John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports

0:04Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

0:27Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm happy to be chatting with John Amici. He is a fellow and chartered scientist of the Institute of Science and Technology. He is a professor of leadership at the University of Exeter Business School, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author. He has written several books on leadership, psychology, management, and a memoir. His newest book is It's Not Magic, The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders. And John is also well known for having played seven years in the NBA as a center for the Orlando Magic and Utah Jazz and also for having played overseas in Europe.

1:09John, welcome. Thank you. It's a lovely introduction. I better be good now. Some questions on leadership. You wrote, and I quote, culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated. What does that mean? That is, as glib as it sounds, it is the reality that when you go into a space, if you can observe poor behaviors that nobody challenges, then that is the thing that's defining the culture. Even the small weird things that people do. So I worked in a company recently. I was brought into a company recently where some senior leader 10 years ago must have brought in the habit of emphasizing what you say by banging on the table as you talk.

1:49All aspiring senior people, mostly men, and all aspiring junior people, mostly men, bang on the table. And they talked about their benefits and they talked about their pension packages and whatever else. The thing that defined that place was the kind of discursive violence of every meeting being punctuated by fists thudding on desks. So that's what I mean by it. But institutions or teams or companies that appear dysfunctional, they're often highly functional in other ways. So if you think how Michael Jordan treated his fellow Chicago Bulls, well, that defined one part of the culture. But the team did incredibly well, right?

2:26Cooperated on the court, high level of discipline. They knew not to pass the ball to Bill Cartwright too much. Why is that the thing that defines the culture? So it is the thing that defines the culture, especially because the people listening to you and I talk aren't going to pay their aging center$5 million a year. they aren't going to pay the vast majority of their players over a million quid a year dollars a year right and they aren't going to have a player even one of the caliber anywhere near of a michael jordan so we can take the example that is as rare as i don't know adamantium and have it be the the thing we go by or we can say that most companies have extraordinarily average people within it and so they don't get to play by the same rules plus i would point out all those people who loved watching, I've never seen it, the program that they did about Michael Jordan and his years in that.

3:20Look at the number of people who didn't show up, the number of people who wouldn't appear in that program, despite having perhaps made their mark, earned their stripes, and certainly earned championships with him. They wouldn't even show up on his testimonial show. But say, you know, Paul McCartney and the Beatles, a fine British band, George Harrison ended up hating him. Steve Jobs and Apple, those might be exceptions, but they seem to be exceptions that account for a large part of the GDP or the cultural impact of a sector. Yeah, they might well be. I just, I would say to anybody who wants to model themselves after Steve Jobs, be that brilliant and that compelling and that insightful and that prescient, and you can get away with it.

4:09But I would also say anyone whose idea of being a great leader is that their superpower is somehow intrinsically linked with their ability to be an arsehole has misunderstood the human condition. Because nobody performs at their best when they're frightened. Nobody. It's physically impossible. What are the kinds of rituals that leadership needs? The kinds of rituals it needs. Connective rituals. Rituals that let people know that you aren't just a transaction to them. those types of things are important what are the rituals rituals that give direction in times of trouble and strife now think you know when things so many things are going wrong and not just inside work with transformations but outside of work with wars and social political upheaval so giving people direction and whatever rituals you can have around that rituals that show you care and that are slightly that you're slightly human i think are important too i know that that's not popular with some very, very, well, certainly some of the leaders you've modeled and talked about, they weren't interested in being seen as human.

5:12But as a six foot nine person of some size, I can tell you it's actually quite useful for people to know you're not just a frightening monster all the time. You're a leader. What's a specific ritual you use? We have Yorkshire Golden Hour. So there's a tea in Britain called Yorkshire Gold, and it's my favorite tea. And so we have this meeting where all the team comes together, where we explicitly do not talk about work, but it's just a time to catch up. We're a mostly virtual organization. It's one of the few times we get to catch up, and it's a place where we get access to each other's lives if we are civil and courteous and kind enough.

5:51When you were in college, and I do not mean your time spent playing basketball, but what was a leadership mistake you observed there? oh uh well i mean i've i've railed against the impact of college sports on on on the athletes themselves i witnessed and not not i will say this not at penn state i'd not to be protective for penn state i've been vocally criticism critical of penn state over the years but not at penn state but other places where i got to know players it was very clear that that no responsibility was being taken for them as people outside of their athletics. They weren't going to graduate.

