We’re all bilingual. Most people, for example, are called on to use different languages for different audiences. We all have both public and private languages. For example, when you are going to a business meeting, you have to adjust your language to allow your audiences to listen to you more effectively. You need to choose words that are more than

Each day, over many months, he had a required set of tasks to perform. In the beginning, those tasks would have seemed easy to a child—though they were as difficult for Elgin as scaling mountain peaks. He could not speed up the process. He could go to the next stage of his rehabilitation only after he had completed the prior one. There was no skipp

DECISION-MAKING IS centered around gathering information, assessing it, and deciding what is pertinent for your specific situation, and what is the right decision for that moment. It may not work out, but knowing that you made the most informed, thoughtful, and intelligent decision based on the information you could gather at the time is all that y

one night, while I was leading a break up the floor, I noticed Bob Cousy over my shoulder, running behind me. I told myself something was wrong, the picture was out of whack, the signature style was missing. Bob Cousy, to this day, is the best I’ve ever seen in the NBA at running a fast break. What I was inadvertently doing was taking him out of hi

As a player and a coach, I didn’t look at statistics the way sportswriters and fans did. I wasn’t interested in who scored most, got the most rebounds or assists. I was after clues that would let me see patterns, what it was that enabled the Knicks to succeed against us. The stats, this time, revealed something startling about the Knicks’ defense.

I did something else, too. Sitting there on the bus, I’d close my eyes and try to see each move these players made the same way I had “memorized” Michelangelo and Leonardo. As I saw them move in my mind’s eye, I imagined myself as their shadow or mirror image. Every movement, every subtle gesture they made, I made in reverse, till I knew that I cou

Discipline is not really so much about self-abnegation as it is about having control of and a plan for your personal life to the point where you can do whatever you must to follow through. Individuals as much as people in collective settings are faced with this problem.

What is absolutely essential to understand is that integrity involves a willingness to be honest with oneself in any kind of self-assessment. Integrity is always an inner process where outcomes are not preordained. A person who lives by a standard of integrity will encounter setbacks in one way or another and will often have to accept the reality o

RUSSELL RULES Rule One: Successful teams of any kind are dictatorships. This is not a bad thing, but a necessary component of a winning team. Rule Two: Good dictators follow as well as lead. They will encourage, not discourage, the people who work for them. Rule Three: Tenderness is an act of strength and can be a most powerful leadership trait whe