John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports
Organisational psychologist and former NBA centre John Amaechi talks with Tyler Cowen about why culture is set by the worst behaviour a group tolerates, the myth of the brilliant-asshole leader, turning down $17 million on principle, what he learned from Doc Rivers and Jerry Sloan, being gay in professional basketball, the delusion of nostalgia, and why leadership is an ordinary earned skill rather than an innate gift.
Key ideas
- Culture is defined by the worst behaviour tolerated. Whatever poor conduct goes unchallenged sets the real norms — down to a whole firm banging fists on tables because one senior leader once did. The dysfunctional-but-successful exception (Jordan’s Bulls, Jobs, the Beatles) is a bad model precisely because it is rare: most organisations run on average people and cannot buy exemption from the ordinary rules.
- A superpower fused to cruelty misunderstands the human condition. No one performs at their best while frightened, so the visionary-tyrant model of leadership is self-defeating; the leader’s job includes rituals that show they are human, not a ‘frightening monster’.
- Principle, not loyalty. Amaechi turned down a six-year $17 million Lakers offer to stay with Orlando for roughly $600,000 and no guarantee, repaying a team that had chosen to keep him — knowing it would likely cost him his place. It is now his credential with clients who ask how much his word is worth.
- Being out is not a binary. Being gay can be openly known to teammates, family, and a partner without a public announcement; not-knowing on some observers’ part does not put a person back in the closet. Few men come out because the consequences remain profound, and the men’s league polices its own presumed heterosexuality.
- Leadership is earned, not innate or bestowed. It is a set of ordinary behaviours around presence and eloquence that anyone can choose to develop — energy-expensive but not complex, and free of gatekeeping by school, accent, or personality type.
Content
What defines a culture
Amaechi opens on his own maxim — ‘culture is defined by the worst behaviour tolerated’ — and glosses it plainly: whatever poor conduct a group observes and never challenges is the thing actually setting its norms, including small strange habits. His example is a firm where a senior leader’s decade-old tic of banging the table to emphasise a point had propagated until every meeting was ‘punctuated by fists thudding on desks’. When Cowen presses the counter-case — Michael Jordan’s Bulls were toxic in parts yet cooperated and won — Amaechi’s answer is about representativeness, not denial: listeners will never pay a player anywhere near Jordan’s calibre, so building a leadership model on so rare a case is useless. Most organisations contain ‘extraordinarily average people’ and do not get to play by superstar rules. Offered Steve Jobs and the Beatles as world-shaping exceptions, he concedes they exist but draws the line hard: anyone whose supposed superpower is fused to being an asshole has misunderstood the human condition, ‘because nobody performs at their best when they’re frightened’. The rituals leadership actually needs, he says, are connective (showing people they are not a mere transaction), directional (orientation in times of trouble), and humanising — his own is ‘Yorkshire Golden Hour’, a standing meeting for his mostly-virtual team where work is explicitly banned.
Leadership across a life — college sport, Jesuits, consultants, and Doc Rivers
Cowen walks Amaechi through leadership he observed off the court. In US college sport he saw an ‘obvious abdication of leadership’: players protected from class and graduation so long as they performed, no responsibility taken for them as people. His Jesuit high school in Toledo preached ‘being a man for others’, a selflessness he thinks genuinely matters for sustainable high performance even if he never adopted the phrase. On the stereotype that consultants lead poorly, he offers a mechanism: bureaucracy is a convenient hiding place for anyone uninterested in the craft, and the consultants he has seen lead well tended to have another vocation first — a former doctor, a former physics teacher. Asked whose leadership impresses him, he names a couple of FTSE chairs ‘remarkably interested in learning leadership’ and, in sport, Doc Rivers, whose midnight season-opening practice — a sprint every player had to make before the season could start — set the tone that the team would arrive already in shape. On the non-star-players-make-better-coaches theory, the scientist in him refuses the bait: a thousand confounding factors, chief among them that a true superstar has a thousand other things he could do with his pile of gold.
Science fiction and the shape of self-image
The most personal stretch begins with Victor Hugo. A childhood reading of the Hunchback of Notre Dame — a figure taken for stupid, dangerous, and emotionally illiterate — read to Amaechi as a description of himself: a 6’9”, 150kg Black man met first, everywhere, with fear, ‘our society’s version of a super predator’. He retreated into science fiction, hiding in worlds distant in time and space. Now he inverts the response, deliberately ‘contriving his surroundings’ to help others feel safe, accepting that most people will not first see a professor of leadership. His favourite device from the genre, ‘future history’ — describing a future so vividly the audience believes the writer has visited it — is a live tool in his persuasion work; he reads Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ as a future history rather than a list of grievances. On Star Wars (a lightsaber sits on his desk) he is affectionate but unsparing: the Jedi made ‘so many mistakes’, becoming the galaxy’s monastic police, and mentorship in the stories, as in organisations, often helps the mentor more than the mentee.
