The Coach and the Geek : Building a Kick-Butt Culture

THE COACH AND THE GEEK is a fictional story written for business leaders. This story follows the challenges of a college basketball coach who is about to lose his job. The team has talent, but the culture is trapped within a history of failure, negativity, and blame. Through fate, he meets a senior software manager (aka Coach Geek) who just got fired. Together, they develop an unlikely partnership and new approach that changes their team, their season, and their lives.

Learn how to coach, connect with, gain buy-in, and build accountability in your team. Throughout the book, the authors share many actionable lessons from their lives as coaches and leaders.

Over more than thirty years, my professional journey has taken me from battlefield to boardroom and from cockpit to corporate. Throughout I have served as a serial CEO in the public, private and private equity sectors. In each subsequent engagement, I have rigorously sought to recreate the culture of commitment I enjoyed earlier in my career as a commissioned officer and AH-64 Apache helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army.

As part of my very personal journey of continuous improvement, I’ve remained a lifelong learner and student practitioner of principle-centered leadership. Principle-centered leadership provides the foundation upon which execution excellence is built. In building a culture committed to continuous improvement, one destined for excellence, those at the helm of the organization must consider self-mastery—the ability to lead oneself—as vital to leading others competently.

I’ve heard it said, “Humans can live three weeks without food, three days without water and three minutes without air, but not one second longer without hope.” In THE COACH AND THE GEEK, Building a Kick-Butt Culture, Adams and Van Fleet offer a hope-filled tutorial on principle-centered leadership through an entertaining, inspiring and always fun to read sports novelette. These entrepreneurs and seasoned business leaders codify practical, everyday principles of self-mastery that help the protagonist overcome the despair of personal struggles, professional failures and a life devoid of hope. In their work, they capture time tested methods to bounce back from seemingly insurmountable odds with discipline and delight.

Each chapter introduces self-mastery principles for leaders in all stages of development. Whether currently a CEO, a department head, a company founder or a budding entrepreneur, this work is intended as an aid for aspiring leaders at every level of development aiming to produce daily their career best effort.

Like me, I suspect you will find hope within its pages.

Mark A. Parrish,
Managing Partner of Parrish Partners, President & CEO (former) of Igloo Products Corp, President & CEO (former) of Stuart Dean Company, Inc., Graduate of the United States Military Academy, West Point and former US Army Captain