Today’s discussion of Scottie Pippen brought to mind another character in the NBA who is extremely polarizing with regard to his style of leadership and collaboration: Kobe Bryant. A whole back, Bill Simmons wrote a great article comparing his leadership and accomplishments with Bill Russell:

The Kobe Question

My computer’s being repaired so I’m typing this on a mobile device so I’ll just leave you with some choice quotes below. The whole article might be hard to understand completely if you don’t really follow the NBA so I included some of the juicier and relevant parts. It is interesting to see how Kobe’s ruthless form of leadership has brought him much success and yet seems to be hurting his team in recent years. He’s definitely not very strong in the “unite” aspect of collaboration.

“we were discussing leadership and Russell revealed that he never criticized a teammate publicly or privately. Not once. Not during his entire 13-year career. What was the point? Everyone already knew Russell was their best player — why undermine their confidence by making them doubt themselves, or even worse, making them wonder if he believed in them? How was that productive? Russell believed, and still believes, that a basketball team only achieves its potential if everyone embraces their roles — you figure out what you have, split the responsibilities and you’re off.
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so how do you challenge your teammates without undermining them?
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So Russell kept cajoling Siegfried, never threatening him, just appealing to him as a friend. Russell wore him down. Siegfried relented. After a few weeks, Siegfred decided that he didn’t want to play point anymore. They did the same dance again. And Russell wore him down again, this time by making it clear this was Siegfried’s best chance to play. He didn’t threaten him or anything, just laid out the landscape. We have me, Havlicek, Sam and Bailey (Howell). All four of us need to play. This is your best way to get minutes, Larry. He kept appealing to him as a friend more than anything. You can guess what happened next. And yes, the Celtics won their last two titles of the Russell era with a shooting guard bringing up the ball. So much for Boston being dead.”

“If ever an NBA player could play for a quarter of a century, and thrive for at least two solid decades, it’s Kobe Bean Bryant. He’s a basketball machine.

And that’s what makes “the other stuff” so frustrating. Nothing that happened this season has been surprising because it’s happened, in various forms, during so many other Laker seasons. Once upon a time, he called out Shaq — now he calls out Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard. He still says things like “If it doesn’t get better, I’m going to kick everyone’s asses,” and you still can’t even tell if he’s half-kidding or not.
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At this point, it’s easier to remember Kobe’s unhappy Lakers teams (by my count, nine) than the happy ones. His best teammate (Shaq) left Los Angeles on such hostile terms that they didn’t talk for years. His second-best teammate (Gasol) looks totally broken, just a head case, a totally different player from the one who single-handedly almost vanquished our Olympic team five months ago. His third-best teammate (Andrew Bynum) got shipped to Philly and traded shots with Kobe on his way out. His only great coach (Phil Jackson) quit the Lakers and wrote a 2005 book that fearlessly tore Kobe to shreds with astonishing candor.

It’s just a different way to lead a basketball team: through fear, through conflict, through bullying, through the media. He leads by example, and if you don’t like that example, he reminds you how many rings he has (with the implication being, “Shut up”). When Jackson and Derek Fisher were around, Kobe’s leadership was actually effective — something of a good cop/bad cop dynamic developed, with Kobe pushing the team competitively and the other two guys handling everything else. Now it’s just him.

Sometimes, you wonder if Kobe can see the forest through the trees. He might be turning on Dwight Howard already — you can see it — a crucial development since Dwight could simply flee to Dallas, Houston or Atlanta next summer. Howard’s missed free throws are driving Kobe batty; he can barely hide his disdain on the court anymore. Same for Howard’s trying-too-hard-to-be-jovial routine and a general impression that Howard doesn’t live and die with the result of every basketball game. From what I heard, Kobe already played the “You don’t know anything about winning championships!” card with Howard — during a scrimmage last week, when the second team beat the first team partly because Howard checked out (he wasn’t getting the ball enough), followed by Kobe blistering him. That same week, Kobe needled Gasol publicly for not sucking it up with knee tendinitis, saying he needed to “put your big boy pants.”