Why You're Wrong about LeBron James

Subtitled : I am not sure I completely believe what I am about to argue in the post either, but someone had to take an opposite position.

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The facts of the case are these:

1. Last summer two-time league MVP, consensus best player in the NBA, and one of the best all-around players in league history LeBron James, a free agent no longer under contract with his team of seven seasons the Cleveland Cavaliers, elected to sign a contract to play for the Miami Heat. The 'decision' by James to join the Heat was panned not so much for the actual business and competition factors, but rather for the manner in which it was announced - a one-hour TV special on ESPN, that in combination with the backlash against James from the jilted Cleveland community, ended up backfiring on James, portraying him as an out-of-touch, arrogant, self-important and egocentric person.  

2. James, (and his new teammates Heat stars Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh), compounded the PR disaster spawned by 'The Decision', with an over-the-top, flashy, introduction event in Miami, where James and the others (in uniform), pranced around a smoke-filled stage and opined about winning not just one NBA title, but 'six, seven, eight... ' titles. I am paraphrasing a bit, but you get the idea.

3. The Heat concluded an up and down season, (it was painful at times to watch these three star players attempt to co-exist on the court, when each was accustomed to being 'the man'), with a 58-24 record, good for first place in the NBA's Southeast Division, and the third-best overall record in the league.

4. Entering the NBA playoffs the Heat then defeated in succession the Atlanta Hawks; their nemesis, the Boston Celtics; and the league's top regular season team the Chicago Bulls. Each series was decided 4 games to 1, making the Heat an impressive 12-3 in the first three playoff rounds.

5. In the NBA finals, the Heat were defeated by the Dallas Mavericks, a veteran team playing at the top of their form, 4 games to 2. James was harshly criticized for poor play in the series, particularly in the 4th quarters of Games 4, 5, and 6 (all Dallas victories). James lack of production in these situations served in stark contrast to Dallas leader Dirk Nowitzki, who consistently made big plays and shots to lead Dallas to the title.

6. Immediately following the Game 6 loss, James further damaged his already shaky reputation by implying that people hoping he and the Heat would lose would 'got to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before.' While James would also have to wake up and continue his life, strongly implying that his life, with his millions of dollars, mansions, private jets etc. was somehow superior to yours, mine, and pretty much everyone else's.

These are the basic facts of the case, my apologies for going on so long about them prior to mounting my apologist defense for King James.

If you are like my friends and fellow bloggers Kris Dunn at the HR Capitalist, or John Hollon at TLNT.com, you have taken LeBron to task for arrogance, lack of humility, inability to win or lose gracefully, and over-confidence. While Kris and John and the hundreds of other writers that have participated in the LeBron dogpile have their points, I'll offer three (hope I can come up with three), reasons why they and you are wrong (or at least a little hypocritical) about LeBron.

1. History 

LeBron is most often compared, unfavorably, to Michael Jordan, the greatest player in NBA history. Jordan won six titles with the Bulls, the first one in his seventh season in the league. This was on a team with another all-time Top 50 player in Scottie Pippen and the greatest coach of all time, Phil Jackson. LeBron just completed his 8th season in the league falling just two games short of winning his first title. And since he started his NBA career at a younger age, LeBron is only 26, while Jordan was 28 when he claimed his first title.

Sure, maybe we take shots at LeBron because he compares unfavorably to Jordan, but lets not forget Jordan was a a transcendent, once in 50 years or so player. Everyone compares unfavorably to Jordan. No matter what line of business you are in, be in basketball, software development, or running a company, chances are you won't hold up well either when compared to the legends of your field. 

2. We like to selectively remember

LeBron left Cleveland, and several million dollars in salary on the table, to play for Miami in a situation that he (rightly) assessed as providing a better opportunity to win the title. In sports, fans usually take to task players that are perceived as being only in it for the money. Now LeBron likely earns so much from off the court endeavors that the few million he walked away from in Cleveland did not play into his decision rationale all that much, but it still sets him apart from probably 90% of professional athletes whose primary objective is to wrest every last dollar from their team. LeBron gets bashed for taking proactive steps in his career management to attempt to improve his chances to win and we kill him.

