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”:
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.