EntreLeadership - #379: The Key to Lasting Success with Sam Walker

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

Many sports teams throughout history have boasted a roster of all stars and scored a few titles. But only an elite handful have achieved true, lasting greatness. In his decade-long study of the best sports teams in the world, author Sam Walker has identified the one common factor that led to their sustained success—an extraordinary captain. Listen as he shares what sets the best captains apart and how you can become the kind of leader that leads your team to success that lasts.   entreleadership.com/podcast The Captain Class by Sam Walker The Motive by Patrick Lencioni The Five Fixes to Get Your Team to Act Like Owners - Free Training Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   As an Amazon Associate EntreLeadership earns from qualifying purchases.   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Think about this for a second. What does world-class leadership look like? Charismatic, energetic, bold. Okay, now I got another one for you. What does world-class leadership actually do? Lead from the front, take charge, stand out as the all-star performer? Well, certainly there are cases where all those things are true. But what's crazy is that sometimes the greatest leadership comes from the most unexpected places. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership podcast where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams and their profits. I'm your host Alex Judd, and today we get to talk with Sam Walker, a sports journalist who became absolutely obsessed with one question. What do the most dominant teams in human history have in common? And when I say obsessed, folks, I mean obsessed. It became a 12-year rabbit hole that came to a conclusion that is absolutely jaw-dropping.

Now, the book that details everything Sam found is called The Captain Class and was named one of the best business books in 2017. by CNBC, the New York Times, Forbes, and Sports Illustrated. But this whole preoccupation with champions didn't come from Sam's time with the Red Sox or with the Bulls. It came from the Bombers, his Little League baseball team. Yeah, the only good, great team I've ever been on. And it came out of nowhere.

I was in fifth or sixth grade. And, you know, I played with these kids from my neighborhood. We always had the same team. We were terrible. And we just were hopeless. And, you know, we lost. who was a little league, you know, summer league, and we were really getting beat up all the time. But one year, I don't know what happened.

You know, I just don't know why, but suddenly, you know, we started winning. And we had this kid from a different town who came in and was pitching. He was pretty good. And it just all fell together. And it was this magical experience. I mean, we got to the point where just we knew we were going to win, you know, and we won every single game. We won the city championship. It was just our parents were baffled.

I mean, they were sitting there like, whose kids are these, you know? And we knew that we weren't any different. You know, we were the same. We were the same hopeless, you know, guys. You saw that balls roll between our legs and strike out swinging. But something was different. And I got really obsessed. I kind of assumed when I was that age that this would happen again, that I would experience this again.

And, you know, I really never did. I mean, I played sports. I played on some decent teams, but never a great one. And, you know, I went through most of my career in journals. I finally got to a great team at the Wall Street Journal, the sports team. that we started was like that, I think. But it never happened again, and I was baffled. And I think I felt, you know, like I needed to figure out, it was always in the back of my head.

Like, what was that? And how do you achieve that? And what is that magical alchemy? You know, it's not talent. It's something else. And what is that? I think that was one of the things that really pushed me toward this topic. And it sounds like that passion or that question was just reinforced by the work you were doing in sports journalism

and by what you were seeing in locker rooms and at games. Is that right? It's totally true. I mean, I think you gravitate to things that are strange to you or that you don't totally understand. And, you know, I started as a sports writer. You know, my first assignment, funny enough, was the Chicago Bulls, you know, Michael Jordan's second game back, you know, from his retirement.

So I saw a lot of these great teams up close. And, you know, I saw a lot of bad teams, too, and teams that were supposed to be great, but then didn't cut it for some reason. And, you know, it was fascinating to me because I thought I knew what a great team was. My job was weird. I really covered championships and major events. So I spent a lot of time around the great teams.

And I had a sense for what a great team was like when it was all together. But I didn't completely understand what that was. What was that thing that they had? And really, it all came together. And I decided to start writing this book in 2004 when I spent a lot of time with the Boston Red Sox. I mean, from the early days of spring training, I was with them all the time. and more time than I'd ever spent with another team. And, you know, I didn't think much.

I thought they were a funny group of guys and they were really entertaining, but they didn't have that seriousness of purpose that I'd seen in great teams. And sure enough, in the middle of the summer, they were left for dead. I mean, they were nine and a half games back of the Yankees. Everyone just gave up on them. And, you know, then all of a sudden in August, something happened. And something just clicked. And they were a completely different team.

They just became that unstoppable force, like all those other teams I'd seen. And, of course, the rest is history. They came back and made the playoffs and, you know, took down the Yankees after losing the first three games and won their first World Series in 80-something years. And this is a famous team, right? And I missed it. You know, I didn't, what happened? Like, so I had to, I felt like something, there's something more than talent. There's something more than strategy.

There's something about the chemistry of people that makes a group great. And I became assessed with that and decided that I had to just. really dive in and try to figure it out. And when you set out to answer that question, like, what is that thing? What is that ethereal? The thing that I can't quite label, but I know it's there. What is that thing? Were you thinking, oh, man, this is going to be a book or this is going to take a long

time to figure out? Or what was your thought process then, Sam? No, I was an idiot. I thought he was going to write a column for the Wall Street Journal. I wrote a column, right? A 900-word column. I was like, oh, I'm just going to go, here are the 10 best teams. And I'll take out.

been a week looking at it and I'll say, oh, here's what it is. Problem solved, right? And I realized right away that was not going to happen. And it turned into this project that just kept growing and growing. And I realized that it was just a giant rabbit hole. You know, and I just went right down. Well, I'm so glad you went down the rabbit hole, though. But like, 12 years.

12 years. That's how long the research took. From beginning to end. Oh, my word. It's crazy. It was crazy. I could have written five books in that time, right? Gosh.

But no, it just became this obsession. And the more I learned when I finally started to put the pieces together. And in the end, what it was was I really felt like I had stumbled onto something that was important and that I'd never expected. And that's really what drove me because I realized I had to get this right. Like, I mean, I have flaws. I'm not the best researcher, writer, statistician in the world. But I felt like I had a responsibility to tell the story. because what I found was so astonishing to me that I thought that I just had to give it everything

and make sure that I didn't miss some important step so I wouldn't be discredited, you know, along the way. So that's why I got, I'm also an OCD. As I was reading the book and kind of walking through the process that you went through, and I do want us to highlight that a little bit, I just started thinking to myself, this guy is a mad scientist. He's like in his laboratory. And so I guess clarify for us, what was the core question that you were, we're setting out to answer in your study as you started going down this rabbit hole.