Remember that Cleveland team that LeBron single-handedly dragged to the finals in 2007? That was the worst team I have ever seen that actually made the finals. LeBron was not going to win in Cleveland. But he played out his contract, did not whine to the press and try to force his way out via a trade, and exercised his right to choose the team that best fit his goals and career aspirations. The same process any of us would do. And that over the top 'Decision' TV show? We usually fail to mention that show raised over $2M for the Boys and Girls Clubs, one of James' favorite charities. Finally our friend Michael Jordan, who we like to compare LeBron with since we know LeBron can't measure up, let's also not forget how he quit his team to pursue an irrational dream of playing major league baseball, only to come back a year later.

3. You're only angry because LeBron didn't win

Much of the heat LeBron is getting is not so much because he and the rest of the Heat bragged, strutted, and pranced around before they had won anything, but because in fact they did not win. We give lots of slack to arrogant winners, not so much to arrogant losers. We look back with reverence about the famous Larry Bird three point contest story, where Bird famously derided his competition prior to the event by telling them they 'were all playing for second place', and then proceeded to win the contest. We can either take shots at arrogance or take shots at talking too much and not backing it up, but it seems a bit hypocritical to have it both ways. In business and in sports, we want our leaders to be confident, to project strength and resolve, we need to have someone to follow into the competition.  Do you really want a person leading your team or your company that doesn't predict victory? If all LeBron ever said was 'We will take one game at a time' and 'We have to continue to work hard', the media would kill him for being a drone or a cliche-spewing dullard..

4. (Hey, I actually thought of another reason) - There are bad guys everywhere.

LeBron is an easy target, in fact he has placed the target right on his back. But the fact that the target is there doesn't mean we need to take shots at it. But professional sports is full of guys of questionable character, that have had run-ins with the law, and a demonstrated history of bad behavior. In fact some of those kinds of guys play for the Dallas team that everyone adopted as some kind of rag-tag, Hoosiers-like plucky band of underdogs, (who were led by Dirk Nowitzki and his $17.2M salary). If you don't believe me, just Google 'Jason Kidd domestic violence' or 'Deshawn Stephenson arrested'. Sure blast LeBron for being arrogant or out-of-touch, but let's not give guys who have done much, much worse things a pass while we are at it.

Well there it is, my 1400-word defense of LBJ. While I am sure I have not convinced most of you, especially the Cleveland fans, I hope that I made you pause just a bit to think about LeBron in a wider context. Let me have it in the comments...

Have a great weekend!

Bench Pressing and Basketball

With the National Basketball Association player draft fast approaching, fans, observers, and pundits alike love to speculate and predict the player draft order, and imagine the glorious future for their favorite team once this years' version of young Timmy 'The Flint Assasin' Sackett, or some other such prospect joins the squad.

Readers of this site, along with my pieces on Fistful of Talent, know that sports, and in particular how the talent evaluation and assessment processes that professional sports teams undertake as they consider which players to draft, recruit as free agents, trade, and compensate; make for some compelling stories and often illuminate applicable lessons for those of us with concerned with more mundane but similar workplace conundrums. None of the 'Sports and HR' parallels are more clearly illustrated than annual player drafts that all the major USA professional sports leagues conduct.

The purpose of these drafts is to help 're-stock' the talent pools in the league with new players, ones that have the capability and potential to raise the overall talent profile of the league and the individual teams. Essentially each season, younger, more talented players (or at least ones judged to have potential to be good players), enter the league while older and/or less skilled/more expensive players exit. It is a kind of a cool, virtuous 'Lion King' style circle of life, but will louder music and more tattoos.

