Cory Weismann, two Coaches, and a Story Told by Frank Deford

We lead by being human. We do not lead by being corporate, professional, or institutional.  (Paul G. Hawken, founder, Smith and Hawken)
Quoted by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Pozner – Encouraging the Heart:  A Leaders Guide to Rewarding and Encouraging Others

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Frank Deford

A suggestion – stop what you are doing and listen to this segment on NPR’s Morning Editon by Frank Deford:  When There’s More To Winning Than Winning.   (audio, plus transcript, available here).  (Frank Deford’s commentaries are consistnegly great treasures).

Here’s how he starts:

When last we left the NCAA, it was February madness, colleges were jumping conferences, suing each other, coaches were claiming rivals had cheated in recruiting — the usual nobility of college sports.
And then, in the midst of all this, the men’s basketball team at Washington College of Chestertown, Md., journeyed to Pennsylvania to play Gettysburg College in a Division III Centennial Conference game.
It was senior night, and the loudest cheers went to Cory Weissman, No. 3, 5 feet 11 inches, a team captain — especially when he walked out onto the court as one of Gettysburg’s starting five.
Yes, he was a captain, but it was, you see, the first start of his college career. Cory had played a few minutes on the varsity as a freshman, never even scoring. But then, after that season, although he was only 18 years old, he suffered a major stroke. He was unable to walk for two weeks. His whole left side was paralyzed. He lost his memory, had seizures.

The story is one that will stop you in your tracks.  It is a about a basketball coach, and another basketball coach, and a group of players, who remembered that being human was more important than anything else.

Cory had worked so very hard — to walk, to run, to participate in the pre-game drills.  But he was far from being a college-level basketball player after his stroke.

On the last game of his last season, the coach started Cory Weissman.  He played just a few moments.  But what moments!

And then, at the end of the game, with the game fully decided, the coach put him back in the game.  The other team’s coach called time out, and asked his players to intentionally foul Cory to give him a shot, a chance to score a point from the free throw line.

Shot number two:  The ball left his hand and flew true – swish, all net.

Deford ended with this:

The assistant vice president for athletics at Gettysburg, David Wright, wrote to Washington College: “Your coach, Rob Nugent, along with his staff and student-athletes, displayed a measure of compassion that I have never witnessed in over 30 years of involvement in intercollegiate athletics.”
Cory Weissman had made a point. Washington College had made an even larger one.

“We lead by being human.”  Yes, we do.

Cory Weismann -- "The ball left his hand and flew true - swish, all net."

A 7-Step Process to Achieving Your Goals

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Alexandra Samuel for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.

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It’s still early in 2012, and from what I see on Twitter, lots of folks are jumping into the New Year with a resolution or two. Whether those resolutions are online (“check Facebook no more than three times a day”) or offline (“exercise every day”), the challenge lies in translating resolution to reality. For the past few years, I’ve had an annual ritual that helps me make good on my goals for each year or quarter. Using Excel, I evaluate all my current activities and whittle out everything that doesn’t advance my key goals. Here’s [three of seven steps in] this process to achieve your goals for this year:
1. Write down your top goal or goals for the year (or quarter). Choose no more than three, and be very clear if there is one you are most committed to achieving. Write these at the top of your spreadsheet in a large font so they keep jumping out at you.

2. Dump all your current and upcoming tasks or projects into the spreadsheet. Put everything in one column, with one task or project per row. The goal is to get everything that you’re working on, or even considering working on, written down in one place. You’re going to end up with a very asymmetric list: one row might be “Annual report on sustainability” and the next might be “Fill out Nov 2011 expense report.” This is the most challenging part of the process, so don’t rush it: you’ll know you’ve got most of what’s in your head onto the list once you’ve gone 24 hours without adding to it.

