Dave Butler, Co-CEO of Dimensional Fund Advisors Agrees: Bigger Equals Simpler 

Forty years later, Dimensional Fund Advisors leader Dave Butler can still remember his basketball coach’s speech word for word.

It happened when Butler’s coach, Lou Campanelli, came over to Cal-Berkeley after a notable career at James Madison University. Campanelli gathered his players around and told them what they could expect under his leadership. 

“My teams do three things,” Campanelli told them. “We play defense, we play hard and we play together. That’s it.”

Not only was the coach’s system an unimpeachable one from a values and principles perspective, it also impressed Butler with its deft and assured simplicity. “I think for any organization, especially as you get bigger, simplification is the important part,” explained Butler in the podcast. “Those simple statements are things that people can rally around.”

Butler went on to be drafted by the Boston Celtics, only to be denied an NBA career because of a player’s strike and injury. But he pivoted to a career in finance and now serves as Co-CEO of Dimensional Fund Advisors. In the 25 years since he joined, the firm has grown from $10 billion in assets under management to $719 billion (as of March 31, 2024). 

He may have switched career tracks but Campanelli’s words continue to serve as a model for how Butler motivates his corporate team. Butler also admires the way Campanelli operationalized the value of simplicity by creating a point system that rewarded players for acting on the team’s values. For example, if you scored a basket, you got one point. But if you took a defensive charge, you got five points. If you dove for a ball on the ground, you got four points. 

“His system taught me that big, broad, simplistic statements that people can rally around are important, but you also have to have the tactics underneath that are going to support those statements. Otherwise, they become empty,” said Butler

Listeners looking for creative ways of connecting a broad mission with specific tactical measures will benefit from Butler’s lessons, including: 

• Using powerful storytelling to effect changes in corporate culture.
• How to hire “characters with character” rather than clones in your organization.
• The case for involving your most junior people early on in evaluating important hires.

“I played with Steve Kerr on the USA National Team, and Steve told me about a conversation he had with his coach Lute Olson,” recalled Butler. Kerr told him that Olson used to introduce top recruits to everyone on the team and ask one simple question: “Do you want to play with this guy?” If one person said no, Olson stopped recruiting him. 

The lesson? “The key for leaders is to figure out how to get people to voice their opinion without being fearful of that opinion being something the leader would push down on.”

Check out more episodes of Corporate Competitor Podcast with guests including Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders, MasterClass CEO David Rogier, and Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian.

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