The trick for talent evaluators and people in charge of player personnel decisions in the draft is how to assess the complex combination of a prospect's performance on the court to date (usually in college basketball, but sometimes just high school, or international play), the player's physical attributes, their personality and character, and finally whether or not that elusive 'fit' between style, physical traits, and mental make-up exists between the prospect and the team.

You will often see quotes from NBA or other sports execs talking about players they select as being 'Our kind of player', or 'His style fits how we like to play'. These quotes are as much about cultural and organizational fit as they are about hitting jump shots or ability to rebound the basketball. The rules of the game are the same for every team, but how they go about assembling the team and their philosophies about how to best accomplish the universal goal of winning the championship are all unique.

So in sports, like in most every other line of business, talent assessment and selection is really hard. So NBA teams have come to increase or expand the variables they assess and measure when it comes to the talent evaluation process for potential draftees. One of these variables is the number of times the prospect can successfully bench press 185 lbs, a moderate amount of weight for a well-conditioned athlete, certainly not a power lifter or bodybuilder burden, but also a weight that could present a challenge. The 185 pound bench press is meant to give a generalized assessment of the player's upper body strength, that at least in theory could translate to effectiveness on the court. But bench pressing isn't really basketball, they don't roll out a bench and some barbells in the 4th quarter of a close game. The other advantage to teams in using the bench press test, (and a myriad of other fitness and strength tests they use), is that every prospect takes the same assessments, thereby giving the teams a common data set across the entire talent pool from which to make comparative judgments.

But the data itself offers a team no competitive advantage - every team in the league has access to the same information. The trick is knowing how to interpret the 'measurables' (bench press, vertical jump, etc.), with the 'intangibles', (character, coachability, likeability), and finally a frank assessment of 'Can this guy actually play?'; in order to make the best talent selections. 

But back to the bench press, which is the reason I wrote this piece. Yesterday I noticed a tweet from Chad Ford, one of ESPN's basketball writers and analysts commenting on the bench press test results from a few of this year's current NBA draft prospects.  The tweet is below:

The implication of the tweet is a kind of red flag or warning about those few players unable to successfully bench press 185 pounds. That teams considering drafting these players may pause, and fans of teams that eventually do take these players might need to be concerned that their lack of demonstrable upper body strength (doing something that isn't actually playing basketball), portends poorly for their future performance as NBA players.

It is hard to say for sure if this poor performance on the test will actually hurt these players draft position, it certainly won't help it, but I think the larger point is about data collection in general. Whether it is an NBA team evaluating a power forward, or a software company assessing the background and skills of a candidate for a development job, our abiliity to collect reams of data about background, capability, demonstrable skills, and even mental make up has never been greater. We have access to powerful analytics tools to crunch the data and perhaps eventually to construct detailed and predictive 'success' models.

It could very well be the success on the bench press test does suggest future success on an NBA team. Or failure on the test predicts failure on the court.

But even if we can create those kinds of models, for basketball players or software developers, they will never be fool proof, as people and performance are ultimately likely too unpredictable to ever understand absolutely. We have to be open-minded enough to ignore our own models from time to time.

You may, even if you are not a basketball fan, have heard of a player called Kevin Durant. He is a star player for the Oklahoma City Thunder, has led the league in scoring, led the USA team to the Gold Medal in the World Basketball Championship last summer.

In 2007, when Durant declared himself eligible for the NBA draft, he was unable to bench press 185 a single time. 

And we know how Durant has worked out. 

Sure collect, assess, analyze, correlate, model - it's important. But don't forget, bench pressing is not basketball.

The Wisdom of Jeff Van Gundy - Part V

The sage was at it again the other night during the Oklahoma City - Memphis NBA playoff game.

In case you don't know what I am referring to, former NBA head coach, and current TV analyst Jeff Van Gundy (JVG) dropped another bit of simple, yet essential knowledge about basketball that I think is also directly applicable to the workplace, management, and organizational dynamics.

