Over at the Business 2 Community website, Andre Bourque wrote a solid piece about leadership essentials those in business can take from basketball.
These 7 essentials are also good reminders for those of us in basketball!
Whether it’s Stephen Curry draining a 3-pointer, or Villanova winning the NCAA title, Spring in America means basketball. In the world of business, some leaders live by the same disciplines and strategies as the game.
I recently met with Adam Wray, CEO of Basho, and his team at a Final Four happy hour in San Francisco. An avid University of Kansas fan, Wray’s distributed database is fine-tuned to deliver stellar network availability to big name companies like Best Buy, Riot Games, and Comcast. He attributes the success of Basho to a management style not unsimilar to basketball leadership.
“The sum of players is greater than any individual player on the Basho roster,” Wray explains. It needs to be, because the company consists of employees distributed across the globe. “We’re a distributed database platform, at the same time we’re drinking our own champaign as an organizationally distributed company,” he continues.
Ask anyone on the Basho team, and they know their individual role, and how it fits into the overall game of business. Then ask any one of them what the organizational objectives and goals are, and they’ll recite exactly the same thing: contribute plays, and win the game.
Wray has built Basho this way by approaching his company like a basketball coach, more than a boss. Just as coach relies on the talent he or she’s assembled, the role of effective CEO is quite similar.
Wray and his team shared seven characteristics of the basketball-to-business leadership parallels that contribute to his organizational success.
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