Get on the right bus, Mike Krzyzewski
Coach K’s blueprint for trust, character, and unstoppable teamwork.
Mike Krzyzewski (better known as Coach K) is one of the greatest college basketball coaches of all time. He was the head coach at Duke University for over 40 years, racking up an insane number of record accolades. He also coached the U.S. men's national team to three consecutive gold medals in 2008, 2012, and 2016, leading U.S. men's basketball's resurgence to the top of the basketball world.
I think there's a tremendous amount to learn from sports (I wrote a piece called Nerds should train like professional athletes, after all), especially from a leader and coach who led so many teams of players to the highest pinnacles of basketball glory. Everyone in basketball has the utmost respect for Coach K's career, but most importantly, a reverence for his ability to lead and create a team culture.
These are notes from a conversation that Krzyzewski had with Shane Battier (one of Coach K's former players and highly decorated NBA player) and the other co-hosts of the Glue Guys podcast.
Get on the right bus
Coach K talks about how he learned incredible lessons from his mom. One of them was in the her sheer will, which he used to motivate his players:
"So my mom, you know, Polish lady, shopping bag, you know, and she gets off a bus on Chicago Avenue. And a couple of guys knocked her over and tried to take away her purse. And she wouldn't give up her purse. And she never did give up her purse and they went away. And so we, Ma, they could have done something.
She says, Mike, it's my purse.
So when these guys would turn the damn ball over. I said, Shane, my mom wouldn't [give up her purse], when you're giving up that damn ball."
But the most important lesson she shared with him was to get on the right bus:
"That was the most pivotal talk I've ever had in my life.
And it really set the stage for what I did the rest of my life was the night before I was going to high school. And I was a cocky, I was punk, you know, and I'm going to Catholic boys high school and you take the city buses, you know.
So the night before I'm going, my mom says, Mike, tomorrow, make sure you get on the right bus.
And I look at her, you know, like, Ma, Damon to Armitage, Armitage to where I mean. I can take Division to Grand.
And she says, that's not the bus I'm talking about.
So I'm, what bus are you talking about?
Tomorrow, you're going to start driving your own bus and only let good people on your bus ... If you get on someone else's bus make sure they're good people and those buses will take you to places that you would never go alone.
I get chills. The best advice, in other words, hang with good people ...
I've been on great buses. And some of those buses were, he drove the bus sometimes, or Laettner drove the bus, or Kobe Bryant drove the bus.
But they were always, they were good people."
Talent with character, not talented characters
"A lot of people are capable of doing it every day. Who's willing? Who's willing?
There are a hell of a lot of people capable. Who is willing? Every day. Every day. Not a bad day ... You know, you were well coached and we have good guys, you know?
Like we recruited talent with character. We didn't recruit talented characters."
I love this juxtaposition: we recruited "talent with character" not "talented characters."
Duke managers are the ones who keep the team culture
Something super interesting is that Duke's (student) managers keep the team culture. Coach K said that he often gets a lot of credit for setting the top-down culture, but it's maintained through the student managers.
"You know who helped us keep our culture? Our managers."
Basketball players are some of the (literally and figuratively) biggest people on college campuses, especially at a place like Duke. But Coach K talks about how strict the team culture is on treating all the student managers of the team correctly:
"So a player, you can't say, “hey, you,” or, you know, “get this” [to a manager]. I would tell my managers, if they said that, tell them to go take a hike."
The greatness of an organization can be measured by speed to trust
"I call it shared values, shared standards. How does everyone own it? The two standards that I've always had was when we talk to each other, we look each other in the eye.
And the second is we always tell each other the truth. And when I'm speaking, I said, like, if I'm recruiting Shane, and I tell him, I'm going to be one of the few people in your life that will always tell you the truth. I promise you that. And I want the same in return. So, like, boy, your shoes are really nice. The slacks are, you know, that top sucks. Not that it doesn't.
But because there's going to be a time out where you come to the bench and you're playing not well. And I look at you and I say, you need to get your head out of your butt, man. And you can't shrivel up and say, like, that's the truth. Same thing, you just hit two threes. Man, keep it going. And what happens then? So he and I trust one another. We still do in a moment.
And part of really establishing a great organization is that speed to trust. How quickly, when you say something to me, do I trust you or do I have to check it out?"
As Charlie Munger points out, the highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust.
Lord Alfred North Whitehead pointed out:
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
One of the easiest ways that happens is having the ability to trust other people.
Leadership is the study of constantly changing people
"Really, in the study of leadership, it's really the study of people. And so people are the best resource for every organization. You can have AI, analytics, and all that. But it's the people. And so you have to constantly, not have to, you want to, keep learning about your people."
I think everyone should know by this point that your people are the most important part of any organization (but people still underestimate this fact), so you have to know your people really well.
However, an undervalued aspect here is people change throughout time, and so it's up to you as the leader to keep track of this.
Coach K's greatest strength was his adaptability
"Every year, Coach K would come and say, look, our absolutes are with each other in the eye, and we don't lie to each other. Everything else was on the table every year. Every year. Every year. Style of play, what we believed in. And that was probably one of the most shocking things when I tell people. They thought, no, no, you've had 45 years of success. It's rinse and repeat; it's paint by numbers; my way or the highway; this is how we do it. And that actually was not the case at all. I think one of your biggest strengths is your malleability."
I've been fascinated to see how non-system/team dependent Coach K's ability to coach and lead is.
Coach K has coached countless teams of college basketball players and led many of them to championships. He has coached teams of NBA superstars to multiple Olympic gold medals. Each of these teams has a completely different set of players, and he is able to create a culture and system that maximizes their strengths. The only other comparable basketball coach I've seen is Gregg Popovich, coach of the San Antonio Spurs.
Most basketball coaches have a "system" that they have used for years, and they slot their existing players into this system. I think of this as a relatively high-mean, low-variance strategy, but it tends to underperform the top coaches like Coach K and Popovich's flexibility and mastery of the game and coaching.
Have a friend in the room
"And I told him my two standards. Look each other and tell me. I said, I'd like for you guys to contribute. Individually now. When I do a meeting, I always like to have someone in the audience that I've talked to already who I can count on to talk or answer, have a friend in the room. So the meeting comes, okay? And the very first thing I say to him, I said, I want you guys to know, I want you to bring your egos."
When he took over coaching the famous USA Basketball Redeem Team at the Beijing 2008 Olympics, Coach K knew he had to have some hard conversations with the team to set the culture and team values.
Before having the larger team meeting, he pulled aside the strongest players on the team — LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, and Jason Kidd — for individual 1:1 meetings first. Once he had these meetings with the team captains and leaders, it was much easier to have those tougher conversations with the entire team. He already had many "friends in the room" that could co-lead the conversations with him.
The greats want to be coached and held accountable
"A great player wants to be coached. They want to be a part of something. And they want to be held accountable. And a lot of people don't hold them accountable because they are that player. They use them, but they don't. And so we had great rapport."
This is something that I see over and over.
A lot of talented players (who don't work very hard) have set a cultural expectation that talented players don't actually want to be coached and work hard. And to some degree, this creates a feedback loop in which we don't have high expectations for our talented people, so they don't rise to the level of our expectations and encouragement.
It's a shame, because you realize that the generational talents and the truly great players constantly seek feedback and work to refine their games.
As Michael Jordan pointed out:
"Pay attention to the way I played the game. Pay attention to my passion. Pay attention to the idea of focusing on improvement every day. Pay attention to my commitment."