It was very simple. What makes great teams great? What is it? What is the thing they all have? And the problem I realized, I want to use sports because to me, sports is the best laboratory for looking at teamwork, for looking at how people actually interact in that chemistry between people. Because, you know, in business there are teams, but there isn't that level of teamwork. There's not an opponent. There's no clock. There isn't that pressure and that immediate result. So I always thought sports was a great laboratory for one thing. You know, it's entertainment in many ways and not important, but I think in terms of teams, it's important. So the problem was, you know, as soon as I started looking at the question, I realized there was, I had to answer

another question first, which is what is greatness? You know, how do we define greatness? And that was part of the problem because there were so many lists online of, oh, here are the greatest teams of all time, you know, the 10 greatest. But was it really someone's opinion or was based on some statistic that didn't really apply equally or it was really about one sport or one country. So I had to define greatness. You know, what is it? And even before I could do that, I had to say, what is a team? Like, define a team. You know, is an ice dancing pair? Is that a team or is that a partnership? You know, are three people, you know? So a lot of this was working out my definition of what a team is. And I believe that the best team in the true sense is a team that

competes together, but there's also teamwork. There's an opponent, but there's also teamwork, and that they cooperate. So a track relay, not really a team, because they don't interact with the opponent. So really that pure level of teamwork and success. And what I realized with success was that in order to find the greatest teams, you really couldn't have any limits. I mean, it had to be the whole world. So it was, I think there were 25,000 teams that I looked at. It was 37 different categories of sports all over the world since the 1880s. every single team. And I got the winning ones narrowed it down a little.

But what I realize about greatness is that the problem is we all think, what's the great team? We think, oh, you know, the 72 dolphins, undefeated, you know. We think about these one-year teams. But what we're really after is sustained greatness. I want to understand how do you build a culture of greatness that sustains itself over time, even when the people, you know, even when some of the people change. So that's really what I was after. So I wanted to look at teams that had been successful, I mean, elite.

dominated the world for at least four years. And that really ruled out a lot of teams and narrowed it down a lot. So once I had that definition of greatness and a definition of what a team was, then I was really ready to try to narrow that list down. And after years and years, I had about 140 teams. And we're talking about cricket, women's field hockey, the NBA, the NFL, I mean, the whole world, right? And then they were 17.

And the last criteria for me was the team had to have done something that no other team had ever done the history of its sport, whether it was the number of championships at won or its winning percentage over time, something unique. I mean, if you're going to be the best team in the history of sports, you have to be the best team in your own sport, right? So that really narrowed it down. I went up with 17 teams that I believe are the greatest single individual team units in the history of sports.

And so then I was, that was end of phase one. I was, I had my list. And then now I can actually do. Which by making that list, you probably made a whole lot of enemies really, really fast. You made probably a handful of. a handful of friends, but a ton of enemies really fast. I made it so many more, so many enemies. It was crazy.

I mean, I, you know, I get calls. I've done, you know, interviews all over the world, and I get beat up all the time. I mean, I did a radio call show in Bogota, right? And they were, you know, threw a translator, and my Spanish is terrible. And all they were calling in and screaming and yelling about my team that I picked. And I'm like, okay, you know. But it's, it's, it can't please everyone. It can't please everyone.

No, but I'm telling you, I don't have a dog in this hunt. All I wanted was a pure sample. You could debate this all day, and it's a great debate. And there's some teams I probably could have put in or not. But the only thing about that list of 17, there's no question. There's no asterisk. There's no question about their greatest. They were freakish.

I mean, if you look at the chart of results, they were way off it. I mean, they were outliers. And that's what I wanted. I mean, if there was any seed to greatness, it had to exist inside that group. It was a pure sample. So it wasn't really about ending that debate for all time. It was really about coming up with the right group to study. Yeah, the phrase that you used in the book that really stood out to me was the phrase empirical freaks.

And it's like objectively, we're looking at the statistics that these teams, these 17 put up. And it's just astounding. It's outrageous. It's outrageous. And so at that stage, did you start to recognize or maybe even before as you were figuring out what those teams were? did you start to recognize like, okay, there's going to be some gold in here just for athletic curiosity and intellectual curiosity, but there's probably going to be a lot of parallels in here for the marketplace and for the world as a whole for us to learn about great teams? You know, not at first. At first, I saw the list and I thought I was in trouble because I really did. I mean, there were teams I'd never heard of, like the Cuban women's volleyball team from the 1990s. I mean, come on, you've never heard of them.

I'd never heard of them. You mean you're not a huge Cuban women's volleyball fans, Sam? Are you? Well, what have you been doing? I am now, but... Can I read the list? I've got it in front of me. Can I read it?

Yeah. So these are the 17. It's the Collingwood Magpies Australian Rules football, and that's from 1927 to 1930, the New York Yankees Major League Baseball team from 1949 to 1953, the hungry international men's football. football, 1950 to 1955,

Montreal, Canadians National Hockey League, 195 to 1960. We don't need to read all of these, but something that Americans will actually have heard of is the San Antonio Spurs NBA team, 1997 to 2016, which that's a pretty remarkable run. The New Zealand All Blacks International Rugby Union, 2011 to 2015.

So it really runs the gamut. As soon as I heard about that list, I was like, okay, well, how could, other than the fact that they were dominant, how could they have anything else in common was my next thought? Yeah, that was my thought too. Is that right? Yeah. Well, so I started, after I got the list and sort of the first outlines of the list, you know, I realized pretty quickly that, you know, I started cheating, right?

I started looking at some of these teams. And, you know, I looked at so many different things. And I started to see something that I didn't expect, which is in a few cases, it was really remarkable. It was, there was someone in that team who did some. something crazy, like something that was nuts. Like the first one, you know, that I came up with was the New Zealand All Blacks, the great rugby team. And they had actually two different teams that were in this, in this group. And I heard this story right before they started this run in 1986 to 1990 when they didn't lose for four years. They started this run and they had this crazy match

against the French in France. And they had won the first match, just beat the French. badly. And then the second match, the French were mad. I mean, they, they, they were nothing was going to stop. They were dirty. They were going to do whatever it took to get these guys, right? And rugby is already a tough sport. And then you add angry French people to already. Oh my God. French are the worst. The French are the dirtiest rugby country in the world, right? So this was a war, right? It's called the Battle of Nantes. It's this famous man. It was bloody. I mean, seven players would carry it off. But I saw this story. I could not believe it was true. this guy Buck Shelford who was brand new to the team who would go on to become the captain you know during this run in the middle of the match he had three teeth knocked out he kept playing he got sucker punch he kept playing he was knocked unconscious got up kept playing but something happened in the second half which is I mean you have to read I can't I don't have ruined anyone's meal I have never cringed so much while going through a book because I didn't read this story I couldn't believe what so he gets the long story is he got

kicked in the groin, right? It happens. And he kept playing. And then after the match, they discovered that he ended his kicked in the groin. He'd been spiked. And the spikes in the French player's boot had ripped open his scrotum. I mean, can you imagine? I mean, 99.9% of men on earth would crawl into an ambulance whimpering, right? And he played. Yeah, he didn't just stay at the game. He kept playing. And the other thing is they were losing horribly. Like, the game was essentially over at this point. Yeah. No, he was the only one who was really carrying that team. It was amazing. I mean, so I saw that and there were stories like that inside these teams. These things I could not believe.

