The Beautiful Game

Inspiration comes from many places. For me, it often comes from Youtube. There’s a Mount Rushmore of videos that I come back to again and again, that inspire me as much on the 100th viewing as the first.

One of these videos is a tribute to the San Antonio Spurs professional basketball team, specifically their “golden era” of the 2000s/2010s. Here’s the video, entitled “The Beautiful Game”:

I’ve been a basketball fan as long as I can remember. I played when I was a kid, followed my college team’s crushing lows and massive highs (UVA fans know what I’m talking about), and still keep tabs on whatever’s happening at the professional and college level in the US, even after moving abroad. While the Spurs weren’t my hometown team, I was always impressed with their approach.

But what brings me back to the Spurs again and again transcends basketball, and represents where my life and work has taken me since I was a kid, dreaming of being a professional player myself.

In a sport that was increasingly dominated by singular star players, the Spurs embraced a “team-first”, selfless style of play that regularly beat star-studded teams. What really sticks out in this compilation is their passing - the Spurs moved the ball effortlessly, creating results no single player could, no matter their skill.

Those of you who’ve read many of my posts will notice that I often write about process and organizational behavior - since giving up my basketball dreams, I’m now pursuing a different “beautiful game” - the well-run company.

No company is perfect, and building software (the primary activity of most teams I work with) is an inherently messy process. But the pursuit of smooth process, low ambiguity, and a team-oriented approach - the corporate version of the Spurs - is a goal worth striving for. Aspects of a culture that works this way are likely similar to what you’d have observed on the Spurs - low ego, high intellectual safety, and a team-first attitude, even for incredibly talented individual contributors.

Helping companies in the pursuit of this ideal drives me to do the work I do. When an organization can play “the beautiful game”, they’ll more often than not produce fantastic results, just like the Spurs.