6:29They weren't attending classes. They were protected from doing that as long as they performed on the court. To me, it was one of the most obvious abdications of leadership I saw at a very early age. How about the Jesuit high school you went to in Toledo? Although you're British, you went in Toledo, right? Our Toledo. How were they at leadership? I don't know that my mind was oriented towards it to notice it. What I did notice was that if there's something that they had, it was this constant rhetoric towards the tenets of leadership. I know they were Jesuit tenets, but they were talking about things like being a man for others.

7:03We were an all-boys school. That was the constant mantra being repeated. And it did seem like many of the people there, teachers, educators, believed that mantra to be true. I don't know if I, I mean, I think there's a selflessness part of being a leader that's important if you want to be sustainably high performing. But I'm not sure that I've ever used the man for others terminology myself. There's a stereotype that overall, people who work in consulting are not very good at leadership, that they're a bit bureaucratized. Do you think that's true? And if so, why did that happen? I think it's easy to hide behind bureaucracy.

7:42If you're not interested in the work, the graft, the effort, the skill gaining that's required to be a positive leader, then bureaucracy is very useful to you. And so I can imagine how some people who aren't interested in the graft of leadership would gather around themselves as much bureaucracy as possible to hide the fact that they were uninterested in leadership. I can see how that would develop. I have seen consultants who are minded towards leadership. I will say that they all seem to have come from, like I'm thinking in my head of somebody who used to work in the NHS, so they used to be an actual doctor, and somebody else who used to be a physician, sorry, a physics teacher in a university.

8:21So they all seem to have different orientations before they became consultants. Putting aside political figures, whose leadership impresses you today? That is a very, very thin sheet. That's not true. I work with a group of chairs of FTSE companies in the United Kingdom, and there are a couple of them who are notably remarkably interested in learning leadership. That's probably the thing I noticed most about them as people who are extraordinarily experienced. If there's a name for American people, it would be a sports figure. It's probably Doc Rivers, somebody whose leadership was very evident to me while I was in Orlando, really obvious that he was doing things that I hadn't seen before from other coaches.

9:05Why did Doc make your practice start at midnight, at least one of your practices? Well, yeah, the beginning of the season. I think you talked about rituals at the beginning. There was a ritual that we did. Everybody, we started practice at midnight, and we did in that practice at midnight the ritual of our, this sprinting exercise. We had to sprint across the width of the court in a certain number of seconds. Everybody had to make it, and if you didn't make it, you couldn't start practice. And it was just this ritual that kept us focused, even in the off-season, knowing that we were going to do that.

9:38And it set a tone, I don't think, maybe now more than back in my day, but people think basketball was, they kind of worked their way into shape, so they weren't really minded to be in shape in the preseason. And Doc set a precedent with that ritual that we would be in shape on day one. In fact, day zero. Do you agree with the stereotype that the non-star players have a better chance of being great coaches? Because Doc was a good player, but not a true star, right? I'm not sure. Wasn't he an all-star? I think so. But he's not thought of as a player. He's thought of mainly as a coach. I mean, see, the scientist in me just says there is a thousand confounding factors in that, right?

10:19So if you are so remarkable as a player, then you don't have to go into coaching. Your life doesn't have to revolve around sport because you could do any number of things other than that. You could just sit on your laurels and play golf if you wanted to. So there's part of me that thinks that if you're an excellent superstar, maybe you have a thousand other things that you can be interested in because you're sitting on a pile of gold. How were you influenced by Victor Hugo? Oh, my goodness. I haven't thought about that for ages. So I vibed, if you like, with the – why is it escaping me now? The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

10:58and I thought, I'm trying to think, is that the story? That's the one you discuss in your memoir. That is so long. As I mentioned to your colleague before, I have forgotten half of the book that I've written now, never mind the one I wrote in 2007. But there was a description of the hunchback in that book that when I was a child was a description that I thought was me. I have always, I still have this experience today And it's part of the reason I don't leave my house very much unless I have to for work. And it's that wherever I go, the first look I get from people is usually one of terror and of fear because I am a six foot nine, 150 kilo, that's very large, an American pound black person.

11:45So essentially our society's version of a super predator. And everywhere I looked, people thought I was stupid. They thought I was dangerous and they thought I was emotionally literate too. so illiterate too. And that was the description that was given in passing of the hunchback. So yeah, that was my introduction to seeing myself reflected in literature. But you read that, and then what happened? You think like, oh, it's okay to be this way? Or you think, my goodness, they all consider me a hunchback. This is terrible. Well, at the time, I just retreated. I retreated into books. That's why I read so much as a child, science fiction, I retreated into worlds that were distant in time and space from my own, and I hid there.

