Lead to Succeed: 10 Traits of Great Leadership in Business and Life - Hardcover

Pitino, Rick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767903412 ISBN 13: 9780767903417

Publisher: Broadway, 2000

Synopsis

Learn how to be a leader from one of sports' greatest teachers, Rick Pitino.

As Rick Pitino says, great leaders aren't born great; they learn great leadership along the path of life. From the time Pitino first became a coach at twenty-four, he has been a student of leadership in all its forms, studying how great leaders from legendary coaches to American presidents to world humanitarians are able to inspire and motivate others. He discovered that all leaders, on the court and off, in business, politics, or civil rights, have certain qualities in common; these leaders share key traits that make people want to listen to them and follow them.

Now, in Lead to Succeed, Rick Pitino shares the ten traits of great leadership he discovered and has cultivated in himself, and shows readers how they, too, can become leaders in their business and personal lives. As the former coach of the Kentucky Wildcats who turned the team around from probation status to a 1996 NCAA championship, Pitino relates stories of this experience, and other leadership lessons from his career.

When Rick Pitino joined the Boston Celtics in 1997, he took on the biggest challenge of his professional life, becoming not only head coach but also president of the Celtics. In addition to coaching professional athletes with multimillion-dollar contracts, he was assuming a leadership role of an organization saddled with salary cap problems, limited talent, misfortune in the draft lottery, and bombarded by adversity on all sides. Facing these adversities, Pitino has relied on a leadership strategy based on his years of learning from leaders around him and from his own mistakes and successes.

Leading isn't about being a dictator; nor is it about people-pleasing. As Pitino shows in Lead to Succeed, leadership is about communication, consistency, and selflessness. In addition to illustrating how these traits apply in a variety of business situations, Pitino addresses these issues:

How you can be an effective business leader and still be honest
When it's best not to delegate
How the past can hurt you
How to get your team out of a slump

While Pitino has had great success with his players, he has also convinced thousands of people in companies across America that his leadership message applies in the workplace as well. Lead to Succeed is for anyone who wants to inspire and motivate others--be it your employees or colleagues, or members of an organization you belong to, or your family. A perfect book for executives, managers, and sports fans, Lead to Succeed can make great leadership within reach.

About this title

Review:

You gotta hand it to Rick Pitino. In the few years he's been president of the Boston Celtics and the team's head coach, he hasn't led them back to anything remotely resembling their former success--and yet most of the examples and anecdotes he employs in Lead to Succeed concern his dealings with that very team. You can look at that refusal to play down his time with the Celts as a bold assertion that true success is measured in modest increments and not in stats and profits alone. But then again... would Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman, and Elaine May collaborate on a book called Lead to Succeed at the Box Office and then spend the whole time talking about Ishtar?

As it happens, most of the real-life scenarios Pitino uses to illustrate crucial leadership traits--like having a concrete vision; building a "team ego"; acting with integrity, decisiveness, flexibility, and consistency; maintaining focus and discipline; and acting selflessly--are taken, not inappropriately, from his experiences in college-level and professional basketball, which means the book will probably resonate most with those who follow hoops. But Pitino fails to break new ground in his choice of the nonbasketball figures he profiles, bouncing from Abe Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, and Pope John Paul II to Steve Jobs and Moses (who, Pitino quips, not only led well but "had a pretty good boss" himself). The few women you'll find cited here, such as Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir, don't exactly conjure up images of a warm and fuzzy earth mother.

That said, you can't say Pitino doesn't have a clearly defined vision of good leadership, because he does--and his vision definitely falls on the old-school side, with a heavy emphasis on personal responsibility, self-discipline, a strong work ethic, and humility. He seems to see his role as Celtics coach as more disciplinarian than New Age nurturer, and indeed the majority of his Celtics vignettes recount how he brought an ornery, pouting, preening, or spotlight-hogging player (he seems to have a particular beef with standout player Antoine Walker) into line with his tough-love leadership. You also can't fault him for the unswerving, blunt-as-potatoes wisdom and experience he shares on such universally respected leadership traits as putting the team before the individual, total honesty, refusal to delegate the dirty work to anyone else, keeping one's word, and good old-fashioned scrappiness. "You have to stick to it," Pitino concludes in this B-ball-centric but honorable and serviceable guide for leaders of all sorts. And he's the first to admit he means that as much for his leadership position as anyone else's. Say what you will about the Celts, you gotta give the guy credit for that. --Timothy Murphy

From the Back Cover:

"Simply having the title doesn't make you a leader. This is what I had to learn back when I was a young coach, just starting out in my chosen profession. It's an important lesson, maybe the most important lesson. People are placed in leadership positions and think that simply having the title makes them effective leaders, that simply being called the boss solves all the problems and makes everything function both smoothly and efficiently. It does not. Not even close. Leaders are only effective when they effectively lead the people they're in charge of. More to the point, leaders are only successful when the people they're leading become successful."
--Rick Pitino

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0767903412
• ISBN 13: 9780767903417
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240