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Eventide Asset Management, LLC 60 State Street, Ste. 700 Boston, MA 02109 877-771-EVEN (3836) WWW.EVENTIDEFUNDS.COM! ! ! ! MARCH 12, 2015 Teamwork Tipping

I’ve had a complicated relationship with . Not coincidentally, the same is true of my relationship with business. But we’ll get to that . I started playing basketball in fifth grade and immediately fell in love. You pretty much had to love the game because our gym was so small that only the seventh- eighth grade team could practice after school. We fifth and sixth graders had to show up for practice at 7:00 a.m. Which meant that each morning I got up before everyone else, dressed and ate breakfast alone, then walked two miles to school in the Milwaukee winter darkness just to play the game. But I never thought of any of that as a hardship. Basketball was just too much fun. Anything I had to do FAITH & BUSINESS to play was totally worth it. In fact, the only hard part was that each morning at 8:30 a.m. the best part of my day was already over. TIM WEINHOLD After seventh grade my family moved to a small town in the Colorado Rockies . . . and basketball got even better. On my eighth grade team it turned out there Tim Weinhold serves as Director of Eventide's Faith were essentially seven starters — two guards (me as ), four forwards & Business Initiative, and has served in a faith and and a . The best part was that we weren’t just teammates, we were pals. business/investing thought leadership capacity Well, maybe the second best part — winning games, which we did a lot, was with Eventide since its founding. Since relocating pretty fun too. from Boston to Seattle a few years ago, Tim has served on the Executive Advisory Council of the Over the next couple of years I remember many times at the end of the school School of Business and Economics at Seattle day thinking, ‘Wow. For the next two or three hours I get to play the game I Pacific University, and on the Executive totally love with my very best friends. Nothing could be better. In fact, I would Committee of the school's Center for Integrity in pay money to do this . . . and I get to do it for free. Amazing.’ By sophomore year Business. my buddies and I were already dreaming of a state championship in our senior year — in the small schools division, of course, since we only had 400 students in our four-year school.

Then my family moved again, just before my junior year. Now I was at a school where the class size was more than 500 students. With heady visions of starring on a bigger stage, I went to try-outs for varsity basketball . . . and didn’t even make the team. I was crushed. Crushed, crushed, crushed. Totally crushed. Actually, whatever is worse than crushed. In hindsight, this was my first real theological experience — I now knew, viscerally, that we live in a fallen world. Not only would I never be a state champion, the bitter truth was that I wasn’t even good enough to make my own high school team. My playing days were abruptly over, my visions of greatness gone in an instant. Reality had suddenly, savagely snuffed out the fantasy around which my entire adolescent life revolved.

But before long I headed off for college in Boston . . . and promptly fell in love with the Celtics. What was not to love? More championships than anyone else (by a lot). A never-ending cavalcade of the game’s biggest stars — , then , then , then . Followed even more magnificently (personal opinion) by , and Kevin McHale.

But what made the Celtics so inspiring was not so much their victories, nor their stars, it was how they played the game. Most notably, they didn’t play like they were a bunch of stars. They epitomized team basketball. Everyone played tough Eventide | Faith & Business Blog Tim Weinhold on the Teamwork Tipping Point 2 ! ! defense. Everyone hustled on offense. They always made the extra pass, always For me this new game set the extra pick, always crashed the boards. No one ever took a shot if there was a better shot for someone else. The Celtics prided themselves on their reputation as a ‘lunch-pail’ team — blue- collar working stiffs who showed up every day to was to real basketball give it their all. They believed whatever success they achieved came simply because they worked harder, and played more selflessly, than everyone else — as what Twinkies were to emphatically embodied in their game and gutsy leader throughout the , Larry Bird, ‘the hick from French Lick.’ real food — appealing And what made it even better — in ’s Lakers they had a perfect rival. Stylistically, the Lakers were the Celtics’ polar opposite. They were the anti-Celtics. It was limos, not lunch-pails, for them. They were LA glitz at first sniff but and glamour all the way. nauseating after a And yet, deeper down, the Lakers shared a special connection with the Celtics. Under Magic Johnson’s leadership, they also played great team ball. Magic was an extraordinary athlete, and a gifted scorer. Despite that, he seemed to take the couple bites. most satisfaction from setting up a teammate with a great . . . just like his arch-rival on the Celtics. In fact, highlight reels of Magic and Bird seem to show more no- look and behind-the-back and through-the-legs passes than anything else. They were both stars who played selflessly . . . and so their teammates played that way as well.

But where Magic was always the most gifted athlete on the floor, Bird was the most gritty. He never coasted, never quit, never gave less than his very best . . . even when his ailing back hurt so much that he had to lie prone on the sideline during time outs. I loved Larry Bird. I loved the Celtics. I especially loved the selfless, team-first basketball they embodied. Though my playing days were a fading memory, because of Larry Bird and the Celtics, I still loved the game.

