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Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.

—Jim Rohn

When Gary shared his winning strategy with me, I was thunderstruck—and not just because it was a great strategy. I was astonished by how simple it was. Connection, communication, collaboration. In hindsight, it all just seemed obvious—common sense, even. So why hadn't I done something similar?

It's one thing to understand something conceptually. It's quite another to put it into practice. I thought I'd “got it.” But all I had gotten was the idea of leading. I hadn't followed through with action. I thought leading meant being all sophisticated. These basics? They were beneath me.

Yet, those fundamentals are the foundation for success. No, they don't require a great deal of sophistication. But they do require unusual amounts of focus, effort, and tenacity.

As an example, imagine that you're a star high school basketball player. In fact, you're so good that you're voted an All-American. Division 1 colleges fall all over themselves to give you a scholarship to their school. You could go anywhere you want.

You decide to go to UCLA. UCLA has built an amazing program and has won the last seven men's NCAA championships. No other school has won more than two in a row.

You're excited. It's now the first day of practice. You've come to play for Coach John Wooden, the winningest coach in basketball history. Coach Wooden is known as “The Wizard of Westwood.” What wisdom will he impart on the first day?

Coach Wooden begins the first lesson in the locker-room. He starts by telling you to take everything off of your feet. He then says,

The most important part of your equipment is your shoes and socks. You play on a hard floor. So you must have shoes that fit right. And you must not permit your socks to have wrinkles around the little toe—where you generally get blisters—or around the heels.³

You might think, “Has coach lost his mind? Doesn't he know I'm an All-American athlete? Is he for real?”

Coach Wooden doesn't stop there. He details how to put on your socks and shoes—holding the sock up while you put on the shoe, how to tie it and double-tie it. “I don't want shoes coming untied during practice or during the game,” he argues.⁴

What?!

You came all the way to UCLA to learn how to pull up your socks and tie your shoes!?

Coach Wooden then turns around and closes his practice by saying,

If there are wrinkles in your socks or your shoes aren't tied properly, you will develop blisters. With blisters, you'll miss practice. If you miss practice, you don't play. And if you don't play, we cannot win. If you want to win Championships, you must take care of the smallest of details.⁵

Coach Wooden was a master of the details. In fact, over his career, he developed a philosophy of coaching and leadership that he called the “Pyramid of Success.” Bigger things only came as a result of smaller things, and smaller things were based on fundamentals.

Whether it's basketball or leadership, success is based on fundamentals: learning them, mastering them, applying them, and teaching them to others.

These small details aren't hard to understand. The challenge is to consistently apply the fundamentals on a daily basis. That's what separates the amateurs from the pros and the average from the excellent.

Years ago, I had the opportunity to have dinner with a colleague and her father. Her father had started working more than 30 years before as a salesman for a food processing company, and, in the course of his career, he rose up the ranks and became CEO of what was a multibillion-dollar organization.

I asked him, “At what point in your career did you feel like you arrived? That you could relax and not work so hard to prove yourself? Was it when you became CEO?”

He beamed and broke into a hearty laugh. “Relax? Not prove myself? That's easy. I remember that day vividly. It was the day I retired.”

He continued, “When you lead, you keep coming back to the fundamentals: being a role model, communicating clearly, managing your time, providing vision, making informed decisions. That never ends. The day you stop doing that is the day you get into trouble.”

Connection, communication, and collaboration: you'll spot their fingerprints all over the handiwork of outstanding leaders. By the end of this book, you'll have a thorough understanding of these principles. You'll be armed with dozens of specific tools of how to apply them back at work. You'll be well equipped to make extraordinary leadership an everyday occurrence.

In doing so, you'll separate yourself from the pack. For as simple as the basics seem to be, they're not practiced consistently. These leadership fundamentals are sorely lacking in today's 21st-century organizations.

As we've already seen, most of today's leaders are mired in mediocrity. But it's not for lack of desire or effort. There are a lot of invisible forces working to get you stuck in a rut. The forces at play are much bigger than interactions at a personal level. As the acclaimed management consultant W. Edwards Deming stated, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”⁶

These undercurrents are cultural, institutional, and societal in origin. They've been around for a long time and affect us in ways we don't even realize. It's important to know how these dynamics shape the way you see, think, and act as a leader. Understanding them enables you to step back and look at leadership through a long lens and see the big picture.

When you have this context, the basics will be illuminated with a rationale you wouldn't have otherwise. You'll see how what you do fits into the larger whole. Then, when you apply the basics, you won't be mindlessly following a leadership checklist that someone else wrote out for you. So, before diving deep into these three fundamental principles, let's look at these influences and how we got into this mess in the first place.