Wooden On Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization

In the final section of the book, Wooden includes excerpts of pages from notebooks that he used throughout his career. In the introduction to “Lessons From My Notebook,” Wooden writes that the excerpts include “notes, observations, reminders, suggestions, and lists of relevant goals and how to achieve them” (235). He also explains that he selected material “that has application to leadership beyond just basketball or sports and to suggest how it might apply to your own organization” (235). He begins the section with an approximation of the speech he would deliver to his teams at UCLA at the beginning of each season. According to Wooden, “it’s important that everyone in an organization be on the same page” (238). He also includes a list of rules taken from his notebook and a shorter list of instructions for how his players should take criticism. Concerning these, he argues that “an effective leader achieves positive and productive results with criticism. The leader who is less effective uses criticism in a heavy-handed manner that only compounds the problem. Thus, a leader must both know how to deliver criticism and teach others how to receive criticism” (245-46).

Wooden also includes a list detailing eight steps to good relations, about which he writes that “the relationship between a leader and those in the organization determines in many ways whether

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