Adaptive Cooperation: the King and the Majesty
I will discuss the distinct cooperation approaches adopted by two of the greatest basketball players of all time: LeBron James and Michael Jordan (who have been given the nicknames of “King James” and “the Majesty”, among others). I’ll try to extract some insight which can be relevant for more common fields of social life in which cooperation is of vital importance.
Those two names will pop up in any list of best players ever made by anyone in their right mind. But however similar they are in some of their characteristics, they are known for remarkably different styles of leadership and cooperation, both on and off the basketball court. Now, both athletes mentioned are/were outliers in a league of outliers (the NBA), but I think ordinary people with outstanding professional capabilities face similar dilemmas (as explained below) — as LeBron and Jordan have done — in various other contexts, such as workplace and academia, and that’s where I will eventually get to.
But first, let’s start with the King’s story, who is currently an active player. He jumped into the NBA straight out of high school, was drafted by a struggling team and instantly became their go-to guy. In his first couple of years, LeBron practically carried the team, putting on a one-man show, impressing the crowds, but didn’t get any (championship) rings to show for it. There wasn’t much of anybody with much to offer if he was to cooperate. He even managed to beat very solid teams thanks to his individual effort, but not the best ones which will bring him a championship. Hence, not satisfied with sole individual success, after a while he wanted to leave his team.
So LeBron moved on to a more promising team, and he still really could do it all. But the bad news was to win a basketball game he had to beat five-player teams. The good news was he also had four new, better players alongside him. Thus the problem for LeBron, as it is for many less famous but highly talented people in other areas, was how to divide his labor between group cooperation and individual benefit.
Let me state the problem more clearly: if you shine individually, you get the pride and fame and fortune and all that to a degree but not as much as you would get if your team succeeded as a whole, which might require you sacrificing some of the credit you’d get if you were individually more prominent. Besides, unlike the NBA, most of the more typical professions doesn’t reward individual success that much in the lack of group success. For instance, it doesn’t matter you have done a wonderful job on your part of group project, if the project itself doesn’t turn out to be successful due to poor performance of your group-mates or some other reason. In contrast, in the case of Jordan and LeBron, it is almost like they could get away with not cooperating well (or at all), for their individual contributions were so great that it was better for the group regardless of their levels of cooperation, even it was not the best. But even then, these players were smart enough to see that what they are getting out of that arrangement was not optimal, so they started adapting to cooperate better. That is probably what distinguishes them from a plethora of other players with similarly exceptional talent. Only after they got better cooperators truly remarkable success for themselves and their teams ensued.
To start with the King, he didn’t just learn to cooperate, he’s become one of the best at cooperation in terms of basketball. He rapidly matured into a player who made everybody on the court better, making use of his immensely versatile skills to operate the team. Sacrificing individual numbers (reducing them from extreme to well-above average), he assumed the role of a floor general, who only goes all in by himself when the situation calls for it.
Jordan on the other hand, arguably the most individually talented player of all time, devised a different method of cooperation. Like LeBron, he dominated individually since his first game in the league, but that alone didn’t bring team success. Jordan needed to begin cooperating more effectively, but, unlike LeBron, he didn’t change his ways much in terms of level of individual contribution, but he became more efficient. I mean, incredibly efficient (e.g. still has the best field goal percentage to this day). What he (and everybody who saw him play) figured out quickly was that when he played at peak performance he was pretty much omnipotent. But he (and possibly no one) could keep up with that performance for a whole game, let alone a whole season to win the championship. So Jordan learned to save his energy; he played in bursts of inhuman effectiveness, then laid back for a while at the offense (while maintaining very decent defense) and let the other team members play and do what they can until he is restored. Besides, he was very smart about when to take the reins; at the last minutes, when critical points were needed, where he excelled at delivering. At those times there was no better option than to simply give the ball to Michael and get out of the way (as put by one of his teammates), to which nobody objected.
Taking LeBron and Jordan as examples, I have described two ways in which extremely talented individuals can adapt to cooperate with their group-members: 1)They assume a central role in maintaining and improving cooperation and rise to the stage alone only when it is really necessary instead of continually providing extreme individual contribution; and 2) they do not very actively collaborate but provide extraordinary benefit to the group capitalizing on their outstanding individual capability in exchange of being idle for certain periods and more liberated overall.
In light of the above discussion, the lesson I intend to highlight is that groups shouldn’t sacrifice the benefit coming from individual talent for the sake of cooperation, at least not how it is traditionally understood (like direct collaboration). Instead, the extremely talented must be allowed and encouraged to cooperate adaptively, leading to individual and group success. That said, groups also should not rely too heavily on extreme individual capability so much so that they miss out on the advantages of properly adapted cooperation. It should be remembered, considering many examples, that either of the mentioned two players could have just become “what could have been” stories instead of the legends they have become, if only they had not got smarter and found ways to cooperate better.
