Page 36 - How to Create a Winning Organization

Wooden on Leadership
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Each rung represented some important tip he wanted members
of the Martinsville High School basketball team, the Artesians, to
keep in mind—footwork, for example, or hustle. At the top of his
ladder, of course, was success as he and most others saw it, namely,
beating another team.
Well, the ladder idea got me to thinking. It was a good start, but
I wanted something more comprehensive and illustrative. And, of
course, my definition of success differed greatly from Coach Curtis’s.
I remembered reading about the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt
while I was a student at Purdue. It was the last of the Seven Won-
ders of the Ancient World. Built with blocks of red granite and
pure limestone, some weighing up to 60 tons, the Great Pyramid
was constructed on a massive foundation whose huge cornerstones
were the biggest and most important of the whole structure.
Additional blocks, each carved with a specific purpose and po-
sition in mind, were then painstakingly ramped and hoisted into
place, creating successive tiers—each one supported by what had
come before.
There was a center, or heart, to the Great Pyramid, which then
rose to an apex that towered 481 feet over the sands of the desert.
For 4,300 years it remained the tallest structure on Earth. And de-
spite its size, the Great Pyramid was built with such precision that,
when it was completed after decades of labor, you couldn’t slide a
single playing card between its huge blocks of granite and lime-
stone. Even in the twenty-first century it is considered one of the
sturdiest and best-planned structures ever built. And I am not alone
in this thinking. The great management writer and analyst Peter
Drucker, when asked who were the greatest managers of all time,
answered, “The builders of the great Pyramids.”
An Egyptian proverb says, “Man fears time, but time fears the
Pyramids.” The Great Pyramid of Giza was built to last—and it
did. The symbolism of all this effort seemed very practical to me.