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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.

Baby Steps

April 8, 2014

Two first, small steps have been taken in the direction of making school-sponsored sports for junior high/middle school-age athletes more attractive to these students and their parents.

Next school year, MHSAA member junior high/middle schools have the option to increase the length of quarters in basketball from six minutes to a maximum of eight minutes and to increase the length of quarters in football from eight minutes to a maximum of ten minutes.

In late March, the MHSAA Representative Council approved these recommendations of the MHSAA Basketball and Football Committees which had favorable reaction also from the MHSAA Junior High/Middle School Committee and from the Junior High/Middle School Task Force which is meeting throughout 2014 to bring special attention to long languishing issues of policy and programming for students prior to high school.

It is hoped that the up to eight additional minutes in school-sponsored basketball and football contests will allow more students to get playing time in more games, and we fully expect that it will also mean more playing time in all games for some students. Both are needed for school sports to be competitive in the youth sports marketplace.

These may have been among the easiest decisions the Representative Council will face as the Junior High/Middle School Task Force works its way through many tougher topics during 2014 when, in many cases, societal trends will confront sacred cows.