A Coach's Diary

Getting guys from all different walks of like to buy-in to one common theme is what makes him a genius of the game. During a broadcast of the USA Basketball Men's National Team's practice, Grant Hill was asked where the 'greatness' of Coach K comes from. Grant says that, along with his great mind and understanding of the game, his ability to connect and build relationships with the guys allows him to build a trust and get a buy-in from the guys.   Grant says that Coach K has a way of selling himself and making you feel special within that relationship. We can have all the knowledge in the world, but if we can't get a group of guys to buy-in to a common theme and come together as one, we will struggle to find success.  Use your relationships to do so.

How Can We Make This Thing Right Here Personally Meaningful? The most powerfully motivating condition people experience at work is  making progress at something that is personally meaningful . How can you make what your team/school/class/business is doing personally meaningful? - Understand what drives each person - Help build connections between what drives them, their individual work, and the mission of the organization - Provide timely feedback - Help each person learn and grown on an ongoing basis Regular communication around development – coaching conversations – is the single most important managerial competency that separates highly effective managers from average ones (or great coaches from average ones) Many managers think they don’t have the time to have these conversations, and many lack the skill. Yet 70% of employee learning and development happens on the job, not through formal training programs. So if line managers aren’t supportive and actively invol...

Every group has a culture.  The culture reflects the conversations of the people within the organization.  To create change, you have to change the culture.  To change the culture, you have to change the conversations. If the CEO is committed to creating possibilities from “nothing”, he or she cannot transform those possibilities into reality as a lone wolf. If he surrounds himself with the smartest people, it does not mean those people will be comfortable turning “nothing” into something extraordinary. Even the smartest people need to be motivated to produce astonishing results. And, without a culture to support extraordinary, high performance becomes a pipe dream. Therefore, the CEO is also responsible for creating a winning culture. While there is no silver bullet, the solution is much simpler than it sounds. Every organization has a culture. Every culture is made up of a network of conversations (social anthropologists say the culture of a countr...

Portland Trail Blazers NBA Summer League This is a GREAT way to get an easy basket, and could turn into one of your better back screen plays that we like to use to start the game off with a lob or an easy basket.   You can also use this play to get your best player a look in an end of quarter/half/game time situation. I saw this play while watching the Portland Trail Blazers play the New York Knicks.  Portland ran this play several times to get shots for guard CJ McCollum and they also ran it for a lob to athletic guard Will Barton. What I love about NBA sets, along with them being the best sets in basketball, is that each play has so many options, and they always have a setup for the ‘play after the play,’ as I have heard Lawrence Frank call it. It is important to have built in scoring opportunities or options for if the play breaks down or doesn’t work.  In the NBA, that often means a ball screen look, and this set has a few different options at different...

“That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.” In 1915, aged thirty-six, Einstein was living in Wartorn Berlin, while his estranged wife, Mileva, and their two sons, Hans Albert Einstein and Eduard “Tete” Einstein, lived in comparatively safe Vienna. On November 4 of that year, having just completed the two-page masterpiece that would catapult him into international celebrity and historical glory, his theory of general relativity, Einstein sent 11-year-old Hans Albert the following letter: Thanks to www.fresherair.net for the find and www.brainpickings.org for the added research. The thing you are doing now, the thing you do when you are supposed to be doing something, the thing you do to waste the time, that is your true passion.  #followit

This is a clip from an episode titled “ What Could Have Been”   from NBA TV’s “ Open Court.”   In this clip, they are discussing the career of Tracy McGrady.  Tracy McGrady was a very talented and versatile scorer and star in the NBA from 1997 – 2013.  He was a 7 time all-star and led the league in scoring twice.  He was also known as a big time superstar, who in his prime, could not lead his team out of the first round of the NBA playoffs. In the clip, Steve Kerr questions McGrady’s ‘fire’ and suggests that this lack of ‘fire’ kept him from being greater than what he was. Some of the other guys jump to McGrady’s defense, expressing that him being able to do what he did as a professional in the NBA shows that he did indeed have that ‘fire.’  McGrady skipped college, jumping straight to the NBA out Mt. Zion Christian Academy in North Carolina.  Kenny Smith said something very interesting about the growth in learning that you get from goin...