And then it all changed. Basketball lost its way. Selflessness disappeared, selfishness prevailed. A team game quit being a team game . . . and became, instead, simply a showcase for stars. The standard NBA offense now seemed to be four guys standing around watching the fifth dribble this way and that until he could make a highlight play — a big three-pointer or a dramatic drive to the hoop. If neither proved available, he reluctantly relinquished the ball to a teammate and now everyone stood and watched what that next player could do. Yuck. On defense, nobody took it seriously until the fourth quarter, and maybe not even then. Double yuck.

The game was now about the stars, not the teams. Actually, the stars were the teams. Jordan, Kobe, LeBron . . . their teams, even the entire NBA, revolved around them. All of which hit a nadir (let’s hope) in the sorry spectacle of a primetime TV special for LeBron to announce he was moving to Miami to build himself a cherry-picked championship . It was now, most definitely, a me- first world, and basketball had embraced that new reality with both hands.

I hated it. The new version of basketball was a mockery of the game I loved, a game where self-sacrifice was the essence of what it meant to be a team, and the essential foundation for success. For me this new game was to real basketball what Twinkies were to real food — appealing at first sniff but nauseating after a couple bites. Eventually I couldn’t stand it anymore . . . and so I gave up. I didn’t watch a regular season game for nearly fifteen years, and saw only a handful of playoff games over that time. Basketball had gone from my very favorite game to one I never watched. Why bother? The game the NBA was playing was, to my

For more Faith & Business content visit: EVENTIDEFUNDS.COM/FAITH- AND- BUSINESS/ Eventide | Faith & Business Blog Tim Weinhold on the Teamwork Tipping Point 3 ! ! The Spurs weren’t just eyes at least, a sham and a shame — one more sad evidence of a fallen world. And then it changed again. Quite belatedly, at last year’s NBA Championship Finals I discovered the Spurs. I watched only because I so hoped playing the kind of someone could keep Miami from a third consecutive championship. True, I really hadn’t cared about NBA basketball for a very long time, but still . . . three straight basketball I had loved, championships for LeBron and the Heat? That’s just salt in the wound. I know it’s a fallen world, but does it have to be one that’s gone to hell in a handbasket? I really hoped not, so I watched, passionately rooting against Miami and, therefore, the kind of basketball for the Spurs, about whom I knew almost nothing. But it didn’t take long to be mesmerized . . . and astounded. These guys were whose passing I had playing a kind of NBA basketball I thought had long since gone extinct. It was beautiful to behold — a clinic on defense, on offense, on passing, but above all deeply mourned, they on selfless teamwork. I felt like I was seeing a brand of basketball I hadn’t seen since the end of the Celtics dynasty more than two decades earlier. It was like being an archeologist and suddenly finding a real, live dinosaur munching tree were playing it tops in the park. My instinctive reaction was ‘Wow! Where the heck did you come from?’ flawlessly. They had And the Spurs weren’t just playing the kind of basketball I had loved, the kind of basketball whose passing I had deeply mourned, they were playing it flawlessly. They had elevated teamwork to an art form. It was breathtaking. That’s not elevated teamwork to merely my opinion, by the way. Here’s what the Heat’s Chris Bosh said after the Spurs won the championship in just five games. “They dominated us. They took an art form. two games on our home court, by twenty points apiece. They beat us by about twenty tonight. You have to tip your hat to those guys. They played the best basketball I’ve ever seen.” To which LeBron added, “I agree. That’s how team basketball should be played. You know, it’s selfless — guys move, cut, pass. If you’ve got a shot, you take it but it’s all for the team, it’s never about the individual.”

The television announcers for the Finals expressed similar thoughts:

“Everybody [on the Spurs] touched the ball there without it going to the floor.”

“San Antonio is great about ‘I have a shot, but you have a better shot.’ [As a result] they break you down.”

“They constantly sacrifice for the person next to them . . . it’s poetry in motion.”

“The Spurs are playing some of the most beautiful team basketball that we’ve seen in a long, long time.”

“They call the Spurs’ game ‘The Beautiful Game.’”

Regular readers of my columns might guess where this is going — business, like basketball, has lost its way. Business used to be (substantially) about service to others, but for the past few decades selfishness has prevailed. OK, good guess. I do think the selfishness that ruined basketball for so long has had much the same effect on business. And as a result, my relationship with business has come to have some of the same ‘love-hate’ quality as my relationship with basketball. Good guess, but no cigar. This extended personal commentary about basketball has a different purpose.