And it just was astonishing to me. So I started looking and I started to say, well, you know, look at these, who are these people? And I started to notice that, you know, when you really look closely, they were all captains at some point. They were the leader of the team. I started noticing that and putting a chart together. And I realized very quickly that, um, it was uncanny. If you took the winning streak, if you took the beginning of that winning streak and the end of that winning streak, it aligned almost perfectly. I mean, in some cases, up to the, within two weeks, it was the arrival and departure of one player,

and that player was always the leader of the team or the captain of the team. In every single case, and not just for the 17 teams that I ultimately chose, but all the way down the list, I mean, you saw all of those teams had someone at the center of that team who was a leader, an important figure on the team who was clearly there was some sort of relationship between that person's presence and that winning streak.

It was uncanny. And Bill Russell was the next one that really, from the Boston Celtics in the late 50s and 60s. Just incredible. So his rookie of the Boston Celtics, they never won anything. I mean, they were a mediocre franchise with a decent coach who had a mediocre record. And he shows up, they win their first title. they won 11 NBA titles in 13 years. I mean, I'm sorry, LeBron, you know, Michael George.

It's like you're never, you'll never get there, right? And then he retired after they won the 11th title, and then they went back to being mediocre. And, you know, he was, the coach, Red Auerbach, you know, he retired in the middle. And Russell was also coaching the team. So it wasn't even the coach. It was just, it was, he was the only constant on that whole team. And, you know, Russell was not a big. scorer, not a great player, not a great shooter, not a great, he was this defensive player

who did things that they didn't count. They didn't count blocks. They didn't count, you know, rebounds. They kind of counted, but, you know, not even that closely. But he was just someone who was unlike anybody else who was so just sort of an unusual weird player. And he was clearly, clearly the catalyst for that. But there were so many examples that I realized it was on to something. As you started to find, like, that legitimately you look at this, list of what you have now purely identified as the greatest team and every single team on the list, their run of dominance coincided with one player on the team. Did your jaw just start to drop? That just seems almost, almost too crazy to feel like it could be true. That's exactly what I thought.

I mean, the first reaction was I found the fountain of youth. I found, you know, this is it. But then I was like, wait a minute, come on, this is way too good to be true. I mean, I was, That's one of the reasons to took so skeptical. I mean, I was like, it can't be leadership. Like, how could leadership be? I know it's important, but it can't be that important. And that's the thing is it's like, okay, I could maybe see leadership. We teach the idea everything rises and falls on leadership here all the time.

And so the person I would think of is, oh, the coach, right? It had to have coincide with the coach. So what did you find out about the coach's presence on these teams? Well, so that was what I thought to. I mean, I think if you'd ask me where I was headed, this would be a book about coaching because you think coaches set the tone and the culture and that's what we're accustomed to thinking and that was a huge surprise to me. I was shocked. So only one of those teams of that 17, only one of them, I even had a coach who was even considered a great coach when that streak began.

I mean, it was unbelievable. Most of them had very little coaching experience or no coaching experience at all. It was their first season, right, as a coach. And others, you know, had mediocre records or had been fired from a previous job. And a bunch of these teams actually changed coaches in the middle of the winning streak and kept winning. And coaches are very important. I mean, they're more important in a way than I realized, but not in the way I thought. What we're talking about is how do you sustain greatness? It's not about how do you get it and have it.

It's about how do you keep it going. And there's a million ways to achieve greatness and a streak where you're really good. But there's only one way to sustain it. And it's not about the internal dynamics and chemistry inside that team. and the coach plays a huge role, but the coach is not the most important thing. I looked at talent. I looked at tactics. I looked at money.

I looked at resources and management. I looked at everything I could think of. And I realized that it's almost like a slot machine. You need several things to line up to have a great dynasty. But there's only one thing you have to have. You have to have a certain kind of leader who leads in a certain kind of way. And that was what blew me away about these captains. because I started looking at them.

I didn't know who they were. Who's Farrak Puskis? Right? I didn't know. Who's Jerome Fernandez? He's a French handball player, right? Of course. I mean, he's big in France, right?

So I didn't know anything about these people. But when I started looking at them, I was like, wow, okay, two things. One, you know, they're all very similar. They're very different people, the different, you know, races and ethnicities and lived at different times. They're very different people. But they're very similar in the way they approach. leadership, their actual behavior in leadership. And the other thing I realized was that profile was unlike anything I thought it would be.

I mean, it was completely different. I don't know where I got my ideas about leadership. I think we all get them from Hollywood or we get them from, we get them by osmosis. We think we know what a leader is supposed to be. And I had all those prejudices and stereotypes. And these people did not meet any of them. Yeah. It's almost like as you start to go through this list and we're going to go through the list of

the traits, I almost start to get a little. offended because I'm like, Sam, you're turning my world upside down right now. What are you doing to me? I know. It's crazy. It's so hard to wrap your head around. And I mean, I, it's hard for me because I talk to a lot of groups. I talk to a lot of business, military sports, you know, and it's just, there's a period of like, you have to wrap your head around the idea that what you think is absolutely true is not true. these captains there were men and women they were i mean it was it was it didn't matter where they were from they were not the superstars i mean some of them were but i think it's very hard to be a great leader and a superstar and it's very rare so they were usually these players you'd never heard of who were defensive players they were people who played in the shadows and they did not like

attention they didn't want it they didn't seek it it it made them uncomfortable they were not charismatic they didn't they didn't give speeches they were very low-key behind the scenes people They were not at all interested in outside perception of their role in the effort. And the thing that really astonished me was you think leaders are supposed to be diplomatic, right? They're supposed to be, you know, bringing people together, right? And about not creating conflict and creating harmony. And, man, these were tough. And they were hard to manage.

I mean, they would push back all over little things, tiny things, anything they thought was getting in the way of team winning. They were aloof. They were cranky. They were hard to deal with sometimes. I mean, they were not, they're kind of people you would push away because they're just tired of dealing with them in some cases. So, you know, that's not what I expected either. I mean, I think you can be a superstar with great charisma and someone who's an incredible diplomat and a unifying force and all those things that we think leaders are supposed to do. And those are great.

But those are not the qualities and behaviors that will sustain greatness over a long period of time. It's great to have them. If you have them, congratulations. But you don't need them. It was like, wait a minute, you don't have to have a silver tongue. You don't have to be great at giving speech. You don't have to be charismatic. You can be the worst player in the team,

and you can still be a great leader. And that, to me, is very liberating in a way because I think we've been, we have these people on our teams, and they are actually doing the hard work of leadership and they're incredibly valuable, but we don't see them. And if we just looked for something else,

we would be more successful and everyone would be happier. And, you know, you'll expand and go public. That's right. So for the small business owner that's listening to this, as we're about to walk through these traits and qualities and some of these stories associated with it, how should they be evaluating themselves, but also be thinking about how this information that we're

about to talk about applies to their team and their business as a whole, Sam? Yeah, so the business thing is interesting. It's, at the end of the day, my view is the teams are teams. Any group of people that is doing something together is going to have the same basic dynamics that are successful or not. So there is a universal quality. Business is different, though, and business is hard. And the job that you have as a small business owner is difficult. And in a corporate environment, same way.

