I’ve always lived in Southern California — mostly in Orange County, south of LA. If you lived somewhere else, it’s probably not possible to describe what Jerry West meant to Los Angeles. It starts with what the Lakers mean to Los Angeles and then what West meant to the Lakers, as a Hall of Fame player, and then as a coach and general manager. Yes, there’s another professional basketball team in Los Angeles but only a few misfits care about them. Quality of life in Los Angeles is determined in large part by how well the Lakers are playing. West was synonymous with Laker basketball for 40 years. You could say that after West retired as a player, the Lakers were synonymous with Showtime, Magic Johnson, Kareem, James Worthy, and later with Kobe and Shaq and Phil Jackson. But West assembled the Showtime teams, acquired Kobe in a draft day… Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Phil Jackson
High-Visibility Management
A friend of mine asked me the other day, “Do you think an organization really values a good manager?” He asked me that because he’s moving from a position as lead developer on a high-visibility system (lots of job security) to a position managing the developers of that system. And I had to say that in general, I think the answer is no, which is why you see managers generating a lot of useless paperwork to make their work visible: project plans, Gantt charts, spreadsheets, flowcharts . . . Does this help? I haven’t found that it does, but it does provide an illusion of control and an acceptable way of failing: the manager can point to all the paperwork and say, “Well, I followed the accepted process right down the line, so the fact that we failed can’t be my fault!” An analogy Our local basketball team is coached… Read more →