But before that payoff, we need one last basketball data point. That revered sports newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, recently wrote:

For more Faith & Business content visit: EVENTIDEFUNDS.COM/FAITH- AND- BUSINESS/ Eventide | Faith & Business Blog Tim Weinhold on the Teamwork Tipping Point 4 ! ! has the [Golden State] Warriors off to their hottest start in franchise The Spurs are potent history, a 42-9 record that tops the NBA. But it’s what this team does when it isn’t playing basketball that some Warriors say is unheard of in the NBA: they eat together . . . The players say there is a much simpler reason for their team dinners: evidence that the tide they just like being around each other. “And you see it on the court,” said Warriors of (what often feels like center . This is now the essential trait of the NBA’s best teams. The Warriors, like the Eastern Conference-leading Atlanta Hawks and reigning champion , inexorable) selfishness typify the style of whirring ball movement that is synonymous with winning in today’s NBA. Golden State’s brand of basketball depends on the five guys on the floor playing like they get along. This year, the Warriors have taken it to the can be pushed back. extreme, averaging the most assists in the league, as well as the most “secondary” Which means a assists—the pass before the pass that created the basket (emphasis added). Hold it. Did I read that right? The “whirring ball movement” (i.e., selfless team-first play) of the Spurs . . . and the Warriors . . . and the Hawks . . . is now recognized as corrupted, me-first, “the essential trait of the NBA’s best teams?” You mean the Spurs are not just some freakish outlier, some aberration in the space-time continuum of NBA basketball? There’s actually a revolution well under way — a recognition (once approach to business again) that team and teamwork trump selfishness and stars? A fresh realization that the Spurs’ (and Warriors’ and Hawks’) sort of selflessness, executed well, “is can be unlearned. synonymous with winning in today’s NBA?” Someone pinch me. And here, finally, is why all this should matter to those of us who care about God’s intent for the purpose and practice of business, i.e., to those of us who believe business is meant to be a powerful engine for blessing rather than blight, for human flourishing rather than floundering. The Spurs are potent evidence that the tide of (what often feels like inexorable) selfishness can be pushed back. Which means a corrupted, me-first, approach to business can be unlearned. A ‘Love your neighbor’ rather than love- yourself version of business can yet prevail.*

How? Well, how has it been happening in the NBA? A team like the Spurs shows how beautiful — and successful — it is when teamwork (service and selflessness) triumphs. In fact, the Spurs have won more championships over the past fifteen years than anyone. Slowly their compelling example attracts others (Warriors, Hawks) down the same path. Eventually the selfishness consensus starts to crumble, and even observers like the Wall Street Journal begin to describe an entirely new reality.**

Are you practicing business according to the selfishness mantra — profits and share price are all that matters — that has so corrupted business over the past few decades? Or are you, like the Spurs, setting an entirely different example, blazing a very different path? Are you practicing a ‘Love your neighbor’ version of business based on the ‘royal law of Scripture?’ If you are, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK! Like the Spurs, you are having more of an influence than you may think. Why? Because God has ordered his moral universe such that, in the larger scheme and the longer run, “Love never fails,” 1Corinthians 13:8. And because you do not labor alone: “Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the LORD, the God of hosts, shall be with you,” Amos 5:14.

Admittedly, the triumph of service over selfishness in business can seem distressingly far off. In which case, we can all take heart from the Spurs. Under the leadership of devoted believers like and and Tim

For more Faith & Business content visit: EVENTIDEFUNDS.COM/FAITH- AND- BUSINESS/ Eventide | Faith & Business Blog Tim Weinhold on the Teamwork Tipping Point 5 ! ! Duncan, the Spurs began playing selfless team-first basketball when the rest of the NBA thought they were crazy. They were dismissed as a small-market team whose low-key ways would never prove sufficiently popular to be anything other than a backwater curiosity. Now, long years later, San Antonio is the gold- standard against which everyone is measured, and NBA basketball itself is being entirely transformed. So take comfort in the Spurs . . . and in this divine encouragement: “Do not despise these small beginnings, for the LORD rejoices to see the work begin,” Zechariah 4:10. Now go and play The Beautiful Game of business the way God always meant it to be played. Go use business to bless the world. It’s the calling for which you were created.

* This, more than anything, motivates my ‘faith and business’ writing. During a time in which business selfishness holds sway, I hope to be a ‘voice in the wilderness,’ reminding Christian business people of God’s call to a very different pathway. In turn, as Christian business people heed that call they, like the Spurs, can spark a revolution — eventually leading the larger business community back to the service, and blessing, for which it was always intended.

** Currently the Wall Street Journal still espouses the tired and toxic ‘owners above all others’ business rhetoric of the past few decades. This despite the fact that service-first companies — companies like Apple (customers first) and Southwest (employees first) and planet-first companies like WholeFoods and Patagonia and W.L. Gore — thoroughly and sustainably outperform all the selfishness-first companies foolishly following Wall Street’s counsel. Nevertheless (and no doubt without realizing the larger implications), the Wall Street Journal now acknowledges that, for basketball, there is a better way. Eventually they will acknowledge that service rather than selfishness is the pathway for success in business as well.

The material provided herein has been provided by Eventide Asset Management, LLC and is for informational purposes only. Eventide Asset Management, LLC serves as investment adviser to one or more mutual funds distributed by Northern Lights Distributors, LLC, member FINRA. Northern Lights Distributors, LLC and Eventide Asset Management are not affiliated entities.

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