Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain

In Australia, I proudly pointed out that my home state of Arizona was so insignificant that it was the last state in the continental United States to be admitted to the Union. After becoming a state during the Taft administration, Arizona offered cheap land and a place for retirees to go and complain about the extreme heat. When my family relocated there in the late 70’s, the city had a population of less than a million people. For some unknown reason, in 1968 the NBA had decided to grant the provincial town of  Phoenix an expansion team and it was our sole representation in the big four American professional sports. Without an NFL, MLB, or NHL team to distract us; the city loved their Phoenix Suns. As a team, they won a lot in the regular season but in their storied forty-five year history, they have yet to win a championship, coming agonizingly close in 1976, 1993, and were blatantly robbed by the NBA in 2007. For a thirty year period starting in 1977 and ending with the aforementioned thievery of the Phoenix Suns title in 2007, I was a rabid Suns and NBA fan.

My dad brought me to my first NBA game in the Winter of 1977 at the old “Madhouse on McDonald”. We saw the Suns beat the Trailblazers and started a tradition of occasionally attending games, watching on TV, and checking box scores in the newspaper (I’ll have to explain that last one to my kids someday). For the next decade I followed the careers of Kyle Macy, James Edwards, and Larry Nance. I hated Walter Davis for wasting his talent on cocaine. Just as I was losing interest after years of sucking and scandal, in 1987 the Suns blew up the team by trading all of their existing talent and acquired a rookie Kevin Johnson and some draft picks. At the end of the season, Tom Chambers was acquired as a free agent, Dan Majerle was drafted, and the nucleus of an entertaining team for the next four years was formed.

In 1993, after another fifty plus win season followed by a disappointing second round playoff exit, the Suns pulled the trigger on “the trade”. Phoenix gave Philadelphia Tim Perry, Andrew Lang, Jeff Hornacek, and a bag of magic beans in exchange for one Charles Barkley. Suddenly, there were championship expectations. For the first time in a decade and a half of following Phoenix Suns basketball, the Suns put together a team based on the principle that ESPN writer and Boston Celtics superfan Bill Simmons refers to as “The Secret”:

1. You build potential champions around one great player.

2. You surround that superstar with one or two elite sidekicks who understand their place in the team’s hierarchy, don’t obsess over stats, and fill in every blank they can.

3. From the framework, you complete your nucleus with top-notch role players and/or character guys who know their place, don’t make mistakes and won’t threaten that unselfish culture, as well as a coaching staff dedicated to keeping those team-ahead-of-individual values in place.

4. You need to stay healthy in the playoffs and maybe catch one or two breaks. (1)

The 1993 team captivated me as I watched from afar, living in Colorado. They put together a 62 win season, sent Charles Barkley and Dan Majerle to the all star game, witnessed Barkley win the league MVP award, and made it to the NBA Finals. Sadly, they lost to the Chicago Bulls (another team that embraced “The Secret”) because as Charles Barkley later said, he was only the second best player on the planet after Michael Jordan.

The magic of the 1993 season did not last as Hakeem Olajuwon’s Rockets came to dominate the two year self-imposed exile by Michael Jordan. For whatever reason, Kevin Johnson and Charles Barkley could not seem to stay healthy and peak at the same time. After three more years, the Barkley era would end and it would be another eight years before the Suns put together another team that embraced “The Secret” with a core nucleus of Steve Nash and Amare Stoudemire. The Nash teams dominated the regular season with “run and gun” style and came within a fractured Joe Johnson skull, an Amare Stoudemire knee surgery, a dirty play by Robert Horry, and the worst decision by a commissioner in professional sports from winning multiple titles.

My love affair with the NBA came to an abrupt end after the commisioner, David Stern, suspended Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw for standing up and then sitting right back down after one of the worst cheap shots in the history of the league. To make matters worse, Seattle lost its team, the Supersonics, just as they got the rights to to superstar in waiting Kevin Durant. Since relocating to Oklahoma City (of all places - adding insult to injury) the OKC Thunder/ex-Seattle Supersonics have gone on to become a constant contender and have reached the NBA Finals.

