Bluestone Development Systems

Proven Methods to Build Winning Teams

Wooden on Leadership, written by Coach John Wooden and Steve Jamison provides useful perspectives on leadership principles and how to inspire and build team success.

Wooden on Leadership gives us a look at one man’s leadership qualities and habits applied during his highly successful career of building winning organizations.  Coach Wooden shows how to develop a high-performance team and how to teach skills that build success.

Former UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden, is a member of the basketball hall of fame as both a player and a coach.  Wooden shares his leadership wisdom, core concepts, methods and beliefs he used to teach his teams how to attain what he calls competitive greatness and true personal success.

The material is relevant to business and the process of building a winning organization.  Each chapter includes: Rules to Lead By, Point-by-Point Action Steps, Key Concepts and Leadership Tenets.

Perhaps one of the most useful insights that Wooden shares is: “The best leaders are lifelong learners: they take measures to create organizations that foster and inspire learning throughout.  The most effective leaders are those who realize it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts most.”

He spent time talking about the fact that it’s important to learn to be a good teacher.  Wooden points out that even if one is knowledgeable and skilled, that does not mean that one will be skilled at teaching.  If you need your team to “get it”, you need to be good at teaching.  Many frustrated business professionals could make faster and easier progress if they took time to work on their personal skills related to teaching.

Additional key perspectives that I found particularly interesting:

• Get the Fundamentals in place and practice continuous improvement
• He emphasized the need to develop processes, analyze, test and improve
• His reflections on mistakes and what he did to overcome the early pitfalls

Pyramid of Success

Coach Wooden discusses his “Pyramid of Success” in detail.  His approach to team building could serve as an outline to develop your own systems for team building and personal success.  The book offers plenty to think about.  This book is based upon the successful career of an honest hard-working guy.

It’s interesting too that many of Coach Wooden’s methods are found in the total quality management (TQM) literature; however, he does not use the quality management lingo.  He applied solid process development approaches and used methods of quality management that are on the cutting edge.

Wooden on Leadership is aimed at those interested in developing their leadership skills and develop teams to improve their business.  Sports and basketball fans will love it for sure.

Summary: Wooden on Leadership has plenty of illustrative ideas on continual improvement, the core values of leadership and team building.  The Success Pyramid alone is worth the price.  His notes and suggestions in each chapter offer even more value.  It’s easy to read and offers provocative ideas with emphasis on doing your best and achieving long-term success.

Just the facts:

Wooden on Leadership, First Edition, Copyright 2005 by John Wooden and Steve Jamison, McGraw-Hill, Business/Leadership, 293 pages