Part 12 (1/2)

CHAPTER 9

BITTERSWEET VICTORY

Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

GABRIEL GARCiA MaRQUEZ

That summer Michael and Scottie headed to Barcelona to play for the Dream Team. Jerry Krause was not pleased. He argued that they should skip the Olympics and rest up for the coming season. But they ignored his request, and I'm glad they did. An important s.h.i.+ft took place in Barcelona that would have an enormous impact on the future of the Bulls.

Michael returned from the games raving about Scottie's performance. Before the summer, Michael had regarded Pippen as the most talented member of his supporting cast. But after watching him outplay Magic Johnson, John Stockton, Clyde Drexler, and other future Hall of Famers in Barcelona, Michael realized that Scottie was the best all-around player on what many consider the best basketball team ever a.s.sembled. Scottie, Michael had to admit, had even outshone him in several of the games.

Scottie came back with renewed confidence and took on an even bigger role with the Bulls. NBA rules prevented us from adding a third cocaptain to the roster (in addition to Michael and Bill Cartwright), but we gave Scottie that role ex officio. We also made B.J. Armstrong a starter, since John Paxson was recovering from knee surgery and his playing time was limited.

In The Tao of Leaders.h.i.+p, 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.”

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.”

This is what I was trying to do with the Bulls. My goal was to act as instinctively as possible to allow the players to lead the team from within. I wanted them to be able to flow with the action, the way a tree bends in the wind. That's why I put so much emphasis on having tightly structured practices. I would a.s.sert myself forcefully in practice to imbue the players with a strong vision of where we needed to go and what we had to do to get there. But once the game began, I would slip into the background and let the players orchestrate the attack. Occasionally I would step in to make defensive adjustments or s.h.i.+ft players around if we needed a burst of energy. For the most part, though, I let the players take the lead.

To make this strategy work, I needed to develop a strong circle of team leaders who could transform that vision into reality. Structure is critical. On every successful team I've coached, most of the players had a clear idea of the role they were expected to play. When the pecking order is clear, it reduces the players' anxiety and stress. But if it's unclear and the top players are constantly vying for position, the center will not hold, no matter how talented the roster.

With the Bulls, we didn't have to worry about who the top dog was, as long as Michael was around. Once I forged a strong bond with Michael, the rest fell into place. Michael related strongly to the ”social bull's-eye” I described earlier because he envisioned the leaders.h.i.+p structure as a series of concentric circles. ”Phil was the centerpiece of the team, and I was an extension of that centerpiece,” he says. ”He relied on me to connect with all the different personalities on the team to make the team bond stronger. He and I had a great bond, so everything I did, Scottie did, and then it fell down the line. And that made the whole bond stronger so that nothing could break it. Nothing could get inside that circle.”

Scottie was a different kind of leader. He was more easygoing than Michael. He'd listen patiently to his teammates vent, then try to do something about whatever was troubling them. ”I think guys gravitated toward Scottie because he was more like us,” says Steve Kerr. ”Michael was such a dominant presence that, at times, he didn't appear human. Nothing could get to Michael. Scottie was more human, more vulnerable like us.”

The 199293 season was a long winter of discontent. Cartwright and Paxson were recovering from off-season knee surgeries, and Scottie and Michael were bothered by overuse injuries. I'd promised the players the year before that if we won a second champions.h.i.+p we wouldn't have grueling two-a-day practices during training camp. Instead we held one long practice each day, interrupted by breaks to watch game videos. But that schedule didn't work out very well because the players stiffened up during the breaks.

Some coaches like to run long practices, particularly after they've suffered a hard loss. My college coach, Bill Fitch, was a cla.s.sic example. Once he got so exasperated with our lackadaisical performance at a game in Iowa, he made us practice when we got back to the UND campus, even though the plane didn't arrive until after 10:00 P.M. I don't believe in using practice to punish players. I like to make practices stimulating, fun, and, most of all, efficient. Coach Al McGuire once told me that his secret was not wasting anybody's time. ”If you can't it get done in eight hours a day,” he said, ”it's not worth doing.” That's been my philosophy ever since.

Much of my thinking on this subject was influenced by the work of Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanistic psychology who is best known for his theory of the hierarchy of needs. Maslow believed that the highest human need is to achieve ”self-actualization,” which he defined as ”the full use and exploitation of one's talents, capacities and potentialities.” The basic characteristics of self-actualizers, he discovered in his research, are spontaneity and naturalness, a greater acceptance of themselves and others, high levels of creativity, and a strong focus on problem solving rather than ego gratification.

To achieve self-actualization, he concluded, you first need to satisfy a series of more basic needs, each building upon the other to form what is commonly referred to as Maslow's pyramid. The bottom layer is made up of physiological urges (hunger, sleep, s.e.x); followed by safety concerns (stability, order); love (belonging); self-esteem (self-respect, recognition); and finally self-actualization. Maslow concluded that most people fail to reach self-actualization because they get stuck somewhere lower on the pyramid.

In his book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Maslow describes the key steps to attaining self-actualization:

experiencing life ”vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption”;

making choices from moment to moment that foster growth rather than fear;

becoming more attuned to your inner nature and acting in concert with who you are;

being honest with yourself and taking responsibility for what you say and do instead of playing games or posing;