Culture & Leadership

Blisters and Basketball – How to Boost Excellent Execution in Your Organization

April 9th, 2013   |   by fbadmin

basketI admire John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach. He spent the first day of practice each year teaching his team how to put its socks on properly. Wooden’s reasoning? If you can avoid blisters, you’ll focus more, play better, and boost your on-court performance.

Wooden’s emphasis on excellent execution resonates for me. Partially because I played ball on a very tight and disciplined junior high school team back in Chicago that’s in the basketball hall of fame. Over time, the team won 220 games in a row, and it cranked out a record of 1,000 wins and 8 losses over 10 years. And partially because I want Rubicon Project to be quick and sharp in the way we operate and implement.

When we started our company, we were totally driven by the notion of excellence in execution.  As we grew bigger and more successful, I began to worry that we had become a little soft, even sloppy, in our execution.

Now, we’re on it and once again really focused on detailed execution.  And that includes all 271 of us at Rubicon (growing to 370+ this year.)

As an example, I’m reinforcing our original core values at the Rubicon Project:  starting and ending meetings on time, for example.  If we finish five minutes late on a regular basis across our organization, doing the math, we would lose the equivalent of 23 total workdays of productivity in the business per year – that’s many millions of dollars of wasted investment, and almost a full month of opportunity cost.

And that’s why I think it’s worth following John Wooden’s approach. He truly understood how to make things work better to achieve optimal results. Wooden’s bottom line (and mine, too) – discipline matters.