What a Detroit Basketball Hoop Taught Nicholas Mukhtar About Broken Companies

Nicholas Mukhtar was 22, driving through Detroit, when he saw a group of kids playing basketball with a deflated ball and two construction barrels for hoops. They lived in a major American city with no park to use. He grew up with ten. “That image stayed with me,” he wrote, “not as a charity case but as a systems failure.”

The reading mattered more than the scene. Somewhere between city budgets, federal priorities, and decades of disinvestment, a neighborhood had been designed out of basic recreation. The kids had not failed. The infrastructure around them had failed long before they arrived.

Two years later, in 2013, Mukhtar founded Healthy Detroit on that premise. Rather than open clinics, the nonprofit partnered with the city’s Parks & Recreation Department to turn public parks into wellness hubs offering free fitness classes, biometric screenings, immunizations, and connections to social services. Parks were the delivery mechanism precisely because they carried no barriers to entry. No appointments. No insurance cards. No co-pays. By 2017, the organization ran an annual operating budget of roughly $15 million, and the American Public Health Association named it the National Public Health Organization of the Year.

That same diagnostic instinct now travels into boardrooms. Mukhtar, who runs Tera Strategies in Fort Lauderdale, argues that companies “treat symptoms because they haven’t mapped the system producing those symptoms.” He has watched the reflex play out everywhere. A department runs over budget, so leadership cuts headcount. Revenue dips, so marketing gets restructured. A C-suite executive leaves, and the reporting chain gets reshuffled overnight. None of those moves touches the cause.

The questions that would touch it tend to go unasked. Was decision-making authority ever written down? Were communication expectations set before the team scaled, or left to improvisation? Did financial reporting run often enough to catch the problem before it became a crisis?

A 2025 paper in Frontiers in Health Services described systems thinking as a method that “enables policymakers to comprehend the interconnections within public health systems and anticipate the potential consequences of policy implementation.” Strip out the academic phrasing and it matches what Mukhtar learned on the ground: you cannot fix a problem you have not traced to its origin.

So when a struggling company calls, he does not open with what went wrong. He asks how the business was built, what was designed deliberately, what was improvised, and what was never discussed at all. That last answer, he says, is usually where the real work begins.