I don’t know what caught my interest in the NBA again. It might be being back in the US again. Maybe I’m filling the void that the end of the NFL season has left. Perhaps it’s the excitement of getting an NBA franchise back in Seattle which will be nowhere near as good as the franchise that left... Regardless, I picked up Bill Simmons’ book.

The concept of “The Secret” seemed to make sense and the chapter where he described learning “The Secret” from Isiah Thomas, a man who once promised to beat the crap out of him if they were to ever meet in real life, drunk near a topless pool in Vegas was pure comic gold. However, it was the following chapter comparing Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain that got me thinking.

When I first started following the NBA, there was an ongoing debate over who was the better player - Wilt or Bill? Both players had already retired and the subject was about as interesting to me as it will be to my son when people my age argue who was better Charles Barkley or Karl Malone (the answer is Barkley). Before reading the chapter, I would have gone with Chamberlain.

Career Numbers - note Chamberlain has a career average double Russell’s:

	Points	Rebounds	Assists
Chamberlain	30.1	22.9	4.4
Russell	15.1	22.5	4.3

Without digging deeper, it would be pretty easy to give the title of the best of the era to Chamberlain. However, Simmons convinced me that I was very, very wrong. The thing about Chamberlain and his gaudy stats was that Chamberlain didn’t care about anyone but himself. His whims and desires led to selfish play on whatever challenge he issued to himself that year. If he wanted to lead the league in scoring, he did so at the detriment of his own teammates. From L.A. Times columnist Jim Murray:

“[Wilt] can do one thing well - score. He turns his own team into a congress of butlers whose principal function is to get him the ball under a basket. Their skills atrophy, their desires wane. Crack players like Willie Naulls get on the Warriors and they start dropping notes out the window or in bottles which they can cast adrift. They contain one word: ‘help.’”

When he decided to pursue leading the league in assists, he again modified his game to the detriment of his teammates or the goal of winning. From Simmons:

“Suddenly Wilt was passing up easy shots to set up teammates, checking the scorer’s table multiple times per game, complaining if he felt like he hadn’t been credited for a specific assist, lambasting teammates for blowing his passes and taking an inordinate amount of delight in leading the league in ‘68 (a record he bragged about more than any other).” (2)

Another curious obsession that Chamberlain pursued was his desire to maintain his streak of not fouling out of a game. John Havlicek wrote about it in his autobiography Hondo:

“Wilt’s greatest idiosyncrasy was not fouling out. He had never fouled out of a high school, college or professional game and that was the one record he was determined to protect. When he got that fourth foul, his game would change. I don’t know how many potential victories he may have cheated his team out of by not really playing after he got in foul trouble.”

None of his individual goals had anything whatsoever to do with winning which was the biggest difference between Russell and Chamberlain. Basketball is not an individual sport, but the cast that surrounded Russell and Chamberlain were fairly comparable during the years they were in the league together. Russell won eleven NBA championships and Chamberlain won two. Russell adjusted his game, scored in rhythm, anchored the defense, and did what it took to ensure winning. He was the ultimate team player who possessed the physical gifts to challenge Chamberlain in any one of the stupid individual goals Chamberlain foolishly pursued. Instead Russell made himself a leader and a champion repeatedly.

As I read about some of Chamberlain’s selfish and team destroying actions, I couldn’t help but think of a certain software company’s performance management system that seemed to focus on the individual at the cost of the team. It was almost as if this company, based in Redmond, Washington, was providing incentives to create an army of Chamberlains.

The Company believes that it takes superstars and alpha dogs to make it successful. It uses a bell curve distribution to reward the best and terminate the bottom 10%. Whereas the sport of basketball contains numerous statistics that can at least be a starting point for evaluating a player and limits the number of players per team on the court to five at a time, a big company does not work that way. To make software and services, large teams of product marketers, program managers, developers, and testers are often used. The employees of The Company spend an inordinate amount of time writing career plans. To move up in the organization, it takes almost a Wilt Chamberlain pursuing the assist title mindset to point out accomplishments and to receive credit for them. The Company does not believe in nor tolerate role players who do the dirty work that allow the superstars to take the glory.

