Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court

Why Teams Fail

No matter how great your product, if your sales department doesn’t produce, you won’t get the results you want. Different departments must all function well for the company to succeed. Different individuals must also function well for the departments to succeed. It takes all doing their best.

I told players at UCLA that we, as a team, are like a powerful car. Maybe a Bill Walton or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Michael Jordan is the big engine, but if one wheel is flat, we’re going no place. And if we have brand new tires but the lug nuts are missing, the wheels come off. What good is the powerful engine now? It’s no good at all.

A lug nut may seem like a little thing, but it’s not. There’s a role that each and every one of us must play. ...