March Madness and Screen Printing: Defining yourself for success: Lessons from #1 Basketball Team Gonzaga University

There’s a great article in The New York Times about the Gonzaga basketball program’s ascent from perennial scrappy overachievers to national champion contenders. The lessons about clear visioning, hard work, and defying expectations can be applied to a basketball program, a screen printing business, or any other type of organization.

It’s clear that the success that’s come to Gonzaga is a result of their program’s day-to-day actions and long-term plan. But to many people it seems like a random lucky success story. There’s one section that talks about how surprised people ask why it happened at Gonzaga, as opposed to other basketball programs. Coach Mark Few responds “I would argue it probably happened at some point at Notre Dame with football. It probably happened at some time with Alabama at football.” We often forget that nearly every successful organization started out as something much smaller. Apple famously started in a Los Altos, California garage. The New England Patriots had been perennial losers until Bob Kraft, Tom Brady, and Bill Belichick (among others) came together to win three super bowls in four years. America, even, was just one of many English territories before citizens decided to make a new country based on the foundation of democracy.

It’s natural to assume that successful organizations are different than others. But they aren’t inherently different and there’s no reason you can’t get to that level in whatever pursuit you’re interested in. Coach Few continues, “they evolved into where they are now, where people don’t look at them the same way, where people don’t look at us the way they used to.” Great to hear from the inside about any organization that decided they could achieve a higher level of success and went out and did it.