It has been said that the difference between a great developer and a bad one can be an order of magnitude (10x). However, in assembling teams on complex software projects, there are important roles for non-superstars. Fixing bugs, reviewing code, managing check-ins and merges, setting up environments, etc. all have to get done. Superstars are unlikely to want to waste their intellectual horsepower and menial but necessary tasks. There is plenty of room for role players on projects with a visionary superstar to do the grunt work. Unfortunately, The Company believes they would be more productive if everyone were a superstar and therefore superstars performed these exercises.

So it goes... Year after year, the company heaps praise and glory onto its superstars who do the most to “manage their careers”. Since there are no convenient stats to use, the company has a calibration where managers get together to rank the employees. At these meetings, there are four types of managers:

1. Managers who don’t give a shit. These managers are in it for themselves and will do whatever it takes to fly under the radar. They will avoid sticking up for an employee and will not fight for promotions or higher rankings for their people. They want to do the least amount of work, but still take credit for whatever their team accomplishes and they actively seek to avoid conflict during calibration.

2. Managers who think every employee on their team is great. These managers are the best to work for and fight tooth and nail for their employees. I have seen some of the dumbest people go from Group Manager to VP in a space of ten years by being under this type of manager. They believe that promoting their employees makes them look good and the better they look, the more rewards they receive.

3. Managers who think every employee on their team sucks. These managers come from the school of thought that no one is as perfect as they are. They will find flaws in the best of employees for simply not being them or having a different style of work. They take delight in holding people back.

4. Real good managers. The rarest of all types, these managers really care and seek to bring out the best in their employees. They realize their teams have both good and bad employees and seek to make every employee better. The good employees get recognition and encouraged to do more. The bad employees are not written off, but actively coached and mentored to hopefully get them to perform better. Sadly, these managers who often do not have the Chamberlain mindset don’t make it very far and are limited in their ability to influence.

Since people’s very livelihoods - from the size of their bonus to whether they’ll have a job next year are dependent on calibration,  there is a huge emphasis on getting this process right. This leads to managers managing managers managing managers. There is a whole layer of people who do not contribute thought leadership or vision but trying to somehow measure the productivity of the individual contributors (ICs) beneath them. Some of the managers really have no idea what they’re ICs do or are very far removed from doing actual work.

The Company has a three tier structure of ICs on the bottom, middle management, and partners. Since it’s the managers who perform the calibrations, it’s in the best interest of the ICs to become managers. Of course, the managers all aspire to become partners. And the partners? The partners all try to stay in power and maintain the status quo. Sadly, these incentives do not value the people doing the actual work, but the individuals who can game the system to reap the rewards, or drawing on my analogy an incentive structure to create Wilt Chamberlains.

As Bill Bradley said of Wilt, “Wilt played the game as if he had to prove his worth to someone who had never seen basketball. He pointed to his statistical achievements as specific measurements of his ability, and they were; but to someone who knows basketball they are, if not irrelevant, certainly nonessential. The point of the game is not how well the individual does but whether the team wins. That is the beautiful heart of the game, the blending of personalities, the mutual sacrifices for group success. Wilt’s emphasis on individual accomplishments... assured him of losing.”

It seems fairly obvious that valuing individual talent to the detriment of teamwork is flawed thinking. Perhaps my analogy between basketball and the corporate world does not apply as winning a championship and writing software are radically different endeavors. Yet, I can’t help but think that the concept of “The Secret” does apply to any team based accomplishment. Would a team of highly motivated and involved people with a lead visionary, a few sidekicks, and a bunch of role players outperform a team where everyone thought they were a superstar or at least spent the bulk of their time trying to convince several layers of managers that they were superstars? Should The Company reward team success over individual stats? Should employees be more concerned about goals bigger than their own individual bonuses? Would you rather play with Russells or Chamberlains?

(1) The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy Bill Simmons page 47 (abbreviated)
(2) The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy Bill Simmons page 73