Lew Alcindor was the premier college basketball recruit not just for his recruiting class, but for his entire generation. He had won 72 straight games as a high schooler in New York City. His 2,067 points scored were the most of any player in the history of high school basketball. Alcindor could pick his college. He chose UCLA.
Alcindor and his teammates anxiously awaited the arrival of their legendary coach. Gathered for their first college basketball practice, the small group of young men was likely the most talented collection of college basketball players ever assembled in the history of college basketball. They were good.
When John Wooden arrived to greet his team, he gave no pep talk, drew no X’s and O’s, and offered no words of wisdom on the mechanics of shooting or passing. Instead, he taught these elite college basketball players how to tie their shoes.
What kind of person does that?
In The Priceless Investment Value of Exceptional Leadership we showed how properly assessing leadership can be a game-changer for the long-term investor. If we get the leadership right, the rest has a way of taking care of itself.
After teaching Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) and his teammates how to tie their shoes, Wooden went on to win 10 national championships in 12 years, including 7 in a row.
The real value for investors is catching wonderful leaders before they make their run. How do we identify great leaders before they become great?
We begin with the hard-to-dispute truth that great leaders, like the rest of us, are human. Humans are individuals and individuals have certain tendencies. We each have a psychological constitution that tells us how to behave in different circumstances. Those psychological constitutions, likely determined by a combination of genetic inheritance and life experiences, form relatively early in life. Once formed, they change only slowly and only with dogged determination. From a practical standpoint, no one really makes the effort to change who they are. A leopard, as they say, doesn’t change its spots. By early adulthood, our psychological constitution and the tendencies that go with it are largely set.
That gives us as investors a window of opportunity to identify great leaders before they become great. While no leader has an exceptional track record early in his or her career, they do have a psychological constitution which we can assess through careful observation.
Wooden, for instance, obsessed over details. Denny Crum, himself a winner of three national championships as a UCLA assistant under Wooden and two more as the head coach of Louisville, said of Wooden, “Absolutely everything that could affect performance got taken care of.” Wooden left nothing to chance. Every minute of every practice was planned in advance and written on index cards. Each card of every practice was neatly filed away for future reference.
Properly tied shoes was not a suggestion; it was his policy. It was a policy that was not to be broken. A shoe improperly tied could make a difference. It could lead to an injury. Injuries lead to lost playing time. Lost playing time could lose a game. That lost game could be the Championship.
Wooden had polices for everything from the way his players tied their shoes to the way they clipped their fingernails to the length of their hair. If you played basketball for John Wooden, you tucked in your shirt. It was a rule. It was his rule. If you were unwilling to get with the program, you could play for someone else.
This cluster of psychological tendencies - preoccupation with order, perfectionism, attention to detail – is consistent with what psychologists would call obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, or OCPD. Before we go on, let us say that we aren’t medical doctors and this isn’t a medical diagnosis. Wooden is our hero, one of the greatest leaders ever to walk the planet. We are just trying to see what made him tick. Psychologists have spent decades categorizing and describing certain psychological traits. The cluster of personality traits that we think John Wooden exhibited most closely align with what psychologists call OCPD.
The difference between John Wooden and mere mortals with obsessive tendencies is Wooden found a way to channel his obsessive tendencies into a highly productive activity. Mortals with OCPD wash their hands constantly. Wooden won Championships.
As we examine the great value creators of all time – from Walton to Jobs to Buffett to Singleton – we see a touch of what we call productive obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Those tendencies didn’t show up late in their respective lives. They were part of their psychological constitutions before they became great. They were there in full glory for anyone curious enough to pay attention.
Obsessive tendencies alone do not a great leader make. That much is for sure. We believe, however, that a young businessman or businesswoman in a position of leadership with obsessive-compulsive tendencies who has learned a way to channel those tendencies into something fruitful and productive is worth watching. Could be a game-changer.
