GeekMBA360

Game 3 of the 2008 NBA Final between LA Lakers and Boston Celtics. LA Lakers won the game. After the game, one reporter asked Kobe Bryant: "In the final minutes, Ray Allen was guarding you one-on-one, and the game was on the line. What were you thinking?"

"I need to go to work. It’s my responsibility to put the ball into the hole".

I loved his answer. IT’S MY RESPONSIBILITY.

Is this what separates a super star from a good player? — No excuse, just get the job done.

Interesting enough, yesterday, the company that I’m working at had a major data center outage. The data center had a power outage for about 5 minutes. However, the power back-up stopped working. And traffic wasn’t routed to the back-up data center properly. When customers started to email supports, it was not forwarded to the right person.

It’s a disaster.

And people were making excuses: it’s caused by a natural disaster; this type of thing never happened before; the power outage was caused by another company who shared the co-location space with us; we don’t know why customer emails were not received; maybe it just happened that the email queue was full at the time.

It doesn’t matter who and what caused the problem — it’s time to assume the responsibility, go to work, and get the problem fixed. We can have post-mortem to learn from this incident. But, someone has to take on the responsibility. For me, that’s leadership and super-star quality.

Do you want to be a star in your company? Take responsibility for everything you do, and do well.