Because you have to be both. You have to be a coach and a captain. There's some context where you're the captain. You're in there with your team. You're actually doing the work with them. And then there are other cases where you're more of a coach and you have to rely on the people you've delegated to to do the work. And you have to pick the right captain to do that job.

So it's really hard to be great at business. It's harder than sports. Because in sports, you're a coach, you're a captain. You don't have to do both, right? The coach is not going in the game, right? But in business, it's not always the case. So you have to kind of understand. I think the best way to read the book as a business owner is to look at the role of coaches

and the role of a great coach in lasting dynasty and think about what that's like. And then also think about the role of a captain and look at your own leadership style when you're actually in the trenches with people doing the work, your immediate team. And I think you need to kind of take lessons from both because you have to wear both hats. So let's run through some of these traits of elite captains. The first one that I thought really applied to entrepreneurship, and I think they all apply to entrepreneurship, but just that dogged persistence that they all seem to show. And I loved how you connected this topic specifically to that idea of social loafing

and how it can almost counter what can be part of human nature, which is to take it easy. So can you explain how this showed up in your research and then what it means for teams today? Yeah, I think the order of it was I realized that these captains were freakish and that it was their relentlessness. And when I say relentlessness, I don't say that lightly. I mean, you would expect that a great leader would be relentless. But they had this style of play where they only had one speed, which was flat out. And what was fascinating, it didn't matter if they were losing by, you know, 20 goals or they were up by 50 points. didn't matter. They played at the same rate all the time. And they just had one approach. It was

everything all the time. It was maximum effort. And I thought, well, that's great, but how does that actually help the team over the long term? So I found this study, which is a famous study, it was done in 1911 by this French engineer who had his students pull on a rope. And he had them do this as a group and then together as individuals. And he would measure the force they exerted on the rope. It was like a tug-a-war rope, right? Yeah, it was like a tug-a-war rope. And he would pull and there was a weight attached to it, and they would see how much you were pulling. And his theory was that a team is better

than the sum of its parts, basically. He thought every time you add someone of that pulling group, there'll be an exponential increase in the total force applied. That was his theory. He was totally wrong. His favorite was a failure,

a complete failure. Because every time he added someone of the pulling group, what he found was that the average force that each individual applied actually fell. So in other words, when you're in a team, setting, you don't work as hard on something as you would by yourself in isolation.

It's just human nature. And this has been replicated thousands of times. It is a fact of human nature that we do not, we're not inclined to work as hard in a team on the same task as we would work on that task by ourselves. And that's what social loafing is. I assume that's because you have internally, you're probably not making conscious decision like, oh, I'm going to work less hard now because there's other people. It's just internally, you're not feeling the individual responsibility that you would if it's just new? Yeah, exactly. I think that's it. I think it's a sense of shared. We're all sharing the responsibility. So I'm not going to be the one who's, it's not all on me. So there's less pressure

maybe or less inducement. Plus, maybe if you succeed, there's not as much reward for you individually. I think it's a risk or reward sort of thing. But this is human nature. And I knew about social loafing when I knew about the relentlessness. But then I made a connection, which is there, there's a studies that were done to try to see, how do you give? How do you around social, is there an antidote to it? And the antidote is fascinating. So it was very simple. They would go and they would get these people together to do a group task. But before they did it, they would tell them that one member of that group, usually the leader of the group, they would just tell them, high effort, 100% performer, always gives 100% this person that you're going to be

on your team. And just that perception, even if it wasn't true, that perception was enough to get everyone to raise their level so that they would work just hard in the group setting as the individual, setting. And to me, that's exactly what these leaders do, that are relentlessness, that's always giving 100%. There's no social loafing on those teams, right? You know, it doesn't make a huge difference, but over time, if you think everyone's working 6% harder all the time, you know, because of the effort that you're putting in, I mean, over time, that's huge. That's how you sustain excellence. That's how you do it for a long time. And so it's contagious. That relentless effort and a part of a leader. And so for business people, I mean, the fact, and most of the

the problem with these lessons is that none of them, they're simple, but they're not easy, right? It's hard to actually do. And the hard thing is, the lesson is, there's no off there. There's no chill day. I don't care if you just closed a huge deal. You just had an incredible quarter.

You know, you got to go and roll up your sleeves and work just as hard as you always do. I don't care if you're demoralized and things look terrible. You've got to put in that same level of effort. If you want to sustain greatness, you know,

if you want to just be great for a little while and go back to being mediocre, then don't. I mean, if you want to be great for a long time, you have to put in that level of effort. Man, and I love the reasoning behind why. It's not just because, because I think there's a lot of conjecture right now, and a lot of it happens on Instagram about the hustle and the grind, and we just push all the time, you know, we stay up till midnight. We wake up at 4 a.m. and we eat, you know, we eat fiber every morning and protein power, and that's our entire diet. But it's a very selfish, individualistic picture of hustle.

but in reality what you are saying is you are not just hustling for you. You are hustling because your hustle as the captain of this team has a cascading effect, and you are literally the antidote to social loafing on your team because people are watching. Is that a fair assessment? That's what you're talking about is going on. That's exactly it. I mean, we don't think enough about contagious emotion and leaders, what you project is more important than what you say. That's one of the things I learned doing this research because these captains didn't give speech.

They hated giving speeches. They weren't people that motivate you with words. They were people who motivated you with their behavior. And when you think about contagious behavior from a leader, there's really only two kinds of contagious behavior that are always positive. There is relentlessness and there is emotional control. And that's another one of the things that these leaders all had. It's incredible ability to control and regulate their emotion to let it out when it was helpful and to restrain it. when it wasn't. And those are the only things that are contagious that are always positive.

Like you can be contagious and be very joyful and you can be a very optimistic person. And that's contagious in good times. But in bad times, no one wants to hear your positivity. You know, they don't want that. It doesn't work. You know, we're seeing that during this pandemic. Like anyone's a cheerleader. It looks like a moron right now, right? I mean, it's like this is not the time for that. So it only works some of the time. And anyone who projects, you know, frustration or anger, I mean, that's toxic and that's going to hurt you. So there are only those two kinds of leader emotion that I think are always positive. And that's the relentlessness and the ability to control and regulate your emotion, which is something I never thought about as a manager.

