Trust The Process
What entrepreneurs can learn from the Philadelphia 76ers and the “Process” era.
The Philadelphia 76ers are a basketball team, not the next big software product, but in the early 2010s they found themselves in a similar position to some startups or mid-sized companies. They were profitable as a business, their product experienced moderate success on the court, but they sat back and watched as other teams experienced the championship-level success that they aspired to experience. Philadelphia is not a market like LA or New York that can attract players based on the strength of its quality of life or history as a team or salary, so in order to become a team with a championship pedigree, they knew they had to approach the problem differently.
What followed was an era which fans embraced as “The Process”. “The Process” is often simplified in its definition by NBA analysts and fans as a ploy to accrue as many high draft picks by losing as often as possible. The worst teams in the NBA, after all, get the top picks in each year’s draft, which gives them the first crack at the top young players entering the league in the given year. This certainly was a facet of the strategy, and an important one that provided the 76ers with many young, potential superstars on manageable “rookie” contracts. But if you were a true “Process” Sixers fan, you know that “The Process” was bigger than draft strategy, it was a mindset, a daily approach constructing a team and a business that informed every decision that every individual within the organization, from ownership down to the players, made during this period.
A lot of the principles adopted by the 76ers during this time owe a lot to the modern business philosophies pioneered in Silicon Valley. This should come as no surprise as the man who orchestrated “The Process”, Sam Hinkie, was a former investment analyst at Bain Capital and a graduate of Stanford’s MBA program. While Sam Hinkie and the 76ers took their inspiration from the bleeding edge of modern business and financial thought, are there insights that business minds can potentially learn from them? As a fan of the 76ers through their “Process” era I have tried to distil some tenants I’ve gleaned from the “Process” mindset for use by entrepreneurs, as unlikely as it may have been to do so, in my personal ode to “The Process”.
The first tenant of the “Process” mindset is that time is an asset meant to be invested where you anticipate the greatest return on that time. Many entrepreneurs and humans for that matter undervalue their own time. In reality, time should be the only resource we value. When you are employed for a salary, especially in knowledge-based work, you are quite literally leasing your time out to an employer for the tasks they expect you to perform. Put aside for a second the compensation you receive for that time, and think solely about your goals and the lifestyle or growth you one day want for yourself or your business. If every minute you spend doing one particular task is one minute better than you were at that task, is what you are leasing the largest amount of your time to do enabling you the greatest chance at success at what you truly want to be uniquely great at as a product, business, or human being?
This is a question posed often to the players on the 76ers, perhaps to no greater success than Robert Covington. Covington joined the 76ers after floundering as an undrafted player in Houston. Perhaps a team with intentions on winning a championship that year would never have signed a player like Covington, but that was not the 76ers’ intention with signings like this. They saw a glimmer of potential in players like Covington, and knew that with a mentality that emphasized investment of time in the development of players and accrual of draft pick assets, they could give Covington the time he needed to develop skills that would eventually become hallmarks of his game, specifically three-point shooting and defense. Covington carved out such a name for himself as a role player with those skills, he was named to the NBA All-Defensive First Team in 2018.
Covington invested the time given to him during games and in practice during the “Process” to build these skills for himself and differentiate himself from the crowded field of NBA role players. As individuals and entrepreneurs, we have to value our time similarly if we want to grow product and value that differentiates ourselves from the pack as well.
The second tenant of the “Process” mindset is to play the long game. Perhaps there is no singular concept that summarizes “The Process” than the “long game”. This concept is one that is fairly common. In short, the long game is the prioritizing long term benefits over short term benefits in your decision-making process. A simple example of this would be choosing to go to the gym rather than watching Netflix, where one chooses to value the long term effects on their body and health over the short term pleasure of a TV show. Robert Covington’s story is also a great example of the long game. But, what set the Sixers apart during this time is a seemingly fanatical devotion to ONLY making decisions that played the long game, choosing to trust the flowers that would one day bloom from playing multiple overlapping long games over artificially planting a player or coach into the organization to earn a short term win.
This led to a historical losing stretch for the franchise spanning three years. The 76ers essentially cleared the house of any player or coach on the team before the beginning of “The Process” and chose to invest only in those who were aligned with the long game strategy. The Sixers explicitly targetted free agents and trades for players like Covington, and others like Dario Saric and TJ McConnell, that, if they bought into the long game, could one day bloom into a more valuable player than the one they found. This required an expectation of day in and day out commitment from coaches, players, and management in persevering until the draft picks they accrued and the skills and team they developed came to fruition.
Entrepreneurs need to adopt a similar commitment to the long game. There will be dips in your market and there will be hard times in your life as you prioritize long game decisions. Taking out a bridge loan may seem easy, hiring a salesperson to get that extra bit of revenue may seem necessary, but if you are forced into positions like that, and those moves do not match your long game, they only stand to take you further back.
The final tenant of the “Process” era and perhaps the most important is creating a culture around shared values. The growth-oriented mindset that valued time and the long game may have made sense to Sam Hinkie philosophically, but for it to work every member of the organization needed to be bought in and rowing the boat in the same direction.
The 76ers targetted players in free agency and the draft with areas to specialize within their game that could easily adapt such a mindset, but what did they do within their four walls to foster culture and trust? The organization, and head coach Brett Brown, had two key standards and practices within the organization that helped foster such a culture. First was on the individual level. Brett Brown had players watch and comment on videos of themselves on the court from as far back as high school and encouraged them to reflect on the way their personal journeys wove together into the current team culture. This gave every player the opportunity to see how their story fit into the larger story and culture of the team. If players and coaches, or any member of a team or organization, can’t see how their personal story and the story of the organization converge, a long term commitment to either story becomes very untenable.
The second practice, and perhaps most famously in NBA circles, was the team’s monthly breakfast meetings in which players deliver a PowerPoint presentation about a subject of intense personal interest. Topics ran the gamut. Star point guard Ben Simmons gave a presentation on his home country of Australia, backup point guard TJ McConnell gave a presentation on coffee, and shooting guard JJ Redick gave a presentation on the theory where we are all living in a simulation. The point of these meetings wasn’t so much to educate the team on a potpourri of topics, but to give the team the sense that the players were real, diverse people, not just co-workers and to make the “Process” strategy that assembled these players feel like a part of the team’s core identity. What does success look like? Kind of like your star player Joel Embiid nicknaming himself “The Process”.
You may have a great product or team building strategy on paper, but without buy-in through storytelling and team-building, the people within that strategy will struggle to bring that strategy to life.
While the 76ers still have not won a championship in the modern era, it is hard to look at the team now and compare them to the middle of the road they started on and make the case that “The Process” did not ultimately benefit the team. Valuing your time and the long game of the payoffs of your bets have the potential to have similar benefits to you in your decision-making process. You can chase the short game opportunities like whack-a-mole and end up profitable, but only the individuals and businesses with a commitment to the long term value of their product and vision experience Championship-caliber growth and scale.
This article was written largely as a thought experiment and an introduction. If you want to dive deeper, there is no better place to start than Sam Hinkie’s Resignation Letter. It may go without saying, but I am down with TTP and beyond psyched to cheer on my Process babies in the playoffs this year. #HereTheyCome
Trust The Process
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