By my reckoning, that is nothing new for JVG, and if you wish - you can check out the previous installments of the JVG 'wisdom' series here -  (Parts I, II, III, and IV).

But back to the story. During the game Oklahoma City forward Nick Collison made a smart play on defense to cause Memphis to lose the ball, hustled to the offensive end of the floor, and then positioned himself properly to make a scoring move when the ball was rotated to him in the flow of the offensive play. It was a brief series of actions that were not necessarily terribly athletic or skilled or even that remarkable, but as a kind of orchestrated series did add up to an excellent and winning (apologies Chas. Sheen) play.

Immediately after Collison, who is not a starting or star player on the team, completed the play, JVG observed that winning teams need guys like Collison, players that may not have all the physical skills of the top players on the team, but have found ways to contribute using capabilities and attributes that are mostly 'choices' and not simply genetic gifts.

The money line from JVG:

'Guys like Collison, guys that grind, are essential. The best ones are coachable, accountable, and professional. And you can win with guys like that.'

Coachable - willing to accept suggestions, able to make adjustments in style of play to fit the team goals, and cognizant that what may have worked in the past (in college, or on former pro team), might not be the desired behavior on the current team.

Accountable - understands the role, knows how the role impacts and contributes to the success of the team, makes the effort to put himself in the right situations, and simply does his job fully knowing the rest of the team depends on him to meet his objectives. And if other guys on the team, maybe the star players, are having an 'off' night, then he knows when to try and give a little more than normally needed.

Professional - in the narrow sense, we are all professional, i.e. we are paid to perform. But what JVG really meant was a level of personal integrity, pride, and dedication to himself as a player, to his teammates, and to the supporters of the team. This means showing up and giving your best effort even when times are tough, when the team is down, or when you are not meeting your personal objectives. It means being proud of your contribution in every game, and even every practice. It means setting an example for others to follow, even if you don't hold a formal title or leadership role.

Coachable, accountable, professional. All important. All under your control every day. Super talented people in any game or industry or field can get away with only one or two of these, and can still make incredible contributions to the organization. But if you are like most people, and are not in that rare category of naturally talented superstars, just focusing on being coachable, accountable and professional will go a long way in determining your success in any role.

And stacking your team, no matter what the game, with those kinds of players will make you look pretty smart as a leader as well.

And that my friends, is the Wisdom of Jeff Van Gundy.

The 8 Man Rotation - Ebook

Today I am really pleased to support the launch of a little not-so-secret project that has been in the works for the last few months - an Ebook called 'The 8 Man Rotation', that I have the pleasure and honor to have played a small role in creating.

The good Dr. Matthew Stollak, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at St. Norbert College, author of the excellent True Faith HR blog, and one of the most passionate sports fans I know hatched the plan to collect, curate, and organize some of the best 'Sports and HR' blog posts written in the last couple of years from a fantastic collection of writers, and create a free Ebook from the hundreds of pieces.

The roster of contributors for The 8 Man Rotation Ebook reads like a who's who of dudes whose better athletic days are far behind them, but whose passion for sports, and the lessons and insights sports can offer to our profession, our workplaces, and our relationships continues unabated, and in spite of withering criticism from some who would hold that the endless sports analogies are tiresome and irrelevant. Haters.

The starting lineup:

Kris Dunn - The HR Capitalist

Lance Haun - ReHaul.com

Tim Sackett - The Tim Sackett Project

Matt Stollak - True Faith HR

and little old me.

The Ebook covers topic ranging from Workforce Planning and Strategy, to Recruiting, to Performance and Talent Management. Of course with a heavy mix of basketball, football, and baseball mixed in.

The PDF version of the Ebook can be downloaded here, and also can be accessed on Slideshare here (also embedded below, email and RSS subscribers may need to click through).

 The 8 Man Rotation Ebook

View more documents from steveboese

Many, many thanks to Matt Stollak for having the idea for the project, sifting through many hundreds of posts about LeBron James, and compiling this really awesome publication of which I am proud to be a small part.