You know, and I realized when I do this research like, wow, it's really important. How does a business owner go about creating a culture in which the two things you're talking about, relentlessness and emotional control, are celebrated and cultivated in people instead of what I feel like, I feel like a lot of corporate America does is they stifle relentlessness, right? They just say, just do your job, just stay in your lane and clock out at five and we'll be golden, right? So how do you make sure you don't become that as you're growing your business? I think a lot of it is what you do personally and being very aware of how you respond to certain things and really thinking about what you're projecting with what you say and what you do and your body language and all the things that are not verbal that you do.

It's so important. They really set a tone and people really do follow you subconsciously. I mean, not even in a conscious way, but they'll follow you. Sometimes it's your behavior, but, you know,

the lesson for people in business is similar to the lesson in sports, which is, you know, you need to redefine what a leader looks like, you know, what a captain is. Because, you know, we're wrong. And I don't know why. I mean, we're all wrong.

It's not our fault. I just think, you know, Hollywood and we've been socialized to see. see leadership in certain terms. And that's really not the model that sustains excellence. I mean, if that's your goal, should be sustaining excellence. A lot of companies think, well, if we can just get to this level of sales or this milestone

we've been chasing, then that's great. But no, that's not it. And that's what I work with a lot of sports teams. And that's the first thing I'm trying to get through to them, which is getting to greatness is one thing. You know, and it takes a, there's a million ways to get there, but only certain tiny number of teams can stay there once they get there. And that's what you should be doing.

While you're building that great team, you need to be thinking about how you're going to stay there once you get there. And the way to do it in business, you just have to start looking for different things. Because leadership is really about behavior. And that was the thing that shocked me about the seven traits of great leaders. The one thing that wasn't on it was God-given talent, ability, charisma. Anything you're born with, it's not on there. It doesn't matter.

Leadership is not something you're born to do. It's about the way you behave and the choices that you make in every single leadership situation. Any day, there's going to be 150 choices you have to make as a leader. You just have to make better choices. And if you make the right ones and know what the right choices are, you're going to do better. And behavior can be copied and behavior can be learned and modeled. And any of us can get better at it. You know, it's really about what you do.

And one of the things for when you're hiring and looking for team leaders, and captains inside your own team, the mistake we make is that we think leaders are supposed to be obvious, right? They're supposed to be the person who looks like the leader or talks the most or has the most charisma or the person who's just the best, has the highest sales totals, whatever, you know. Everyone promotes the person, this team has a great job and they're like, who do we promote? Oh, the guy who's had the highest individual sales, right? No, that's not the reason the team was great.

Like, there was something else going on that you just totally missed. So one thing that I revise people to do, and it sounds crazy, but when you're thinking about who the leader of your team is, just walk into that room and look around and think, if I didn't know these people, who's the last person I would ever think was the leader of this team? Who's the last person? And it's probably not that person over the corner eating paste or whatever, and don't pick that person. But you're going to be closer to the truth than you would be if you started with who's the most obvious person. because the people who really do the hard work of leadership and care more about the teen than they care about themselves and are really going to pull you through a crisis, those are the people who have the relationships and are doing the hard work that they're not getting any credit for. Because most of leadership is just hard work behind the scenes that no one ever sees. And it's that person.

So when you say, who wants to be a leader and six people raise their hands, you know, you got to kind of look around that group to the person that's not raising their hand, you know, because they know how hard it is. and they don't care about the prestige or the adulation, they figure I'm just going to keep doing what I do anyway. Because that person is probably your leader. And I think if you acknowledge that that person is your leader, what I've seen, and I've done this now enough with different kinds of teams to see, just everything falls into line. It's beautiful.

I mean, everyone will rally around that person because that person gives. That person is there, and they all know that person cares more about the collective than themselves, and just allows everybody to relax into their roles they're supposed to play. So that's what I would say. Start looking for different cues and different behavior when you're deciding who the leadership be. Patrick Lynchione talks about the motive for leadership being either rewards-based leadership or responsibility-based leadership.

And he talks about exactly what you're saying, where if you want to win over the long haul, you've got to find people that are in it for the right reasons, which is not the rewards because that gets old real quick. and a lot of times they don't even come, it's got to be that you are absolutely fired up about the responsibility. And it's interesting. I felt like one of the themes that was prevalent

throughout the book and throughout even us talking today is just kind of that idea of take what you thought was leadership and turn it on its head and then you've probably got a closer picture of what leadership looks like. And I felt like the example

that most perfectly kind of epitomized that dichotomy of what we think it should look like versus what it actually is, was you talking about Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees and comparing him to, I think her name was L'Rea Luis on the Cuban volleyball team. Lerreya Luis, yeah, very close, yeah. Yeah, so can you draw out that dichotomy for us and teach us on how that really, really articulates what you're talking about here? Derek Cheater, so I made a lot of enemies with this one. Between him and Michael Jordan. Yeah.

You can see how wrong we are when you look at who people say, when you ask who's the best captain, you know, and it's usually Jordan or Jeter. Jordan, I don't want to get into him. He was a lousy leader. I mean, a lousy, terrible leader. I mean, just the worst role model you can have. Greatest player ever. But. Oh, and on the verge of narcissism potentially, correct? I mean, oh, I think beyond. But in the book, I have a whole chapter about Bill Cartwright. You know, and Bill Cartwright was this person inside the Bulls. And Jordan had won anything. Jordan didn't win anything for six years because it wasn't a team. It was the Michael Jordan show with a bunch of supporting cast. And then when Bill Cartwright showed up and started doing all this hard work behind the scenes that leaders needed to do,

that's when they won. Even Jordan acknowledged, you know, later that it was Cartwright and made the difference. Anyway, we won't do that. But Jeter, to me, is a great example. And it's part of what's happening to sports because sports has become such a big entertainment spectacle. It's a business. It's a business. And you know what the thing is?

There's no, he's a commercial captain. I mean, there's no better captain if you want to grow your business than Derek Cheater. I mean, the guy, too, his incredible credit, great player, hardworking, committed, did not take PEDs. Like, you know, really gutted. I mean, a really admirable human being. Family man. He was like the poster child of the MLB for years, I feel like. When Jeter showed up with the Yankees, that team was estimated to be worth about $200 million, maybe.

You know, that was it. They built a new stadium, whatever. I mean, by the time he retired. The enterprise value of that team was something like $5 billion. And so much it was tied up and he sold tickets. I mean, you know, he sold jerseys. He was great for business. Okay, but here's the thing about Derek Teter.

It was like, oh, he's a great captain. He was captain for 12 seasons and they won one World Series during his captaincy. And they outspent every other team in Major League Baseball by a billion dollars. And they won one championship, right? How can you even say that is, I just, John Greene was even in the conversation. It's crazy. So he can be great.

He can be great for business. He can be great for baseball. He's a man of outstanding character, but he does not qualify for what you call dominance. And that's really interesting. The thing about Jeter that was different from all these other captains that I studied was leadership is messy. It is about emotional labor. It is about always being there.

