Adaptive Leadership: The Heifetz Collection (3 Items)

The Theory Behind the Practice 33

enables you to gain some distance, to watch yourself as well as others

while you are in the action, and to see patterns in what is happening that

are hard to observe if you are stuck at the ground-floor level.

Bill Russell, a member of the professional basketball Hall of Fame and

star player and then player-coach for the Boston Celtics during their

great championship runs of the late 1950s and 1960s, wrote a book

called Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man and described

how he was somehow able to see the whole court, the patterns and rela-

tionships among all ten players, including himself, and anticipate where

people were going to be, in deciding where to make the next pass or cut.

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He won two NBA championships ...