3. Freak out. This is a very important part of the process. Seriously. Look at the list of everything you’ve been trying to work on concurrently, or meaning to work on, and see how infeasible that list really is. Then look at the one or two or three things you really really really want to accomplish, and let yourself soak in the truth: you are not going to get your most valued goals accomplished when you are trying to do this many things.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Now that you’ve got a feasible game plan that will allow you to work towards your key goal(s) for this year, your resolutions should feel like a firm commitment rather than a vague aspiration. The spreadsheet you’ve created will be your touchstone and conscience for the year: return to it every time you feel tempted to take on more, or if you find yourself struggling to make time for the goals you set for 2012. You may need to do the same process every quarter (or even every month) so that you continually triage your accumulating workload and stay focused on what matters. It’s hard work to live up to your resolutions. Get serious about making time for that work, and 2012 can be the year you achieve your most dearly held goals.

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Alexandra Samuel is the Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University and the co-founder of Social Signal. Follow her on Twitter as @awsamuel. To check out more blog posts by Alexandra Samuel, please click here.

 

 

What Would Drucker Do Now? A book review by Bob Morris

What Would Drucker Do Now? Solutions to Today’s Toughest Challenges from the Father of Modern Management
Rick Wartzman
McGraw-Hill (w3012)

For every especially important question or an especially serious problem, Peter Drucker probably has the answer or solution.

I recently read this book and What Would Steve Jobs Do?, written by Peter Sander and also published by McGraw-Hill. Initially, I suspected that both were (or would become) part of a “What Would X Do?” series that might also include Sun Tzu, Socrates, Machiavelli, and Von Clauswitz or, within the domain of business, Henry Ford, Albert Sloan, one or both of the Thomas Watsons, and Walt Disney. It turns out, the two “What Would” books share little in common, except for the quality of their content and of their authors’ presentation of it.

Rick Wartzman is well-qualified (as is his Drucker Institute colleague, Joe Maciariello) to select, from Peter Drucker’s 39 books and countless articles, “solutions to today’s toughest challenges.” When faced with a challenge, most business leaders attempt to respond to it guided by what they know and by what they have done. If their respond succeeds, fine. But if it doesn’t, what to do? They usually seek a second opinion, perhaps from an associate. I agree with Wartzman that they would be well-advised to seek the assistance they need from Drucker and this book is designed to facilitate, indeed expedite that connection.

At this point, it should be noted that, if anything, Drucker was even more proficient at asking the right questions (usually in combination) than he was at providing the right answers. More to the point, he asked those questions before anyone else did. Many people have characterized Drucker “dated,” “out of touch,” “irrelevant,” etc. This suggests to me that they have read few (if any) of his works. Because Drucker was so expert at asking the right questions, he could then focus on answering them and thereby reveal essential truths. As cited by Wartzman, here are a few examples of insights that have enduring value:

“There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.”

“The business enterprise has two – and only these two – basic functions: marketing and innovation.”

“The shift from manual workers who do as they are being told – either by the task or by the boss – to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves profoundly challenges social structure.”

“Innovation and entrepreneurship are…needed in society as much as in the economy, in public-service institutions as much as in businesses.”

And here’s my personal favorite:

“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”

Wartzman has created an immensely readable “cornucopia” of Drucker material, of course, but in combination with hundreds of complementary annotations, all of which help to create a context for the given Drucker insight. For example:

o  What C.K. Prahalad learned from Drucker, Pages 22-24
o  Drucker on the computer as a “logic machine,” Pages 39-40
o  Warren Buffett and succession planning, Pages 45-47
o  Kathy Cloninger and the “”keeping quiet” strategy, Pages 97-99
o  Drucker on “courting the noncustomer,” Pages 109-110
o  Sony’s “chief transformation officer,” George Bailey, Pages 121-123
o Florian Ramseger on Drucker’s relevance to cloud computing, Pages 172-174

With regard to this book’s formal organization, it caught me by surprise because I had expected the table of contents for the seven chapters to provide more than their titles. Each covers a general business subject such as “Management as a Discipline.” Granted, most (if not all) challenges fall within one of the seven categories and some, perhaps, in more than one. I would have preferred more specificity. That said, I presume to suggest that those who obtain this book skim read the heads and sub-heads, noting which subjects seem most relevant to the given challenge, be it a threat or an opportunity.

Those who read this entertaining as well as informative book owe a substantial debt of gratitude to Rick Warzman, not only for his skillful selection of the material but also for his brilliant presentation of it. His own insights by no means intrude on the narrative; on the contrary, they enrich it. Bravo!