12:30That was what happened. That and Hardy Boys books, for some reason, which, although I knew they would always be the same, I somehow liked them. And that's what I did instead. Nowadays, it's different. Now I accommodate for the fact that I know most people will look at me and not see professor of leadership. They will see something else. And so I now contrive my surroundings to help people feel safe. What did you like best in science fiction? Future history is what I like best in science fiction. It is so immensely cool. I use this all the time in my work today. The future history is the idea that science fiction writers write with such clarity, with such vividness, that you can imagine that they're not just writing about something they're making up, that they've visited the place that they're writing about and are coming back to report it to you.

13:18It's such a powerful tool in trying to change people's minds. It's the same technique that is commonly called the I Have a Dream speech by Martin Luther King is a future history. He doesn't say, you know, it's not a list of grievances. Could you stop biting my people with Alsatians? Could you let us drink at the same water fountain? It is I Have a Dream that white boys and black boys will play together. It's a vision of the future articulated in such a way that everybody involved can feel safe. Are Yoda and Obi-Wan good leaders, or do they just screw everything up and manipulate Luke Skywalker?

13:53By your standards. Jedi are incredibly, I'm so, I am deeply entrenched in it. I have a lightsaber on my desk behind me. But Jedi made so many mistakes, so many mistakes. At the height of their power in the Old Republic, They had an opportunity to evolve and to not be such a monastic and pointless, ritually driven group of people. And instead, they doubled down and they essentially became the galaxy's police, which was never going to lead to ingratiation. It's a really difficult one for me because I'm very much, I feel like I would be a Jedi in the mold of, I don't know, Mace Windu or Jolie Bindu.

14:41or something like that, what people mistakenly called a gray Jedi. But I don't know. They made mistakes, and Yoda certainly made mistakes. I hope that he made up for them with the most recent actions as a ghost. And you like the prequels, don't you? I do like some parts of the prequels. So A New Hope will always be my, that will always be my stone. But I think some of the prequels suffer from the attacks of men who like science fiction but lack imagination and they don't what they really like about science fiction is that it was always about some bloke who got the scantily clad woman at the end of the of the story the 1950s type of robot pal helpless damsel to rescue type of thing and i think if you look at the the prequels through a slightly different lens it actually helps the story evolve and helps the Jedi seem slightly less hapless at times.

15:44What is it you learn about mentorship and menteeship from those stories? Ooh, that it's very often mostly useful for one party and not the other. And often the party it's supposed to help most, it doesn't. That's just the truth of mentorship. It doesn't matter if you're talking about reverse mentoring in organizations or Padawan and Master Jedi relationships in Star Wars, the party that's supposed to be learning doesn't always do the learning, and the party that should be teaching is often the one that gets taught. Now, as you know, you once had a six-year,$17 million offer from the Los Angeles Lakers, and you turned it down to stay with the Orlando Magic for what I think was$600 ,000 for one year and not a guarantee.

16:29What did your mentors tell you at the time? That it was stupid and that I should take the money and that Los Angeles is nice to live in and the weather is hot there. But I lived in Orlando, so it was hot there too. Yeah, most of the advice I had was that I should take the money and run. And people should understand, I don't believe in loyalty. So I think it's a ridiculous concept. It feels very quid pro quo to me and I'm not interested in that but I am interested is in principle and to me the doc and the team had made a very strong decision to keep me when they need not keep me it happened that I played very well for them but there was no reason for that and I know that they kept me in part because I was cheaper than the veterans they cut but they made a decision that gave me a chance to do what I'd always said I wanted to do which is to play a key part and play and start in an NBA team.

17:26And at the end of that year, I had an opportunity to be a person of principle and reward those who had rewarded me. And I knew that it would likely lead to my ejection from the team a year later when more sexy players came along. But in terms of Doc, I felt I had a principle to repay with that. looking back do you feel your mentors were correct at the lakers you would have been behind shaquille o 'neal right to be clear true yeah yeah yeah i mean but i also would have had four championships without lifting a finger which would have been great right but i think the reality is that again if it's about principle i had a principled idea in my head that i should stay and i knew that it would not necessarily be reciprocated and nowadays i work with very influential people in business and large organizations, and they often ask me if I can be trusted.

