Wooden on Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization

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A compelling look inside the mind and powerful leadership methods of America’s coaching legend, John Wooden. John Wooden’s goal in 41 years of coaching never changed; namely, to get maximum effort and peak performance from each of his players in the manner that best served the team. Wooden on Leadership explains step-by-step how he pursued and accomplished this goal. Focusing on Wooden’s 12 Lessons in Leadership and his acclaimed Pyramid of Success, it outlines the mental, emotional, and physical qualities essential to building a winning organization, and shows you how to develop the skill, confidence, and competitive fire to “be at your best when your best is needed”--and teach your organization to do the same. Author Profiles John Wooden (1910-2010), guided the UCLA Bruins to ten NCAA basketball championships over a 12-year period, including four perfect seasons and an 88-game winning streak. He was named ESPN’s “Greatest Coach of the 20th Century” and voted “#1 Coach of All Time” by The Sporting News. Sports Illustrated said it best when they said: “There’s never been a finer man in American sports than John Wooden, or a finer coach.” In 2003 John Wooden was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Steve Jamison is America's foremost author and authority on the life and philosophy of John Wooden. Mr. Jamison is a consultant to the UCLA Anderson Scool of Business’ John Wooden Global Leadership Program. He has collaborated with Coach Wooden on an award-winning PBS presentation as well as several books, including the classic book on teaching and mentoring, Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections.

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Well worth the read, November 19, 2017
By Patrick Moreton

I put this book in the category of books that remind me of the core elements of leading, and help reinforce paying attention to the details of the leadership job. Everyone will have their own playbook of sorts, and a book like this is very useful for reflecting on your own playbook and thinking about why you think it works. Throughout, I found his insights and recommendations helpful in affirming things I was already doing or thinking about doing, giving me a deeper feeling of confidence grounded in seeing something I do also done by someone who has clearly had immense success and influence in his domain.

There aren’t many negative reviews of the book, but those that were negative tended to fault it for the fact that most of Wooden’s insights can be taken as aphorism or that there was little added by his stories. I disagree with both of these criticisms. I have found that the principles of leadership articulated across a wide range of books are pretty consistent and pretty straightforward. Actually adhering to him, by contrast, is extremely hard to do. And, that’s where the book’s examples and Wooden’s accounts of them are extremely helpful. I came away from reading all his stories with a pretty firm conviction that what Wooden had was the ability to consistently practice the principles of leadership, and as is the case with succeeding at basketball, succeeding as a leader really boils down to applying his pyramid for success to the act of leading day in and day out. Yes, this insight is neither earth shattering nor revolutionary. It’s simply right.