Five Lessons From LeBron

Thanks, LeBron James. Your utter crassness has given us a powerful "teachable moment" in matters of decency, communication, and leadership. Here are five lessons I'm considering this week:

1. Don't Blame The Younger Generation: Too many LeBron critics are ascribing his epic lack of grace, civility, respect, and humility to the way it is with young people in today's celebrity age. How preposterous! Good people of any age know how to do the right thing, or at least know how to find out how to do the right thing. LeBron's boorishness last week owes instead to the fact that he inhabits an imaginary world, which has been exacerbated by bad advice coming from childhood buddies at his LRMR company in, gulp, Cleveland. He needs to find a mentor with wisdom, and real fast! If you find yourself blaming young people then, well, you're getting old.

2. Don't Sink To His Level, Dan Gilbert: Cleveland's majority owner Dan Gilbert, a slick mortgage banker, took the bait and absolutely choked on it. His Thursday night diatribe in reaction to LeBron's actions was an embarrassment to his city, his team, his fans, and himself. Sure, anyone subjected to what LeBron did to that guy deserves to be outraged. However, he should have had the presence of mind to wait until the morning to react. The lesson for us all is not to send any e-mail or letter in a state of rage. Gilbert will be living that one down for many years to come. Perhaps he, too, has nobody to help him achieve perspective beyond himself. "You bet, boss, it's a great letter. Go get 'em." And wasn't Gilbert the guy who grossly enabled LeBron's behaviors over the past seven years in the first place?

3. Where Was Pat Riley In All Of This? Should that source of wisdom and sanity LeBron so clearly needs have been esteemed Miami Heat President Pat Riley. Why not? He can't shrug it off as having been none of his business until LeBron joined his team. What he has to realize is that LeBron's actions discredited Riley and his Heat franchise, too. And even without preventing LeBron from hurting himself with that putrid Thursday night made-for-television non-event, Riley certainly had responsibility for the garish, out-of-control Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment-style introduction of the new "Big Three" in Miami on Friday. For some of us, that spectacle was worse than the Thursday night TV event. What were these people thinking?

4. Manage Expectations Carefully: One should learn at an early age to underpromise and overdeliver. Here's the self-anointed "King" who after seven years in the league has yet to win a championship. Here are the biggest of the Big Three ever, also self-proclaimed, who've yet to play a game let alone win a championship. LeBron should exercise extreme caution in declaring that the Heat will win "multiple championships." This is especially true under a new Collective Bargaining Agreement in 2011-2012 that could conceivably set the salary cap below what Miami's Big Three would need to make, meaning that one of them would have to go.

5. Stay Out Of It, Jesse Jackson: Please! You are only adding embarrassment to an embarrassment and, in the process, making matters worse. Jackson consistently fails to understand that leadership is not the same thing as publicity.