18:29They often ask me how much my word is worth. And there's very few people in this world who can say about$17 million. If you had taken the Lakers offer, how do you think your current views on management, leadership, psychology would be different? Do you have any sense of that? That's an excellent question. You'd have four rings. You would have had to lift some number of fingers, but you would not have been starting no i i think one of the things that doc taught me was that there's a role to play in the locker room and on the practice floor even if it's not manifest on the court and i think that i would have had to take that role incredibly seriously in order to feel a sense of my contribution on a team like that but i'm not sure that it would change me fundamentally because in fairness, it is my studies and my experiences outside of sport that most inform my philosophical and psychological approach.

19:24It's just that sport gives me better stories to tell to illustrate my philosophy, I suppose. Did Jerry West not do a good enough job recruiting you? He did an excellent job recruiting me. I had an excellent dinner at an Italian restaurant with him and Phil Jackson. they laid out the next seven years for me in vivid detail i went to their practice facility and their arena they showed me a house i remember distinctly them showing me a house on the seaside because they knew that i loved the sea and i said to them i can't afford this house and they said you will be able to i remember how intoxicating it felt but i i'm always slightly wary of intoxicants.

20:07So. But if Jerry West and Phil Jackson thought you were so good and they were, as you know, incredible judges of talent, why didn't Orlando want to keep you? I think they had a different plan. And also I didn't, I didn't respond to the anguish of my experience as well as I might. So by the time I, by the time I left Orlando, I wasn't starting and I wasn't playing a huge number of minutes. and I almost had a mental block on some of my skills. I remember it distinctly and painfully. You mean like free throw shooting or? Listen, free throw shooting, shooting jump shots. It was amazing. There were days when I just couldn't hit the side of a barn and that's going from a person who was really efficient in my early year with Orlando.

20:53And again, the team dynamic had shifted and changed too. But yeah, I wasn't a great player at the end of that season. I was a very average, average player at the end of that season. And I'm not surprised that they went with younger, better talent. I don't obviate them of their part in why I felt that anguish. But yeah, I probably would have dropped me too. How do those mental blocks work? I mean, can you get rid of them by sheer acts of will or you need rituals? No. You need a mentor or what happens? You need therapy. You need people to talk to or coaching in a kind of mental performance and mental health sense.

21:33You need somebody you can talk to about the nature of your feelings, the depths of anger. Imagine knowing the exact number that is your annual salary spreading out over seven years and watching it disappear in front of you, despite the fact that you knew it was a principal decision. and that's where I sat with it and I sat very much alone with it. The team did not have therapists and psychologists as they do now and I sat alone with that and it really even as I was by the way I was studying for my doctorate as I played but it didn't make any difference. The stuff I was learning theoretically just didn't seem to help me personally.

22:17So later you're on the Utah Jazz. What is it you learned from Jerry Sloan? that being a dick is is not the synonymous with being a leader and he was one of those and not the other yeah i know that he's beloved right i know that he's beloved in in utah and i am certainly not but that man called me names that would make your toes curl world i i was called uppity on regular occasions i was treated as if my studying for a doctorate was a betrayal of my of basketball this coming from the man who had not touched a basketball till he was 17 and in six years from not touching a basketball was starting in the nba no other player has done that.

23:10I came to America while my mom was dying of cancer in Britain, and then this man is calling me the C-word and questioning my commitment? Woof. About life, not playing basketball, but you feel you learned anything from John Stockton and Karl Malone? Yes, huge amounts, huge amounts especially from Carl he was a surprisingly funny kind driven ambitious athlete I didn't know him off the floor but in the around the game that's that's who he was we were often punished for our performance if it was non-optimal and because John and carl were older in the context of athletes jerry would punish us to run endless sprints and these two guys say you guys just sit out and they would sit out but carl i remember looking up during sprints once and seeing john stockin reading usa today as we were just slug slugging up and down the court and i looked over and carl had demanded that one of the trainers bring him a bike and he wasn't just kind of keeping warm he was leathering it on the sidelines and i just thought how remarkable best player on the team best player perhaps in the history of of utah basketball and and there he is at 30 odd years old which was old for a basketball player at 30 odd years old leathering it on the side while we slog on the court yeah of nba players as a whole, what percentage do you think truly love the game?

