BRM Masters studies the people who turned relationships into leverage — and shows you the moves you can use. This time: a coach who built the longest dynasty in modern American sports out of players almost nobody else wanted.
You know the moment. The numbers are down, the team is stuck, and the thought arrives almost on its own: we need better people. A stronger hire. The closer who actually closes. The instinct feels like clarity — like you’ve finally named the problem. The problem is talent, and talent is something you go out and get.
It’s the most natural move in business. It’s also, most of the time, the wrong one.
Consider the man who built the most durable run of success in modern American sports — and did it largely with people other teams had passed over.
Over twenty-nine seasons as head coach of the San Antonio Spurs, Gregg Popovich won five championships, recorded more regular-season wins than any coach in NBA history, and put together the longest single-team coaching tenure the league has ever seen. He stepped off the bench in 2025 and moved into the front office. By then the verdict was settled: one of the greatest there has ever been.
Here’s the part that should stop you. Yes, the foundation was Tim Duncan, the number-one overall pick in 1997 — the player everyone wanted. But a single great player gets you a good team, not a twenty-year dynasty. What turned good into unstoppable were the two guards who arrived as afterthoughts: one taken 28th in the draft, the other 57th — deep in the second round, the kind of pick most teams treat as a formality. Both became Hall of Famers. Popovich didn’t find better people around Duncan. He built the people he had.
That is the whole discipline in one sentence, and it has a name. Business Relationship Management is the deliberate work of building, tracking, and strengthening the relationships — inside and outside an organization — that decide whether effort turns into results. Most leaders treat relationships as something that either happens or doesn’t. Popovich treated them as the system itself. He didn’t manage players; he developed people, over years, on purpose. And the relationship was the thing doing the work.
Here’s how he did it, in moves you can use.
He didn’t draft the best players. He drafted the ones he could build.
Tony Parker was nineteen, French, and largely untested when San Antonio took him 28th overall in 2001. Manu Ginóbili was a 57th pick in 1999 — passed over fifty-six times — who stayed in Europe for three more years and didn’t play an NBA game until he was twenty-five. On paper, neither looked like a franchise cornerstone. Inside a system built for development, both became exactly that, anchoring four championship teams.
The lesson: stop hunting only for finished people. Pick the ones you can build a real relationship with and grow — because a person you develop is committed, coachable, and yours in a way a ready-made star rarely is.
Building them meant telling them the truth.
Parker has spoken openly about how hard Popovich rode him early — a short leash, public correction, no cushion for small mistakes. From the outside it can look harsh. It wasn’t. It was investment. The hard word only works when it comes from someone the other person knows, beyond doubt, is in their corner. Popovich earned the right to be tough because nobody questioned that he was for them.
The lesson: candor is a form of care — but only after you’ve banked the trust. Give people the truth they need, and make sure they never have to wonder whose side you’re on.
But the truth only lands once you actually know the person.
Popovich was famous for the table. Long team dinners, carefully chosen wine, conversations that had nothing to do with basketball. He learned his players as people — their families, what they feared, what moved them. This wasn’t a perk; it was the foundation. The relationship that lets you push someone hard on Tuesday is the one you built over dinner on Sunday.
The lesson: the relationship that develops people is built in the unscheduled moments. The hard work conversation is easy when the human one already happened.
And once he knew them, he let them change the game.
The clearest sign he was building a relationship and not just running a program: he adapted to the people he developed. Once he trusted Ginóbili’s instincts, he stopped trying to contain his improvisation and started building around it — letting an unconventional player be unconventional, because the relationship told him it would pay off. It did, repeatedly, in the biggest moments.
The lesson: development runs both ways. A real relationship changes how you lead, not just how they perform. If your people never reshape your system, you’re managing them — not developing them.
Then came the one relationship he couldn’t hold.
Kawhi Leonard was Popovich’s masterpiece — developed into a Finals MVP by the age of twenty-two, the anointed next cornerstone of the franchise. The development system had worked exactly as designed. And then, across the 2017–18 season, it came apart. A quad injury, conflicting accounts of how serious it was, and a slow collapse of trust on both sides: the team questioned whether he could play; he questioned whether they had his back; outside voices filled the gap. He appeared in just nine games that season, sat out the rest, and forced his way out in a 2018 trade to Toronto.
It’s tempting to read that as the system failing. It’s the opposite. The system was never the drills or the dinners — it was the relationship. And when the relationship broke, everything it had built went with it. The most gifted player Popovich ever developed walked away, not because the talent disappeared, but because the trust did.
That’s the story, and it cuts both ways. For twenty-nine years, the edge was never the talent Popovich collected — it was the relationships he built, one person at a time, over years. The relationship was the multiplier. When it was strong, a 57th pick became a legend. When it broke, a superstar was gone.
You don’t need better people. You need to build the relationship with the people you already have — and to know, before it’s too late, whether it’s getting stronger or weaker.
Popovich did that for twenty-nine years on instinct. Most of us don’t get twenty-nine years, or the instinct. That’s the work A2A does for you: build, track, and strengthen the relationships that decide whether the work turns into results — so you see the rooms you have to prepare for, and the trust you can’t afford to lose, before they cost you the deal.
We do the preparation. You grow the relationship. → Start with A2A.
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