Foundational Fridays -- What Wins?

This post is not meant to drive the NBA "GOAT" (Greatest of All Time) debate. I came of age in the Michael Jordan era, so I am biased in this discussion.

Rather, this quote is about understanding that no one really wins alone. Even in sports like golf or tennis, where an individual is competing, those athletes have strength coaches, swing/form coaches, coaches who break the game down to improve performance, and on. In this way, they are still part of a team that contributes to successful outcomes.

Reflecting recently about the teams I'm on, and how terrifically talented every person is on those teams, we win together. We collectively deliver much more than the simple sum of our parts.

This energizes and engages me to contribute at as a high a level as my education, experience, and expertise might provide or portend. I still contribute what I have knowing full well all of my teammates are far and away better at some (or many!) things than I am.

Jordan highlights intelligence in his quote. In a number of contexts, intelligence essentially refers to the gathering and grouping of applicable insights and information to be applied to actions and activities.

I think of the collective intelligence of my teammates in a whole host of areas such as (in no particular order):

Industry and sector

Scholastic knowledge (book knowledge and applied area expertise)

Organizational effectiveness

Culture and climate

Developing and delivering leader and manager capabilities and capacities

Experts at curating collaboration, cohesion, and connection across the team or organization

Highly skilled communicators

Overcoming operational obstacles

Analyzing and visualizing objective and subjective data to support decision-making

Demonstrating and displaying abilities to operate well in volatile, uncertain, complex and or ambiguous conditions or environments

Failing fast, learning, and moving forward

Staying hungry and humble

High-performance ethics

Intellectual curiosity (growth minded)

Strategic mindedness

Engaging and encouraging

Openly sharing of time, talent, and created content

And many, many more examples!

Simply saying and sharing openly and out loud that I see all the things annotated above in my Gartner and Victory Strategies teammates.

Thank you for being great teammates who evoke and encourage my desire to channel whatever "intelligence" I have to contribute to our many collective team successes (championships!).