24:51It's a hard question to answer because, well, let me give a number first, otherwise it's just frustrating. 40%. And a further 30 % like the game, and 20 % of them are really good at the game, and they have other things they want to do with the opportunities that playing well in the NBA grants them. But make no mistake, even that 30 % that likes the game and the 40 % that love the game, they also know that they like what the game can give them and the opportunities it can grow for them, their families, and generations. They can make a generational change in their family's life and opportunities.

25:38It's not just about love. Love doesn't make you good at something, and this is a mistake that people make all the time. Loving something doesn't make you better. It just makes the hard stuff easier. Are there any of the true greats who did not love playing? Yeah. I mean, so I know all former players are called legends, whether you are crap like me or brilliant like Hakeem Olajuwon, right? And so I'm part of this group of legends and I'm an NBA ambassador as well so i'm i go around all the time with real proper legends and a number of them i know and so i'm not going to throw them under the bus but it's the way we talk candidly in the van going between events it's like yeah this is a job now and it was a job then and it was a job that wrecked our knees destroyed our backs made it so it's hard for us to pick up our children and so it's a it's a job and we were commodities for teams who often at least back in those days treated you like commodities so yeah there's a there's a lot of superstars really really excellent players but that's the problem don't conflate not loving the game and also don't be fooled if you think in britain there's this this this habit of athletes kissing the badge you know that in football they've got the badge on their shirt and they yeah if that fools you into thinking that this person loves the game, if them jumping into the stands and hugging you fools you into thinking that they love the game, more fool you.

27:11Michael Cage, he loved the game, right? Michael Cage, I don't know if he loved the game. I just know he is awesome. Shoulders is awesome. That man, oh my goodness, he was what they used to call a veteran's veteran, right? If you needed sage advice, he had it and not just about sport i remember me and bobby sura were rookies at the same time in cleveland bobby sura was very very good i was not and bobby came in with a new car and then the next day came in with another new car michael cage followed us in i was in a a green jeep grand cherokee laredo that i'd had for years and years and years and they followed us he followed us into the the underground car park this is before practice and he just said is that a new car He said, give me the keys.

27:59That man took Bobby and the car back to the car sales place and made them take it back. I was like, that's what you do as a veteran. I remember him giving me advice about not buying too many clothes, not too many suits, because you have to pay tax and you need to keep hold of some money. He was a good man. He was a good man. What was Vernon Maxwell like, referring to your Houston days? I don't, I didn't play with Vernon. And I knew him then, or I knew of him then. People called him crazy. I'm a psychologist. I'm not much into people calling people crazy. But people called him crazy. And I think sometimes people mistake intensity for crazy.

28:44And he was incredibly intense and not always as self-regulated as I might think is appropriate. But you couldn't fault him as a person who wanted to win. I mean, just must win. Why do you think so few NBA players, and indeed from many other professional sports, but so few, have come out as gay? If you look at the Women's League, a large number will be lesbian or bisexual or other things. It's very common, but not for the men. So the Women's League is not, the W is not a good comparison because I don't believe this myself, but we must be honest and say that many men do not care about women. And I don't mean men don't care about women's sports.

29:30I meant what I said. Many men don't care about women. And so what women do, bisexual, lesbian, whatever else, is immaterial to them. There are men there who couldn't play in a rec league who think they can beat WNBA players. And so they don't care about it. So what they do is inconsequential. What men do is important to other men. And indeed, my understanding of straight men is that most of what straight men do is in order to attract the attention of other straight men. And so when they look at the League, they're really interested in making sure that everybody there is appropriately heterosexual.

30:08It must be confusing for them now because the League is still very heterosexual, but fashion and other things mean that the League slips in its queerness every once in a while. Why are there not more? Because the consequences of being queer in American society are still profound. They're profound in a small town in Texas, and they're profound if you're on national television, and half the sponsors of your team, and certainly the owners, are homophobic. So there's really practical reasons not to be out in America, in a country that seems to want queer people to go the way of the dodo. And how was it for you back then?

30:48Lonely. Lonely. How did the other players treat you overall, without naming names? Really well. There were a number of players who knew because I told them, because they asked. Because for the most part, with one exception, when people asked me, I told them. And so a number of them knew, and it was very much a shrug and not a big deal, and they treated me with kindness. But I also had experiences of people I cared about deeply as colleagues, as teammates, saying offhand comments that I knew they didn't mean because I talked to them in the locker room, but were part of the ritual of masculinity, which is diminishing women, diminishing gay people, making fun of, I don't know, those gay characters often living color and things like that, that were hurtful, even as I knew they weren't aimed at me.