June 17, 2015
By Eddie Pipkin
On April 6th, Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke Blue Devil’s won the 2015 NCAA basketball championship, the culmination of March Madness. Coach K, as he is known by all, is the winningest coach in college basketball history. In the course of his 40 year coaching career, he has won a total of 1,018 games, and led the Blue Devils to five NCAA championships, 12 Final Four appearances, and 12 regular season ACC conference titles. Oh, he also has two gold medals from coaching the U.S. men’s basketball Olympic teams. He is a proven leader.
It’s always good to learn from the wisdom of other leaders (whatever their field) and Coach K is no exception. He has written leadership books and given countless speeches.
He’s famous for saying things like, “Wake up every day happy that you’re a coach . . . and don’t forget that during a bad practice.” Not bad advice for those in ministry leadership. Wake up and get to work every day thankful that we have the opportunity to do Kingdom work with eternal consequences. It’s always interesting work—frequently inspiring—oftentimes life-changing in big and small ways for those involved, and it’s important to not let a “bad practice” discourage us. Because even a championship team has an occasional out-of-sync practice or bad game. That’s just natural. Move on.
During a leadership panel discussion at the Miliken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, Coach K gave some insights into how he builds winning teams:
- Leadership Isn’t Singular: