Help the Helper

September 3, 2012
Pritchard, a former NBA player and former general manager for the Portland Trail Blazers (and current director of personnel for the Indiana Pacers), and Eliot, cofounder of a Stanford University leadership initiative and former performance consultant for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, show how outstanding teams build a culture that recognizes and rewards those who help the helper. “Helping the helper,” a term coined by basketball coach Dean Smith, is what Pritchard and Eliot term “a willingness to do whatever it takes to help others succeed”—the pinnacle of teamwork. Their unique perspective and insight into the turnaround of once ailing basketball teams offer a fresh set of sports examples that business leaders will find relevant. Throughout, the authors showcase the types of behavior great teams demonstrate, from possessing a desire to be part of something bigger than oneself to boasting about others rather than themselves and valuing the identity of the organization over their own. Pritchard and Eliot show how to identify and turn around those who aren’t on board and explain why assessing a “good fit” is pointless when making new hires. Readers looking for new approaches to effective leadership will be able to use the book’s valuable lessons. Agent: James A. Levine, Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.

August 15, 2012
Business-advice book emphasizing the importance of selfless teamwork. Indiana Pacers general manager Pritchard and leadership professor Eliot (Overachievement: The New Model for Exceptional Performance, 2004) approach their "help the helper" theme from a wide variety of angles, some of them barely distinguishable from the others. Though the near-repetition gives the book a tired feeling at points, the authors offer interesting, instructive anecdotes. Sports fans--especially basketball, baseball and football--will quite likely relate to the dozens of illustrative examples from the realm of athletics, especially when the authors recount their firsthand experiences. Readers unfamiliar with the players or coaches may become bored or confused or both. Those readers, however, should be able to relate to the examples drawn from various business sectors, such as restaurants. Pritchard and Eliot explain that a restaurant adopting the most effective teamwork approach would hire servers and managers who place customers above all else. If a customer sitting at a table in the sector of server A asks for a clean fork from server B, server B will bring the fork immediately--although server A might benefit from a slightly larger tip later in the evening. In addition to pithy lessons about leadership, the book is salted with brief quotations from significant leaders, including Gandhi: "Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow men." A welcome relief from business books filled with dog-eat-dog advice.

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