Another Way to Learn
October 30, 2012
In 2000, I had the pleasure of listening to a speech by Ken Dryden, who had been goalkeeper for Cornell University when it was the NCAA Ice Hockey Champion in the 1960s. Ken Dryden then was a goalkeeper in the National Hockey League for eight years. Then president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and he’s a lawyer.
Ken Dryden said that the greatest lesson of sport is that most things go wrong; in fact, that they almost always go wrong. He said he’s seen dozens of coaches on hundreds of occasions diagram plays in the locker room where every defender is blocked just so and every pattern is executed perfectly.
But what you learn in competition, said Dryden, is that the plans almost always go awry, that the patterns almost always break down. What you learn in competition is to not get upset, but to improvise and find another way to get the puck in the goal or the ball in the net.
What happens to the high school student, asked Dryden, who doesn’t play sports in high school and who gets all A’s, a 4.3 grade point average on a 4 point scale, 100 percent on test scores all the time, who never has anything go wrong? What happens to that student in college when he or she gets 90 percent, or 80 percent, or worse. What happens to that student when something goes wrong in life?
Dryden concluded that sport is not frivolous, it’s another way to learn.
Values Trump Rules
November 19, 2013
The last two postings, which were about rules and rule-making, have quoted from how: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything by Dov Seidman. The book deserves at least this additional commentary.
Mr. Seidman posits that in the modern world of hyperconnectivity and transparency (which he describes in detail), there is no such thing as “private” behavior. It’s all public and, therefore, how we do things is more important than what we do.
He states that to stand out in a positive way, an enterprise must “outbehave” the competition. And he says, such behaviors do not follow rules, they flow from values.
This means, according to Seidman, that effective leadership in this environment will be less about coercion (rules) and more about inspiration (values). Leaders will spend less time talking about the carrots and sticks of managing people, and more time focusing on “values and missions worthy of their commitment.”
It’s a shift from “task-based jobs” to “values-based missions;” a transformation from “command and control” to “connect and collaborate” leadership. “It’s a move from exerting power over people to generating waves through them.”
Instead of talking about organizations that are too big to fail, Seidman says we will have organizations “that are too sustainable to fail, too principled to fail, and too good to fail.”