Tim Duncan is such a perfect example. Tim Duncan is the least charismatic human being probably alive. right? I mean, he's never given his speech. But he is constantly working. His eyes are always moving. He's looking for teammates that need something for him, whether it's a pep talk or a little bit of criticism, and he gives it to them in the moment right when they make a mistake. And he pulls them aside, you know,

and he'll engage with them very intensely one-on-one. That's the communication style all these captains did. They didn't give speeches. They didn't talk about, they didn't call people out, like, you know, they'd talk about. They would pull people aside and they would have a conversation where they would listen as much as they'd talked, and people would feel heard. they would feel accountable, but they were also part of a talkative, communicative culture where people

shared ideas and made course corrections along the way. If you want to be great, you have to be able to make a lot of corrections as a group together and have a lot of argument and debate. And you need a leader who makes that possible, makes people feel comfortable. Cheater was a very aloof guy. I mean, he was very lead by example. His idea was, you know, I'm going to play, I'm going to show you how hard I work and how hard I play and how much I care. and that's just going to be enough and it's going to rub off on you. The thing is he didn't really interact with this. He didn't get into the weeds with his teammates.

He didn't get to know them and figure out how to motivate them. He wasn't in there in the trenches doing that hard emotional labor that you have to do as a leader. And, you know, it was pretty successful. I mean, they won a lot, but they didn't come anywhere near any level of dominance that they could have. And it highlights the fact that the all-star that the business owner has on their team. just because they are the All-Star doesn't mean they are the leader that's going to sustain your success long-term. And it doesn't mean you should fire the All-Star. The All-Star is a great gift, and you should celebrate the All-Star, but don't confuse stardom with leadership, is what you're saying, correct?

So that is probably the most important, the most actionable thing I can say. There's such a tendency to take your best player, your best employee, your best star, and to make that person a leader of the team. It is a really bad idea. There's a very rare person who is that much better than everyone else who also has the time and the bandwidth to be a leader. So, Steph Curry is my favorite example. The Golden State Warriors, you know, which sadly broke up. But everyone thinks who's the leader of that team? Is it Steph Curry?

Is it Kevin Durant? Was it Draymont Green? If you don't know basketball, I mean, these are the main stars. The leader of that team was Andre Agadala, you know, who was the sixth man, you know, who came off the bench. and he is the epitome of everything I'm talking about. But now I talked to Andre about this, about Steph Curry. So there's two kinds of superstars. You know, there's the superstar that's very, really, really is focused on their own points and their rebounds.

I mean, Kobe Bryant, but I mean, he was more that kind of a superstar, very kind of focused on his, himself and his role. And, you know, that's a problem because Steph Curry is different. Steph Curry is a superstar who is also very comfortable being part of a team. He can go out and be selfish and take a bunch of shots and be the person that carries the team. But then he can also retreat back into the team context and let other people take the lead. It's a really rare quality in his superstar. And that's what you really want. But now, as Andre put it, Steph's mentality, he said, I've seen these teams that were great.

And I know it's never the star who's the leader. It's always what he calls a super vet. You know, it's some guy who's an older player who's not a great player, necessarily the star of the team, but it's someone who understands, you know, how to get through to people and how to do all that hard work behind the scenes that has to be done, how important it is. And so he defers. And now, kept seeing this over and over again, Pelle, the great Brazilian soccer player. I thought he was the captain, and I interviewed him about it.

And he said, I was never the captain, nor did I want to be. Because think about being a superstar, how hard that is, how hard you have to work. You're better than everyone else for a reason. because you're more talented, but you also work at it, right? It's so hard to compete at that level, to be at that level. To have to add on a bunch of leadership responsibilities is crazy. In Brazil, you know, where Pelle was a god, you know, being Pelle was really hard. I mean, that was enough.

Everyone there realized there's no way he could lead the team. He doesn't have that kind of time or that kind of, you know, ability. So someone else has to do that. And I think, you know, the leadership is this thing where you think it is your leader has to be superior, obvious, shiny, better. You're the leader because you have some quality that makes you better than everyone else, right? It's not the case. It's all about your behavior and the choices you make and how much hard grunt work you're willing to do that.

No one's going to appreciate. Well, and what's crazy too is, and this was, I think, the Luis example that you gave is sometimes they absolutely bucked public perception of what was okay. Like, these people were not just, not only were they not being Derek Jeter, where they, the poster child of the sport, they were being the opposite of that. So you have to tell us the Cuban volleyball story because I think that's my favorite in the book, Sam. Oh, great. All right, this was the hardest thing for me to understand because one of the problems, it's so crazy. And I'm just the messenger, but these people did awful things sometimes.

Yeah. And these captains. I mean, really, you know, bad things. And this is the example of the Cuban women's volleyball team. So let me just set the stage. Cuba's a country of 9 million people, right? It's poor. It's politically repressed.

it had no great volleyball tradition at all, right? All of a sudden, in 1990, they started beating everybody. And for 10 years, they did not lose a match of consequence in 10 years. This is the greatest Olympic team of all time, men's women's, not even close. I mean, it is the greatest Olympic team. And it's from this most incredible unlikely place with not a bunch of great athletes. I mean, so the captain of this team was Maria Luis, who was about 5'9. I met her in Havana.

She's wonderful, right? she's five foot nine I mean the average Olympic strikers six two right she's five nine right I mean they were not even great athletes so she was the leader of the team now they won for six years they beat everyone and they were tired right they'd been overworked and they were they had to go to japan to train and they were all demoralized and they got to Atlanta and they all just wanted to get their hair done they didn't care you know the team was starting to fall apart I thought that was the end of it so she knew she had to do something really dramatic and want to hold that team together so what had she'd do well they were playing the brazilians right and they just barely squeaked into the knockout

round and they got Brazil and Brazil's the other kind of the other best team in the world and they knew this team very well and she said we have to make them beat themselves because we're not going to be able to beat them you know in our current state so she came up with this plan and the plan was really simple she called her team as together coach did nothing do nothing about this she said here's what we're going to do as soon as the match starts we're going to scream you know insults at the Brazilian team. And her team is, like, what do you mean insults? She's like, I'm talking about the worst thing one woman can

say to another. The worst thing you can think of. You're going to scream it at them every time. And they're like, okay, I guess. So, they started doing this and it wasn't really working at first, and they got a yellow card and the Brazilians were complaining. But you could see as that match went on, the

Brazilians got so mad and frustrated. They just started overplaying, making dumb mistakes. Like, you know, and this thing was a thrilling match. and went five sets. It was the semifinal of the Olympics in 96. Well, it didn't the Brazilians start shouting back to? Like, the Brazilians essentially emotionally lost it, right?

