{"id":9251,"date":"2015-04-07T00:40:23","date_gmt":"2015-04-07T05:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/strategicsearch.com\/technical-recruiting-blog\/?p=1539"},"modified":"2015-04-07T00:40:23","modified_gmt":"2015-04-07T05:40:23","slug":"duke-greatness-required-patience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/strategicsearch.com\/beta\/duke-greatness-required-patience\/","title":{"rendered":"Duke Greatness Required Patience!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Duke<\/a>Last night, with Duke\u2019s<\/a> 68-63 win over Wisconsin<\/a> for the men\u2019s NCAA basketball championship<\/a>, many applauded Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski<\/a>\u2019s accomplishments, including: a) reaching the Final Four for the 12th time (tying the all-time record of UCLA<\/a> coach John Wooden<\/a><\/em>) b) reaching the NCAA finals for the 9th time and c) winning his 5th NCAA men\u2019s basketball national championship (2nd all-time only to John Wooden\u2019s 10 championships<\/em>). However, during this praise few were aware that coach Krzyzewski was almost fired early on in his Duke career!<\/p>\n

I joined Duke\u2019s MBA program<\/a> in 1980 at the same time that coach Mike Krzyzewski was hired as Duke\u2019s men\u2019s basketball coach. He was hired after coach Bill Foster<\/a> had left to become coach of South Carolina<\/a>. Coach Foster had a very successful career at Duke, including: a) guiding them the previous year to a 24-9 record, an ACC championship and NCAA regional final and b) taking them to the national championship game, before loosing to Kentucky<\/a> 94-88, two years earlier. As a result, many questioned coach K\u2019s hiring from the start. As proof of this, I was one of only a handful of people that attended one of his early lectures. This afforded me the opportunity to personally share with the coach my knowledge of one of his former players at Army, Gary Winton<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, this doubt grew into a major outcry for his firing as coach K\u2019s first three teams only went 17-13, 10-17 and 11-17. However, the man who hired him, athletic director Tom Butters<\/a> was steadfast. He did his homework to uncover and hire a disciple of Bobby Knight<\/a>. Then he was patient with him during the tough times. That homework and patience has paid off big time for Duke\u2019s basketball program, including being valued as the 9th most valuable men\u2019s basketball program at $181,700,000 by a recent formula listed in the Wall Street Journal<\/a><\/strong>!<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, most organizations in general and R&D, scientific, engineering, technical, IT and manufacturing companies, that we work with as an executive recruiter, in specific are not as patient as Tom Butters was with coach Mike Krzyzewski. For example, as I wrote in a previous article https:\/\/strategicsearch.com\/technical-recruiting-blog\/rd-yields-many-ancillary-societal-benefits\/<\/a><\/strong> R&D is the lifeblood of revenues and jobs creation for most companies. Unfortunately, few exhibit the patience of Tom Butters with those technical projects. For example, at the first sign of a hiccup, the executive recruitment team of a company usually retains a technical recruiter to replace the head of a faltering R&D project. This is done instead of (as Tom Butters would have done<\/em>) been patient. As a result, few are allowed to flourish under many company\u2019s short-sided quarterly results constraints. Instead, more need to adopt Tom Butter\u2019s patience to achieve Duke-like greatness!<\/p>\n

What are your thoughts?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night, with Duke\u2019s 68-63 win over Wisconsin for the men\u2019s NCAA basketball championship, many applauded Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski\u2019s accomplishments, including: a) reaching the Final Four for the 12th time (tying the all-time record of UCLA coach John Wooden) b) reaching the NCAA finals for the 9th time and c) winning his 5th NCAA […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[115,117,55],"tags":[148,47],"class_list":["post-9251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-executive-recruiter","category-executive-recruitment","category-technical-recruiter","tag-rd","tag-research-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/strategicsearch.com\/beta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/strategicsearch.com\/beta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/strategicsearch.com\/beta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strategicsearch.com\/beta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strategicsearch.com\/beta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/strategicsearch.com\/beta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9251\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/strategicsearch.com\/beta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strategicsearch.com\/beta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strategicsearch.com\/beta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}