Anyone who watched the New York Knicks this season saw something that goes well beyond basketball.
They saw team members pass up their own shot when a teammate had a better one. They pulled each other off the floor after mistakes instead of pointing fingers. That had a star player walk away from millions in contract value so the organization could build a winning roster. They saw what most corporate teams claim to want but rarely build. A culture that actually motivates people to give everything they have, not just manage what is expected of them.
I have spent decades studying how high-performing teams work—at Goldman Sachs, Apple, Atlassian, and now through my advisory work with executives navigating growth and change. The biggest threats to organizations usually come from inside. The way people make decisions, share information, and build trust under pressure. The Knicks just spent an entire championship run showing exactly what happens when an organization gets all three right.
CULTURE COMES FIRST
In Game 4, Josh Hart broke away and missed a wide-open layup. He hit the floor. Before he could spiral, Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, and Mikal Bridges were right there, pulling him to his feet and telling him “next play.” Brunson said afterward that this was the moment he knew they were going to win the championship. Ironically, not when the score was in their favor, but when his teammate missed an easy shot and nobody flinched.
The Knicks’ reaction was shaped long before by the culture around them. I know this because early in my career, at Goldman Sachs, we never used the word “I.” It was always “we.” Advancement was tied to how you elevated those around you, not just what you produced individually. The language reflected the mindset, and the mindset shaped how people worked together.
Each Knicks player had been told, at some point in their career, that they would not be enough. Too short. Too slow. Not a franchise player. Traded too many times. Rather than competing with each other to prove otherwise, they directed that hunger into a shared goal. When they were down two games in the series, Brunson described what the team said to each other. Let’s just be who we are. No finger-pointing. One possession at a time. This value system was built early.
Culture is the foundation. Everything else is built on top of it. And it demands constant attention. One glance away is all it takes to destroy it.
STRUCTURE AND DECISIONS
An organization’s structure and leaders’ daily decisions either reinforce or contradict the culture.
Performance reviews, promotions, and individual KPIs are almost universally designed to answer one question: What did you do? That framing puts people in a competitive posture with colleagues. When compensation and advancement depend on individual output, protecting personal stats becomes rational. You won’t give up a good shot if someone is tracking who took it.
The more capable each person is, the more they have to lose by yielding to someone else. Teams of strong individual contributors can easily become groups of people optimizing separately. The structure produces exactly the behavior it was designed to produce, and leaders wonder why the team does not feel like one.
Brunson understood this at a personal level. He voluntarily took less money so the organization could add the players they needed. Even Captain Clutch knows when to pass the ball for the better play or to shake off a bad referee call. That is a structural decision driven by a cultural conviction. To shift teams toward collective performance, leaders must make the same kind of honest assessment and sacrifice.
CONTINUOUS LEARNING SHAPES BEHAVIOR
The Knicks offer a powerful example of how behavior is shaped by our systems. “Next play” was a slogan and a system to keep the team focused on what came next instead of dwelling on mistakes. They also reviewed game film after every game, win or lose, asking how they could improve. The best organizations intentionally design systems to reinforce learning, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Traditional performance review systems often do the opposite, encouraging people to defend past performance rather than continuously improve. That’s why I have long advocated to replace traditional annual performance reviews with continuous learning cycles, an ongoing system that creates feedback, reflection, and growth. Postmortems can become exercises in deflection; people protect themselves instead of solving the problem. People systems should be the opposite: hard on the work, not the people.
WHERE TO START
Mike Brown was the sixth candidate for the Knicks coaching job in 2025, after five others passed, and he had been fired three times elsewhere. He walked in with the right values, a clear view of what the team needed, and the willingness to build it. As he said after the championship, “You get lucky when you put yourself in a position to be lucky.”
That position is built through relentless attention to fundamentals: shared values, trust, and disciplined execution. Down two games in the first series, the Knicks doubled down on putting the team ahead of individual success, and they never wavered. Learning did not stop because the stakes got higher. They adjusted in real time, making improvement part of every game.
Most organizations have this backward. They evaluate performance once a year, talk about culture at the annual offsite, and wonder why neither changes. The highest-performing organizations treat both as living systems. Feedback is continuous. Learning is expected. Culture is reinforced in hundreds of small moments, long before it is ever measured.
That is what “next play” represents. It is the visible expression of an invisible system. When a player stumbles, the team instinctively lifts him up because they practiced that response daily. Trust is a habit. The next play matters more than the last one because everyone believes improvement is always possible.
Perhaps that is the real lesson from this Knicks championship. Great teams are built by designing systems that consistently bring out the best in people. Championships, like extraordinary organizations, are rarely won in the defining moments. They are earned through the daily discipline of learning, trusting one another, and choosing the team over the individual.Tami Rosen is a board member, executive, and advisor to finance and technology companies.