Page 22 - How to Create a Winning Organization

Wooden on Leadership
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just before graduation from Purdue, I was offered a fellowship with
an eye toward my becoming an English professor and joining its
faculty in West Lafayette, Indiana.
I would have accepted the offer except for one thing: Nellie and
I were eager to get married and start a family, and the Purdue fel-
lowship wouldn’t pay enough for us to live on. Had I intended to
stay single, however, I might have taken the offer, become a pro-
fessor of English, and perhaps never become a full-time coach.
So when Dayton High School came calling with a pretty good
sum of money for those days—$1,500 annually—we saw the
preacher and headed off to my new job. What Dayton got for its
money was a pretty fair English teacher and a pretty bad coach.
However, on that first Monday afternoon in September, when I
confidently blew my whistle to signal the start of practice, I
thought I knew what I was doing.
Two weeks later, I quit coaching football.

REMEMBER YOUR ROOTS
I am a competitive man. As far back as I remember there’s been a
fierce determination in me to win—whether as a young basketball
player in Indiana or later as a coach leading teams into competi-
tion for national championships.
While I was blessed at birth with some athletic ability, my coach-
ing skills were acquired later. In fact, I was so bashful as a young
man that you would never have picked me as a future coach, a
leader, who could stand in front of strong-willed, independent-
minded individuals and tell them what to do—and how to do it.
Overcoming shyness was something I had to learn.
I believe leadership itself is largely learned. Certainly not every-
one can lead nor is every leader destined for glory, but most of us
have a potential far beyond what we think possible.