Now download the Ebook and keep it handy while you watch the NBA Playoffs tonight!

Grading Talent the Big Tuna Way

Last night ESPN ran an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how American professional teams typically evaluate talent, with special guest former National Football League executive and head coach Bill 'Big Tuna' Parcells. The context of the show was the league's upcoming college player draft, the annual exercise where the league's teams assess, grade, and ultimately select from 5-10 players each to 're-supply' the talent on their teams. It is a massive, high-stakes, expensive, and critically important recruiting, assessment, and alignment exercise.

Parcells' resume and achievements as a successful coach, and talent evaluator are solid - he served in very senior roles at several NFL organizations, winning two Super Bowl Championships as the Head Coach of the New York Football Giants. 

In the show Parcells' shared some of the talent selection criteria and thought processes that organizations that he was a member of, and in general, most other teams tend to follow when making player selections in the league's annual college player draft. Some of the criteria and processes were fairly obvious, and would apply generally to any talent selection or recruiting context, (players who had been kicked off their college team for disciplinary reasons should be avoided), but some of the other concepts Parcells discussed perhaps are not so apparent to casual observers, and just might have some additional applicability to more conventional talent selection processes.

Here are three Talent Evaluation ideas straight from the Big Tuna:

1. Understand the predictors of success (some are not so obvious)

In NFL football every team measures and grades the basic and easily understood physical characteristics of potential draftees, (height, weight, strength, speed), but during the show Parcells mentioned a few not-so-obvious keys he assesses, (e.g. for the position of cornerback, length of the player's arms). For potential quarterback prospects, Parcells insisted he only wanted players that actually graduated from college, as he felt it demonstrated intelligence, and more importantly commitment. 

The larger point is every competitor has access to the same talent pool, the basic and obvious assessment criteria are widely known and universally adopted, so finding the less clear and more predictive evaluation criteria that other teams may not have discovered is one of the ways to claim some advantage and make better selection decisions than the competition.

2. Make sure everyone involved in Talent selection understands these predictors

Once the criteria is established, and a process to collect and assess these criteria developed, Parcells emphasized the critical need for everyone involved in the talent selection process to understand the criteria, and consistently grade to the criteria. From scouts, to assistant coaches, to even the team owner, the definition of what a top candidate looks like has to be understood by everyone. There are so many players to assess, that no one member of the organization can possibly 'know' every candidate, so the selection process becomes a team effort, and the talent selection team has to have that common ground for any chance of success. Talent is talked about in the common language of the team's assessment ratings, and no conversation about talent fails to reference these assessments.

3. Know yourself

Parcells described a common acronym used in football draft processes, NFU, which means 'Not For Us'. This term is assigned to players that the strict adherence to positional capability assessments or past production in the college game might indicate are good candidates and should be considered in the selection process. But these NFL players have raised some concern off the field, of their attitude, style, work ethic somehow will not be a cultural match to what the organization is looking for. Parcells strongly advises teams to know themselves, know the style they want to play, the kinds of mental makeups that players need to have to 'fit' on the team, and to avoid the temptation of selecting players with fantastic physical skills that might not 'fit' otherwise. These kinds of gambles rarely work out, and they are the ones that get coaches and talent evaluators fired.

But in the end, despite incredibly detailed and complex processes for physical measurement, tests of intelligence, and well-documented and easily reviewed past performance in college football, selecting players for NFL teams is still and imperfect process. So-called 'can't miss' top prospects often fail to live up to expectations, while others deemed marginal prospects once vetted by the traditional processes end up as star players.

Having a system and some ground rules to follow, to find ways to uncover predictors your competition may have missed, and perhaps most importantly a deep and confident organizational self-awareness are a few ways our pal the Big Tuna offered up to try and land more Peyton Mannings and less Ryan Leafs (inside football reference, Google it).