Yeah, they didn't know what to do. Do we yell back? And, you know, but she took it right to that point where she wasn't going to get thrown out, right? She got a yellow card, but she kind of did it when the referee wasn't looked. She kind of just figured out where the line was. There was nothing in the rules and so you can't scream horrible insults. I mean, there was nothing in the rules. Yeah, but the principle that's in the book is you said,

they exemplify aggressive play that test the limits of the rules. And I read that, and I read this story. I was like, this has to be the greatest picture of entrepreneurship that I've ever seen. Like, it's like, I'm going to walk right up to the edge and just what I feel like I'm going over. I'm going to pull it back a little bit. But that's what she was doing. Yeah. No, exactly.

And, you know, it's funny because afterwards it was so heated, she pumped so much animosity in. They got a huge brawl. I mean, it's... But Cuba won, correct? Cuba won, right? They won in a fifth set tie break. They won. And then in the locker room, this huge brawl started.

I mean, yeah, brawl. Like, they had 10 Atlanta cops trying to break this brawl up between these two teams. It was a huge embarrassment for the Olympics, really. And Maria Luis was like the villain of this whole thing. But then her teammates, when I talked to them, they said, you know, when the brawl started, it was weird because there was only one person who was trying to break it up on either side. It was Maria Luis. She was trying to break up the fight because she was doing it.

It was a tool. She knew exactly what she was doing. She wasn't mad. wasn't emotional for her. She knew what she was doing. She was trying to win. She's done this tactically. And now she didn't want anyone to get hurt and she tried to break up the fight. So I realized it was more to it and I talked to her length about this. But what I realized over time was entrepreneurship is great example and business is great too because look, you don't cook the books. You don't cheat, right? Yes. You play with it in the boundaries.

We're not talking about that. We're talking about interpersonal behavior and when you're dealing with people. And there's a line. You know, you don't know where that line is. exactly like Steve, think about Steve Jobs. He always went right, probably went over that line a lot, right? But he was always kind of coming up to that line. There's a line. And what I realize is like, this is a weird message. And all people say, you know, that's the thing about your book I don't like. How can you tell people to be nasty? I'm not telling you. I'm showing you what people did. Here's the difference. This is what I realized in the end. These people did not care about public perception. They're different from us. They didn't care if people thought they were good sports.

They didn't care how they were perceived from the outside. All they cared about was that team and its collective goals and what they had to do to achieve it. And if it meant the rules are sort of gray and they were going to take it right to the edge, that's what they would do because they didn't care about perception. They cared about the team more than they cared about how they're perceived. And if you think they're a bad example for kids, you know what? Change the rules because we're going to play right up to what we think we can do. And they were very good at going right to the line and not over it. Man, the example that I thought of. Our CEO here is Dave Ramsey, and he's now, I think, the third most listened to talk show radio host in the country, right? 16 million listeners a week talks about personal finance. And it's syndicated on stations around the country now. If there is a station that is going to take the Dave Ramsey show off the radio, he, I mean, the guy will go ballistic. Like, he will lose it. But then he will tell us.

The reason why is because he says in that city, wherever they're taking us off the radio, in that city, there is a single mom that needs personal finance advice. And if this means that she's not going to get the advice that she needs, then you better believe I'm going to test the limits of what's okay. And he said, I'm going to do everything that I need to to make sure we stay on the radio because that woman needs help. And that's what I thought of because it's like it's instrumental aggression, right? It is it is not just emotional. it's not just an emotional outrage outburst. It's we have a desired end in mind and we are going to use everything available at our disposal to make sure that desire end gets accomplished. That's one thing I realize about aggression that we misunderstand is that, you know, when someone's aggressive like that,

it's really about the motive. It's what's the aggression is about. And the toxic kind of aggression is when you're angry or frustrated at someone and you want to hurt them, you want to inflict pain on somebody. that's where most aggression comes from. But that's what it is. It's this instrumental aggression where it's like, you know, I'm going to do something that seems aggressive, looks very aggressive, you know, doesn't look any different from what someone might do if they were really mad at someone, wanted to hurt them. But I'm doing it for a completely different reason, which I'm doing it for the further

goal. You know, I'm doing it to attain something. And what these captains did on top of that was they knew that their personal popularity and their personal image in the world would suffer. so they were sacrificing something to do it as well. So it's fascinating. I mean, it's something that I think everyone needs to work out. But again, you know, we're not, I don't think everybody wants to be great for a long time.

I mean, honestly, like, you know, that's one of the problems is I think a lot of people in business, you're like, if I can get to this level of sales, I can get to this point, you know, this many restaurants, this, you know, if I can get to that place and I'm happy, you know, but if you really want to stay there at that. at that exalted level and be one of the greats, like you have to be willing to do some things you might not do otherwise. And, you know, it's really a question of how bad do you want. What do you really want? The final one that I'd love for us to touch on, and you kind of just alluded to it a little bit, it's that strong sense of conviction and the ability to stand apart and the courage that that requires. So can you explain to us what that really is and what that looks like in action, Sam? So that was onto this theme of crazy things that these captains did.

I think the craziest thing anyone, one of them ever did probably was in 1980, the Soviet hockey team that I studied. So everyone knows the great Russian Soviet hockey team, you know, the machine. But all we know really is Americans is the miracle on ice in 1980. They lost to the Americans in Lake Placid, like the biggest humiliation for that team. Really one of the biggest humiliations for the Soviet Union during the Cold War, right? I mean, the Pravda, the paper, the regime didn't even report that the game had happened. It was such an embarrassment, right? So these American college amateurs beat this Russian team that had never, wasn't supposed to lose.

And after that game, the coach, this guy, Victor Tikinov, he told the Russian team, he said, this is a collective failure. We all screwed up. You know, that's the story we're going to tell in Moscow. We don't know what's going to happen to us when we get there, but that's the story we're going to tell. So we're flying back on the plane, and no one had ever told this story, I dragged it out of his teammates. The coach was sitting in first class with his assistant coaches and a bunch of Russian you know, uh, Politburo, you know, guys. And he was saying something else. He was saying,

oh, this player was awful. This guy's horrible. Got to get rid of this guy. He was singling out individual players for the loss, which is what he said they weren't going to do. And a little, what he didn't know is that in the cockpit of the plane, this guy, Valeri Vesiliev, who was a defenseman, like the kind of enforcer on that team. The only thing is scarier than a hockey player is a Soviet Union hockey player. Soviet enforcer. I know, right? Like, he's so funny. Like, he apparently could bend nails with his teeth, I mean, stuff like that.

He's kind of a folk hero of this guy. Of course he could. But anyway, he's, yeah. Of course he could, right? So he's sitting in the cockpit. He hears everything Tekinoff says, right? And he's mad, right? He's like, that's not right.

So what would you do? Soviet Union, Cold War, they can throw you in Siberia for spitting out your gum on the sidewalk, right? So he runs out. He runs out of the cockpit. He grabs Teakeneoff by the neck. And he starts straight. wringling him, shaking me. He's like, I will throw you out of this plane right now if you don't take it back, right? So they haul him back to the plane. He didn't choke his coach out, but everyone's like, we'll never see him again. He's gone, right? He's done.

