“If you want an exceptional outcome, you must be willing to be the exception.” wrote Sam Presti, the General Manager of the Oklahoma City Thunder. It was the summer of 2019 in an article penned to fans after trading away franchise cornerstones Russell Westbrook and Paul George. Everybody knew the team was going from a perennial contender to the bottom of the standings. These words have stuck with me beyond basketball, especially since they weren’t written in a moment of triumph, but during a significant pivot and rebuild. Since 2019, the Thunder have steadily climbed back into contention, ending last year as the number one seed in the Western conference. His words offer profound insights, not just into basketball, but into the role of analytics and leadership in shaping the future of any organization.

Beyond the world of basketball, Presti’s manifesto can help anyone seeking to understand the power of long-term planning, patience and the calculated risks that come with trying to build something extraordinary. While I would encourage you to read it in its entirety, here are several points Sam Presti has taught me about leadership.

Long-Term Method, Not Just Vision

At the start of the article, Sam Presti sets forth a vision of excellence: long term success over years, not just a singular great season. “Our ultimate goal is to build a team that will inspire the same kind of joy, success and togetherness that we have all experienced over our first 11 years. This will take time and involve hard choices.”

Of course, most teams might nod their heads in agreement at this point. A lofty vision isn’t hard to create. However, Presti is clear that this vision can only become a reality from hard choices: “To build true excellence in any industry, and then sustain it, requires trading on time and playing the empirical odds. This will require strategic discipline and thoughtful patience.” Their method was built around their strengths as an organization, but also with acknowledgment to their position in the league. Oklahoma City is what is considered a “small market.” Importantly, this means that the Thunder often doesn’t get big name stars signing with them. It turns out that few stars would prefer Oklahoma City over the likes of LA, NYC or Miami. Knowing that, the Thunder focus is on developing players and acquiring them through the draft. Have a vision, but make sure you play to your strengths.

Commitment to the Fundamentals

So what other elements are there to the method? In the case of Presti, it’s the fundamentals. At the start of the 2023 season, Presti articulated it this way: “It’s no secret, the people that are elite at what they do are also the ones that do the most monotonous parts of their craft with excellence.”  The Thunder works on developing a hard-working culture (amongst players and beyond) and they emphasize the core skills of every role. You can see it in their care for developing their coaching staff.  For instance, their current coach and coach of the year Mark Daigneault was internally developed instead of the usual outside hire.

Excellence in business means being consistent, aligning to your long term vision through data and enabling your team. Zooming into our space of data and analytics, excellence again looks like the fundamentals: meeting your users’ data needs, making data accessible, timely and understandable, and empowering your teams with data literacy.

The winners of the AI era are going to be those who commit to doing the fundamentals. If you want AI to impact your business, it needs to understand your business. That means doing a lot of the “boring” stuff right. Have good data quality, documentation, and processes.

Resisting Shortcuts

Presti goes on to warn against shortcuts and quick fixes. In basketball, this is often things like big, blockbuster trades. In analytics, this is more often big tool transitions/acquisitions or in the current zeitgeist, the rush to adopting generative AI. There is often value in these things, if implemented in the right times and in the right ways. They should be part of the vision and method you set forth, not something you reach for as a quick fix to accelerate your timeline. “It is the job of the organization to resist those shortcuts, accept that criticism, and keep us deeply committed,” Sam Presti continues.

In a world that increasingly demands instant results, Presti reminds us that sustainable success is rarely achieved overnight. AI is not walking through that door. The Thunder’s decision to trade two of their most valuable players was not made in haste — it was a calculated move designed to reposition the organization for future success. They also could have turned around and tried to trade for new stars, many teams do this, but instead the Thunder bet on themselves, their methods and quietly got to work building the next team.

This is a principle that should resonate deeply with anyone who works in analytics. The data-driven decisions we make should not be about achieving immediate gains at the expense of long-term objectives. Instead, they should be part of a broader strategy that considers both current conditions and future potential.

Patience as a Strategic Discipline

Along with resisting shortcuts comes the need for patience. Presti’s letter underscores the importance of patience as a strategic discipline especially when the road ahead will be difficult and you’ll have to endure moments of doubt and criticism. “There will always be the temptation to take shortcuts, to look for quick fixes, and to reach out for instant gratification,” Presti wrote. Instead, he argues for resisting these temptations in favor of a more disciplined, patient approach.

In analytics, patience is often one of the hardest virtues to practice. The allure of immediate insights can lead to premature conclusions or hasty decisions that don’t stand the test of time. Sometimes you must wait for more data. In my consulting, I’ve also found clients want to rush the process. That can look like extracting data haphazardly and trying to cram it together to build a dashboard they can show off, but by skipping steps and bypassing quality checks, the result is a dashboard few can put their trust in. I also see this lack of patience in an over reliance on headline metrics. Don’t get me wrong, KPIs are extremely useful to help you align to your goals and identify areas of focus, but they rarely tell you the true story. Often, the answer in analytics is not just a few metrics or even an interactive dashboard, but a deep dive into the data to help tease out nuance.

Presti’s approach serves as a reminder that analytics should not just be focused on quick wins or narrow sided metrics — It should be about understanding trends, identifying sustainable patterns and making informed decisions that may take time to fully bear fruit.

Being the Exception

Perhaps the most profound lesson from Presti’s letter is the idea of being the exception. In an industry where many teams follow a similar playbook, the Thunder chose a different path. This willingness to be different is what ultimately sets apart organizations that merely survive from those that thrive.

Most importantly, it’s not decisions like Tableau vs. Power BI that will set you apart. I can tell you firsthand that many companies have those tools in abundance, but few are able to bring together all the qualities we’ve talked about (a consistent method, an emphasis on the fundamentals and the patience to see it through). For those of us in analytics, being the exception is a call to practice our craft well, to be fearless when questioning our assumptions, to be bold in embracing what the data supports and to have the patience to gather data, run experiments and do the “dirty work” of data.  Presti’s words encourage us to trust in our strategy and our analysis, even when it leads us down paths less traveled.

The Role of Analytics in Building the Future

Since that summer of 2019, the Thunder have put together an exceptional team increasing their wins from 22 (.306) in the 2020-2019 season to 57 (.695) wins in the 2023-24 season.

Fueled by their vision, powered by their methodology, informed by their analytics and ensured by their patience, they’ve managed to draft and develop young talent that is now positioning them as one of the NBA’s most promising teams.

If we want to achieve something truly exceptional, we must be willing to act similar. In a world increasingly driven by data, let’s be the exception in how we use it.