His passion is what's best for the team NOT what's best for Tim Duncan.
Sabermetrics (made more famous in the recent movie Moneyball) analyzes metrics that have been historically overlooked in sports. One such metric in basketball is the “plus/minus” that analyzes how much better or worse a team does when that individual is on the floor. Tim Duncan ranks in the top 5 of all the NBA. He is that rare player that is both an individual superstar AND one that makes the rest of his team better.
I give tremendous credit to Gregg Popovich and the Spurs organization for creating a culture where a sense of “Team” can thrive in an industry that seems to rise and fall on individual stardom. What about your culture? Do you have a culture that maximizes the contributions of individuals? Do you have a culture that says, "All of us are smarter than any one of us," or are you "married" to the ebbs and flows of a single superstar?
I am a big believer in hiring the best and the brightest. I like working with superstars. However, I have learned that there's no amount of individual contribution that can make up for an erosion in team collaboration. That's because a true sense of team will ALWAYS generate greater results in the long run (and usually in the short run, too). There is a synergy (i.e. greater than the sum of the parts) that comes from maximizing the contributions of a team, especially if your time horizon is beyond "this season."
Peter Drucker said it this way:
“No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and unreliable. It is the test of an organization to make ordinary human beings perform better than what they seem capable of, to bring out whatever strength there is in its members, and to use each man’s strength to help all the others perform. The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.”
Tim Duncan has been my favorite NBA player for some time now. It's not that I'm a huge basketball fan - I simply love how he approaches the game.
