John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports

“Future history is what I like best in science fiction. Science fiction writers write with such clarity, with such vividness, that you can imagine that they've visited the place that they're writing about and are coming back to report it to you. It's such a powerful tool in trying to change people's minds. It's the same technique that is commonly called the I Have a Dream speech by Martin Luther King. It's not a list of grievances. Could you stop biting my people with Alsatians?”— John Amaechi

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Creativity & Innovation

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Vision as vivid report from future, not demand list

“I had a 6-year, $17 million offer from the Los Angeles Lakers, and I turned it down to stay with the Orlando Magic for $600,000 for 1 year and not a guarantee. Most of the advice I had was that I should take the money and run. What I am interested in is principle. Doc and the team had made a very strong decision to keep me when they need not keep me. They made a decision that gave me a chance to do what I'd always said I wanted to do, which is play a key part in an NBA team.”— John Amaechi

Strategy & Decision Making · Philosophy & Reasoning · Economics & Markets

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$17M to keep a promise: reputation as asset

“Institutions or teams that appear dysfunctional are often highly functional in other ways. Michael Jordan treated his fellow Chicago Bulls in ways that defined one part of the culture, but the team did incredibly well. But I would say to anybody who wants to model themselves after Steve Jobs or Michael Jordan: be that brilliant, that compelling, that insightful, and that prescient, and you can get away with it.”— John Amaechi

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making

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Exception fallacy: brilliance tax vs. replicable model

“If you had taken the Lakers offer, how would your current views on management be different? Nowadays I work with very influential people in business and large organizations. And they often ask me if I can be trusted. They often ask me how much my word is worth. And there's very few people in this world who can say, about $17 million.”— John Amaechi

Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Credibility with precise price tag: signal

“Leadership is not innate and it's not bestowed. Leadership is earned. It's not something that you need to understand what combination of personalities or cognitive styles you have. It's a set of skills that you need to choose to develop. Are these people consequential enough for you to want to have the optimal possible impact on them, or aren't they? And if they are, then there are some behaviors that you can choose about your presence and about your eloquence.”— John Amaechi

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

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Leadership as skill, not gift: no gatekeeping

“The WNBA is not a good comparison because many men do not care about women. And I don't mean men don't care about women's sports. I meant what I said. Many men don't care about women. And so what women do, bisexual, lesbian, whatever else, is immaterial to them. What men do is important to other men. My understanding of straight men is that most of what straight men do is in order to attract the attention of other straight men.”— John Amaechi

Culture & Society · Psychology & Behavior · Economics & Markets

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Straight male performance for male audience

“Culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated. When you go into a space, if you can observe poor behaviors that nobody challenges, then that is the thing that's defining the culture. I worked in a company recently where some senior leader 10 years ago must have brought in the habit of emphasizing what you say by banging on the table as you talk. All aspiring senior people, mostly men, and all aspiring junior people, mostly men, bang on the table.”— John Amaechi

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Culture & Society

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Culture = floor, not ceiling of accepted behavior

“Doc Rivers started practice at midnight at the beginning of the season. We did a sprinting exercise across the width of the court in a certain number of seconds. Everybody had to make it. And if you didn't make it, you couldn't start practice. It was a ritual that kept us focused, even in the offseason, knowing that we were going to do that. And it set a tone. Maybe now more than back in my day, but people worked their way into shape in the preseason.”— John Amaechi

Leadership & Management · Operations & Execution

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Day Zero standard: earn right to begin

“Karl Malone was a surprisingly funny, kind, driven, ambitious athlete. We were often punished if our performance was non-optimal. Jerry Sloan would punish us to run endless sprints. He'd say to John Stockton and Karl, you guys just sit out. I remember looking up during sprints once and seeing John Stockton reading USA Today as we were slugging up and down the court. And I looked over and Karl had demanded that one of the trainers bring him a bike. And he wasn't just kind of keeping warm.”— John Amaechi

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior · Operations & Execution

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Elite exemption refused: chose harder path

“I had the ultimate advantage in that Americans at that time didn't seem to be able to distinguish between somebody being British and somebody being gay. I wore this Gromit t-shirt and it had some ridiculous words on it, definitely not what athletes wore at the time. And people were like, yeah, well, you know, he's British. I think part of the reason I skated through my college experience was that confusion for people because they heard my voice and saw my face and that didn't make sense anyway.”— John Amaechi

Psychology & Behavior · Culture & Society

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Cognitive confusion as accidental camouflage

“You need therapy. You need people to talk to or coaching in a mental performance and mental health sense. You need somebody you can talk to about the nature of your feelings, the depths of them. Imagine knowing the exact number that is your annual salary spreading out over 7 years and watching it disappear in front of you despite the fact that you knew it was a principal decision. And that's where I sat with it, and I sat very much alone with it.”— John Amaechi

Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Knowledge ≠ immunity: theory failed under stress

“If you've driven yourself to be in the NBA, and you've managed the disappointment and you've played in Europe as well, then the chances are you've got the grind and the planning skills and the stick-to-itiveness to find yourself another role. More importantly than that, if you played professional sport, you've learned to embrace and even love mundanity, the boring, the repetitive. And if you can embrace the boring and the repetitive, there is no job you can't be good at.”— John Amaechi

Psychology & Behavior · Operations & Execution

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Mundanity tolerance = universal competence

“Michael Cage was what they used to call a veteran's veteran. Bobby Sura came in with a new car. And then the next day came in with another new car. Michael Cage followed us into the underground car park. He just said, is that a new car? Give me the keys. That man took Bobby and the car back to the car sales place and made them take it back. I remember him giving me advice about not buying too many clothes, not too many suits, because you have to pay tax and you need to keep hold of some money.”— John Amaechi

Leadership & Management · Economics & Markets

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Veteran's intervention: forced reversal of mistake

“Personality testing is absolute bollocks. It is not that these factors don't exist, it's just that the constellations of these factors don't tell you who you are. Your personality is mutable. It changes moment to moment, never mind under stress versus not. You are not a bloody primary color. The complexity of the human condition cannot be captured in red. Personality tests have been holding down the same groups of people for the last 50 years. We need to bin them and throw them out.”— John Amaechi

Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management

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Personality tests as gatekeeping tools, not truth