Book
Reviews
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More Than
a Game by Phil Jackson and Charley Rosen Recommendation: •• |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Hoop de doo I liked Phil Jackson more before reading
this book. If you like basketball a lot, you’ll enjoy this book. Otherwise,
too much of it replays old games, long forgotten. The structure of the book
alternates between Charley Rosen who writes well, and Phil Jackson who tries
harder, and writes longer and with more stories. Here are two samples, with applications
for managers. First, good advice on how to handle veteran workers: “Coaching veteran
players can also be difficult because they don’t want to hear a coach
constantly chirping at them after every botched assignment. Vets will
invariably resist any suggestion that there are inadequacies in their games.
Even when their bad habits are revealed again and again as they watch game
tapes, the vets refuse to claim their own frailties and prefer to blame
somebody else. It’s a delicate balance for a coach; you have to work in a
territory that doesn’t threaten the veteran players and put them on the
defensive. With the Lakers, I had to register the veteran players’ errors in
a nonverbal but unmistakable fashion. I call this style of coaching ‘I know
that you know that I know.’ By this process the team understood that certain
players had been dealt with in a way that upheld my standards.” Next, bad advice on setting false goals: “We needed to
finish off the season by winning all of our remaining six games to bring our
season’s total to seventy. In truth, winning seventy meant nothing, but I
told the guys it was important only as a way to try to keep their juices
flowing. In fact, it had been several weeks since we’d clinched having the
league’s best record and enjoying the home-court advantage throughout the
play-offs. And the guys really hadn’t let up.” Lots of managers put out false goals in
the hope that already-motivated workers will continue to excel. Usually, once
discovered, these false goals prove managers as manipulators, and trust
declines. Real goals are then doubted. Read this book if you love basketball,
but emulate management advice only with great care. Steve Hopkins, April 29, 2001 |
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ã 2001 Hopkins and Company, LLC |
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