Turning down $17 million
The episode’s ethical centre is Amaechi’s decision to reject a six-year, $17 million Lakers offer and stay with the Orlando Magic for roughly $600,000 and no guarantee. Every mentor told him to take the money. He explains it not as loyalty — a ‘ridiculous’, quid-pro-quo concept he rejects — but as principle: Orlando had chosen to keep him (partly because he was cheaper than the veterans they cut) and given him the starting role he had always wanted, and he meant to reward those who had rewarded him even though it would likely lead to his ejection a year later. Jerry West and Phil Jackson had recruited him well, over an Italian dinner and a seaside house he could not yet afford; he found the offer ‘intoxicating’ and is ‘always slightly wary of intoxicants’. The decision now functions as a credential: business clients ask how much his word is worth, and ‘there’s very few people in this world who can say about $17 million’. Losing that salary also produced painful mental blocks — he could suddenly not hit routine shots — and the cure he names is not willpower but therapy and someone to talk to, which the team of that era did not provide; studying for his doctorate did nothing to help him personally.
Jerry Sloan, and who actually loves the game
From Utah’s Jerry Sloan, Amaechi says he learned ‘that being a dick is not synonymous with being a leader’. Beloved in Utah, Sloan called him ‘uppity’ and worse, treated his doctoral study as a betrayal of basketball, and questioned his commitment while Amaechi’s mother was dying of cancer in Britain. By contrast Karl Malone and John Stockton he remembers fondly and shrewdly — veterans who had earned the right to sit out punitive sprints, Stockton reading USA Today while rookies ran, Malone ‘leathering it’ on an exercise bike on the sidelines. Pressed for a number on how many NBA players truly love the game, he estimates 40% love it, 30% like it, and 20% are very good while wanting the opportunities it brings; loving something, he insists, ‘doesn’t make you better, it just makes the hard stuff easier’. Players were commodities to teams, and badge-kissing or crowd-hugging should never be read as proof of love. The veteran’s veteran of his memory is Michael Cage, who once physically made a rookie return an impulsively bought second car and counselled against overspending on suits before tax.
Being gay in professional sports
Amaechi — the first former NBA player to come out — treats the question with characteristic precision. The women’s league is a poor comparison, he says bluntly, because many men simply do not care what women do, so a player’s sexuality there is immaterial to them; what men do, by contrast, matters intensely to other men, and the men’s league polices its own presumed heterosexuality. Few come out because the consequences of being queer in American society remain profound — in a small Texas town and on national television with homophobic sponsors and owners alike. His own experience he sums in one word: ‘lonely’. Yet teammates who knew, because he told them when asked, largely shrugged and were kind; the hurtful comments were rituals of masculinity not aimed at him. He resists the in/out binary of the closet: openness to teammates, family, and a partner is being out, even without an announcement ‘on the Jumbotron’. And he corrects two cultural stories with data — the predictor of homophobia is religiosity, not ethnicity, and much Black Caribbean and African homophobia traces to rules Britain imposed under colonialism and now criticises those places for keeping.
London, nostalgia, and what makes his psychology different
Closing wide, Amaechi turns on the politics of decline. Nostalgia is ‘a fundamental delusion of our time’: every generation believes in a past moral golden age, and research never bears it out — the past was better only for the aristocracy, and everyone else, a couple of generations back, was working in ‘the most abhorrent conditions imaginable’. Britain’s sense that things are ‘going to hell’ is manufactured, he argues, by ‘grifter’ politicians who tell people their pain is someone else’s fault and by selectively edited video, even as London crime has fallen for a decade. He left Arizona and the United States over SB 1070, unable to stay where ‘the people who do everything for us’ could be stopped for looking brown. On his own field he is combative: the overrated idea in current psychology is personality testing, the Five-Factor Model included — personality is mutable, not a fixed ‘primary colour’, and such instruments mostly gatekeep. What distinguishes his own psychology is that a rigorous evidence-based scientist writes deliberately to make knowledge ordinary and usable, against academics who write to seem clever. That is the thesis of It’s Not Magic: leadership is neither innate nor bestowed but earned — a set of behaviours anyone can choose to develop, energy-expensive but not complex, and free of gatekeeping by school, accent, or type. His stated ambition is to become a household name for his psychology and reach more people.
See also
- John Amaechi — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Leadership Equation — related model of how leaders are actually developed
- Seven Rules of Power — related concept on power and its use