The finals of the NCAA Division I men’s and women’s basketball tournaments just finished up earlier this week. Notre Dame took the women’s title on Sunday, while Villanove won the men’s championship the following evening. Each year these college basketball tournaments make me think of legendary UCLA men’s coach John Wooden. Besides leading the Bruins to 10 NCAA men’s basketball championships between 1964 and 1975, Wooden is perhaps better known today for the myriad of “Woodenisms” he shared with his players — and those who heard him speak over the years after his coaching days ended. Today, many of these sayings resonate more than ever, especially in the context of the startup company journey. Here are three of my favorites and why they apply so well to startup companies.
“Be quick but don’t hurry”
A startup company constantly races against the clock. Time is arguably a startup’s most precious resource — capital and great people being right up there as well. Given how little time entrepreneur’s have to prove that their company’s product fits a market, to demonstrate that their company’s revenue model scales, and to prove all of this by yesterday, everyone implores the startup team to hurry up. “Time is of the essence,” says the board, the investors, and the CEOs friends and family. Yet patience must be applied. Yes, your company needs a sense of urgency and everyone needs to “be quick”. Craft your plan, set your goals, define the most critical initiatives and hustle. Just “don’t hurry” through everything. That’s how you miss the most important things your company must prioritize, and it’s how you fail to take the time to learn from the mistakes that you and your team will invariably make along the way.
“Don’t mistake activity with achievement”
Now that I’m part of a SaaS company — Remind.com — building an important communication platform in the education industry, I’ve become acquainted with a whole new way to think about the critical relationships that form between our product development efforts and our customer lifecycle work. Bringing these two elements of a SaaS company together is challenging to say the least. There’s never a crystal clear set of to-do items in front of us and, as a result, it’s a never ending exercise for all of us at Remind to figure out what activities lead us most directly to achieving successful outcomes. Finding these connections are vital. Oftentimes startups aren’t clear in defining very precisely the outcomes that define success, which in turn makes it easy to send team members chasing a host of activities that don’t link directly to success. For Wooden at UCLA, when this happened it probably looked like players running around the court without executing the specific screens, passes, and high percentage shots needed to score more points than the opposing team. For a startup CEO, this looks like employees crafting product briefs, marketing plans, or sales pipelines that result in lots of “activity” without crisply linking those actions to specific “achievements” that can be measured in user engagement metrics, customer acquisition rates, or closed-won deals.
“It’s amazing how much can be accomplished if no one cares who gets the credit”
Perhaps my favorite and most shared Wooden quote. Nothing embodies the essence of the team ethos like a group pulling together to achieve goals that are both critical — and seemingly impossible — to reach. Unfortunately, with the rise of social media, the mobile phone camera, and a non-stop refrain that everything’s about the “brand of you”, getting people to step back and realize that when a team wins everyone on the team wins, has become one of the most difficult challenges facing business leaders today. Wooden suffered no fools. Players who didn’t get in line with the team-first approach were welcome to find another team to play for. And granted, one might argue that when you only have 12 spots on the team it’s easier to insist that players place team goals ahead of individual goals, but that’s an easy out. Name a single company that succeeded because they instilled a me-first culture. Sure leaders like Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs may get the bulk of the credit for the success of Amazon and Apple respectively, but the long-term success of any organization stems from a culture that truly embodies a team effort in which it’s — to borrow a basketball metaphor — as important to pass, defend, and dive for loose balls on the floor, as it is to hit 3-pointers and execute amazing dunks.
Originally published on Medium on April 7, 2018. This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.