. They are testing our inner strength in a way that even our guru cannot.’” (p. 185)

“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” ZEN PROVERB (p. 231)

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” THE BUDDHA (p. 262)

“Buddhist sages say that there’s only ‘a tenth of an inch of difference’ between heaven and earth. And I think the same can be said about basketball. Winning a championship is a delicate balancing act, and there’s only so much you can accomplish by exerting your will. As a leader your job is to do everything in your power to create the perfect conditions for success by benching your ego and inspiring your team to play the game the right way. But at some point, you need to let go and turn yourself over to the basketball gods. The soul of success is surrendering to what is.” (p. 334)