Leadership Is Like Basketball

Converse sneakers, now owned by Nike, have been around since 1908. But Jim Calhoun, 46, only stepped up to head the brand two years ago. It was a kind of homecoming for him. Early in his career he had worked in Nike's basketball division before taking executive jobs at the Walt Disney Walt Disney Company and Levi Strauss Company, where he was in charge of the Dockers brand. On his return to Nike he first headed up skateboarding and surfing clothes brand Hurley. I talked to Calhoun about the leadership lessons he's learned along the way. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Were you a leader when you were a kid?

My dad was a college basketball coach. He worked for 40 plus years at Northeastern in Boston and then at U. Conn. At first I never would have referred to my dad as a leader. I also didn't think I could do what he did. He's 6'5" and my mom is 5'1". I'm 5'10". I knew I couldn't go into the family business but I wanted to go into business. Still, I didn't know exactly what that meant. Though I'm very close to my dad I talk to him twice a day I didn't see that what I was doing was a lot like coaching. Then finally about 15 years ago I had an e Kids Nike Free Run piphany as I was describing my job to somebody and I realized it was a lot like my father's.

How is being a CEO like coaching college basketball?

There's a helplessness to being a coach or a CEO. There's only so much you can do. In coaching it was his job to say, if you can't pass the ball, and you can't score the points, you can't play defense. A coach is forced to rely on the people he's assembled and the guidance he's given them. My role as CEO is very similar. I don't have the time or ability and the expertise to micro manage every aspect of the business.

If you're not managing, what are you doing?

Leadership isn't about doing the work. It's about building a team of talented individuals who can build and mesh together. Then you've got to give them some guidance. In my dad's case he drew up plays. Let's say there are five other defenders who want to stop the play. His team has got to be able to adjust on the fly.

I assemble people. We identify a common goal. We build our fundamentals and then ultimately the game is played. It's never scripted the way you imagine. The team's ability to work through those unexpected issues and come out the other end with a victory that's what I manage.

Tell me about a recent victory.

We're in the process of taking back our international licenses. We've operated a business model where we had third party partners overseas who managed and ran the Converse business. It was passive and arms' length. We've built a playbook to help us understand what we're trying to do and how to do it. But no two markets are the same. and Spain for example. is a much different proposition from finding multiple offices in Spain. There's no such thing as a central office in Spain because retailers are much more provincial there. Also what they're looking for in a career is very different. In England there are a lot of people attracted to the coolness of the brand. In Spain people want to talk about longevity and career development.

When you're dealing with a pop culture brand and you're expanding, you're building the plane as you fly.

What was your first management job?

I worked at Nike in the mid '90s when it was rapidly expanding as an apparel brand. They were growing so quickly they were giving promotions every six to nine months. I was a hands on product guy and suddenly I went from player to coach, somewhat reluctantly. I was 30 and I fought it a little bit. I was humbled to realize that there were plenty of other people who could do what I was doing on the product side better than I could. I quickly learned how important it was to surround myself with talented people rather than classic yes men. I went from managing zero to managing six people. I didn't have time in the day to tell everybody how to do their jobs.

Since Forbes hired me in 1995 to write a legal column, I've taken advantage of the great freedom the magazine grants its staff, to pursue stories about everything from books to billionaires. I've chased South Africa's first black billionaire through a Cape T nike own shopping mall while admirers flocked around him, climbed inside the hidden chamber in the home of an antiquarian arms and armor dealer atop San Francisco's Telegraph Hill, and sipped Chateau Latour with one of Picasso's grandsons in the Venice art museum of French tycoon Franois Pinault. I've edited the magazine's Lifestyle section and opinion pieces by the likes of John Bogle and Gordon Bethune. As deputy leadership editor, these days I mostly write about careers and corporate social responsibility. I got my job at Forbes through a brilliant libertarian economist, Susan Lee, whom I used to put on television at MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Before that I covered law and lawyers for journalistic stickler, harsh taskmaster and the best teacher a young reporter could have had, Steven Brill.

Posted by: runningasd1 at 02:18 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 933 words, total size 6 kb.