People Business
April 24, 2012
Last month, Fortune magazine ranked the top 12 business innovators of our time – “founders who turned concepts into companies and changed the face of business.” It was an unsurprising list dominated by the visionary leaders of what are now well-known enterprises. What I found most interesting was a theme.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates, No. 2 on the list (behind Apple’s Steve Jobs), said his best business decisions came down to picking good people and relying on them.
No. 4 Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, credited “a bunch of smart people” that continually take his ideas and improve them.
No. 9 Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines has created “a culture that respected the people he carefully hired.” He said, “front line personnel can either make you or break you. . . Start with employees and the rest follows from that.”
No. 10 Narayana Murthy of the Indian company Infosys said an emerging organization “must coalesce around a team of people with an enduring value system.”
Time and again, the secret sauce is the people. Not policy or procedures or products. People.
Making the Game Safer
October 6, 2015
I’ve recently overheard two insightful perspectives about football.
From an attorney for the National Federation of State High School Associations (I’m paraphrasing): “We need to remind people that we didn’t invent football. We are the ones making it safer.”
From a professor at Michigan State University (again I’m paraphrasing): “In the 1950s when automobile injuries disturbed the national conscience, we didn’t abolish cars; we made it safer to drive them. That’s where we are with football today – recognizing dangers and making the game safer.”
What this means to me is that there’s little need to be on the defensive or apologetic, but much need to be on the offensive and to be optimistic about football’s future.
Never has the equipment been better than it is today. Never have coaches been better educated about player safety. Never have there been more safety rules, and never have officials had more authority and encouragement to enforce those rules. This is true for all school sports, but most obviously so for school-sponsored football.
We are on offense, have been for years, making a game that was very good to me as a player even better, every year, for participants at the secondary school level today.