So, but the next day, two days later, they have practice in Moscow. In walks with Cilia, he's like, hey, guys, hey coach, sits down, puts on a skates, goes on the ice. Like, nothing ever happened. Like, nothing happened. I mean, it was a complete over in his mind. And everyone kind of let it go. And he was elected captain, of course, immediately.

And then they became the greatest hockey team ever. I mean, the next four years, unbelievable. I mean, they were, no one could even come close. I mean, they beat the greatest Canadian all-sert team with Wayne Gretzky and Bobby Orr and everyone. They beat him eight to one. I mean, they was the captain. He was the captain. So he became captain.

They became the great team, right? So what I realized was like, why is this so hard to understand? So what I finally realized was that there's two, again, it's those two different kinds of aggression. Inside a team, there's two driving forces when it comes to conflict inside a team. There's something called personal conflict. Again, personal conflict has been two people just don't like each other, right? And I don't like you. So I'm going to be, there's going to be conflict, right, because of that.

That's toxic. And if a leader does that, 100%. toxic to a team. But there's another kind of conflict research was found, which is called task conflict. And this is when you're arguing about how the team is going about its business in order to make yourselves better. And what I didn't realize was that that can get very heated. Like that kind of conflict can get very heated. It can look just like, like the facility of did look just like personal conflict, right? But it wasn't. He was doing it because he knew he had to hold the team together in this moment where it should have fallen apart. And that's exactly what

he achieved. He wasn't mad. He later said I had no problem with my coach. I mean, I know he was stern, but I didn't hate him. You choke a guy. You think you hate him. No, he was doing it as a message to his team. They need to hold it together and it worked. So it's hard to tell the difference sometimes between someone who's doing the right kind of conflict and someone doing the wrong kind of conflict. It has to come from making the team better. And it's so hard because everyone's so afraid of conflict. You think conflict should be, there shouldn't be. It to be all harmony inside a team. But the research has shown that, especially teams that compete together and do things in real time, at kind of productive conflict, the ability to have really serious arguments and get over them and move on from them, that is the absolute greatest performance enhancer for a team.

Every great team that sustains excellence has that ability to argue and fight and figure it out and walk away without holding grudges. And, you know, it is one of the hardest environment to create because you really have to be a big, person. You have to be able to admit you're wrong and not get your way sometimes and to allow people to really get into it. And I think a lot of us get really uncomfortable when people get into it. We just have to remember, why are we fighting? Are we fighting about being better? Or are we fighting because these people really don't like each other and they're finding reasons to fight? You know, it really takes a little bit of psychology, I think, to figure it out. We were talking to a CEO recently of an organization called Black Rifle Coffee. I don't know if you've heard of them. They've experienced

radical growth. And he just transitioned some of the CEO responsibilities to another member of his team, or actually they hired someone in on the outside. And one of the things that he said, the phrase that he used, I'll never forget it, he said, I had to sacrifice my ego on the altar of the business. And he essentially said, I had to put aside my ego to do the thing that I knew was best for the business and the team. Sounds like that's what you're talking about. Before we jump to the final question, I'd love for everyone to know, Number one, where can they get your book? And then also, how can they follow everything you're writing about right now and everything

you're doing right now, Sam? Yeah, well, the book is, you know, in all the usual spots. You can get it on line these days. It's probably be better. It's still out there. It's called the captain class. And, you know, I write a column for the Wall Street Journal about leadership. And, you know, that's, you have to subscribe.

Sorry, I know. I wish it was free. But so I write a regular column for them. And I'm on Twitter. You know, I'm terrible. social media, but I, I'm on Twitter at Sam Walker's with an S, and I post, I try to post things there as much as I can. So those are great ways. And if you, you know, want to get a hold to me, I love, you know, hearing from people, learn so much from people's experiences. So I encourage

people to reach out if you have a good story or an example that, you know, you think kind of fits my theme or doesn't, you know? I mean, I like to argue it, too. I'm constantly kicking the tires on my own theories. Very good. That's healthy conflict for you. I like it. What is the final word of encouragement and what is the action that you hope people take out of hearing kind of what you've learned and what we've discussed today, Sam? Leadership is actually very simple.

It's just not easy. And that's the thing that you just have to internalize. It's the decisions that you make, there is an actual template. My book will give you the template for how to make every leadership decision and how to think about them and how not to make the wrong one. The problem is the right decision is usually the really hard one. It requires you to give so much of yourself and so much of your time and to do things that you wouldn't really want to do in a vacuum. And that's the thing you have to figure out. It's also you have to understand like you cannot expect the credit.

You know, in fact, if you're getting all the credit as the leader, you're probably not doing it right. you know, it's okay for other people to be the face of the effort and to get the big promotion and to, you know, to leave you for some greener pastors, that's fine. You know, it has to be about the success of the team. I'd go back to Bill Russell, who I think is the greatest captain who ever lived. And the greatest thing he said, you know, and I put it in my book because I think it's the wisest explanation of the mindset that you need. He said, my ego demands for myself, the success of my team. I think that's the mentality you have to have. It's not about you. You have to be enough for your team to win.

Well, Sam, I'm so grateful for that 11-year-old Bombers team that came out of nowhere, and that that sparked a rabbit hole that you were willing to go down and keep going down, and we're super thankful for your time and investment into our audience today. Thanks so much. Thanks. It's really fun. Oh, man, I cannot stop talking about this conversation with Sam, And I can't stop talking about that book, the captain class. I just have so much admiration for the absolutely maniacal level of precision that he brought to identifying the most dominant teams in human history. But then really understanding and disentangling what they all had in common. It's so fascinating that there was one variable.

There was one trait. And it was that they all shared a team captain that embodied those specific leadership characteristics. And I think it just highlights the fact that servant leadership and leadership aren't really two different things. The type of leadership that wins over the long haul is servant leadership. And that's why our team wanted to provide all of you with a free resource. It's actually a training that I taught with one of our other coaches here. It's called the five fixes to get your team members to act like owners. One of the things that Sam talked about in this conversation is the fact that when people take personal responsibility for their role, the entire

team gets better. And that's what this training is all about. It will help you create a self-employed mentality within your team. So if you want to take advantage of this free training, text the word five fixes to 33-444. That's five fixes spelled out F-I-V-E-F-I-X-E-F-I-X-E-S, all one word, no spaces, to 33-44-4, or just click the length that's in the show notes. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership Podcast. If you did, please give us a five-star review and tell your friends, to subscribe. For a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the link that's in the show

notes. And be sure to follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. This episode is produced by Tim Hull and it was edited and mixed by Will Rutter. I'm Alex Judd and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team. Thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. If you enjoy

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