(www.PatWilliamsMotivate.com)
Pat Williams is the senior vice president of the NBA’s Orlando Magic. As one of America’s top motivational, inspirational, and humorous speakers, he has addressed thousands of executives in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies and national associations to universities and nonprofits. Clients include AllState, American Express, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Disney, Honeywell, IBM, ING, Lockheed Martin, Nike, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Tyson Foods to name a few. Pat is also the author of over 55 books.
Pat served for seven years in the United States Army, spent seven years in the Philadelphia Phillies organization—two as a minor league catcher and five in the front office—and has also spent three years in the Minnesota Twins organization. Since 1968, he has been in the NBA as general manager for teams in Chicago, Atlanta, Philadelphia—including the 1983 World Champion 76ers—and now the Orlando Magic, which he co-founded in 1987 and helped lead to the NBA finals in 1995. Twenty-three of his teams have gone to the NBA playoffs and five have made the NBA finals. In 1996, Pat was named as one of the 50 most influential people in NBA history by Beckett’s, a national publication.
Pat has been an integral part of NBA history, including bringing the NBA to Orlando. He has traded Pete Maravich as well as traded for Julius Erving, Moses Malone, and Penny Hardaway, and he has won four NBA draft lotteries, including back-to-back winners in 1992 and 1993. He also drafted Charles Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, Maurice Cheeks, Andrew Toney and Darryl Dawkins. He signed Billy Cunningham, Chuck Daly, and Matt Guokas to their first professional coaching contracts. Nineteen of his former players have become NBA head coaches, nine have become college head coaches while seven have become assistant NBA coaches.
Pat and his wife, Ruth, are the parents of 19 children, including 14 adopted from four nations, ranging in age from 24 to 37. For one year, 16 of his children were all teenagers at the same time. Pat and his family have been featured in Sports Illustrated, Readers Digest, Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, The Wall Street Journal, Focus on the Family, New Man Magazine, plus all of the major television networks, The Maury Povich Show and Dr. Robert Schuller’s Hour of Power.
Pat teaches an adult Sunday school class at First Baptist Church of Orlando and hosts three weekly radio shows. In the last 13 years, he has completed 54 marathons—including the Boston Marathon 12 times—and also climbed Mt. Rainier. He is a weightlifter, Civil War buff and serious baseball fan. Every winter he plays in Major League Fantasy Camps and has caught Hall of Famers Bob Feller, Bob Gibson, Fergie Jenkins, Rollie Fingers, Gaylord Perry, Phil Niekro, Tom Seaver and Goose Gossage.
Pat was raised in Wilmington, Delaware, earned his bachelors degree at Wake Forest University, and his master’s degree at Indiana University. He is a member of the Wake Forest Sports Hall of Fame after catching for the Demon Deacon baseball team, including the 1962 Atlantic Coast Conference Championship team. He is also a member of the Delaware Sports Hall of Fame.
Leadership Excellence:
The Seven Sides of Leadership for the 21st CenturyBy Pat Williams with Jim Denney
Pat Williams has spent much of his life successfully leading others. The principles he shares on these pages are timeless examples that, when put into practice, will help us all achieve a more effective life of leadership.
New York Giants owner John Mara
Pat Williams is a survivor, an innovator, a motivator and, above all, a LEADER. He has written the new manual for leadership 2.0. Leadership Excellence transcends sports and should be required reading for anyone looking to inspire and motivate others.
Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra
Williams has built a library of over 700 leadership books, and after reading all of them he has extracted all of the great insights, stories and practical advice those books contain. In the course of his extensive research on leadership, he became convinced that the fundamental principles of leadership excellence can be distilled into seven basic ingredients, seven profoundly practical insights into what it takes to be an outstanding leader.
Drawn from years of personal experience and hundreds of interviews by Williams, readers will be exposed to the “seven sides of leadership” that apply to leaders of any age, experience and setting:
- Vision
- Communication
- People skills
- Character
- Competence
- Boldness
- A servant’s heart
These seven principles produce results every time they are tried, and each is truly timeless; they are true in every era, in every field and in every successful leader.
