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.
Pulling Up the Welcome Mat?
September 8, 2011
Michigan’s welcoming foreign exchange program network and the MHSAA’s accommodating rules have caused there to be more placements in Michigan schools than any other state during each of the last two school years. But this open environment for foreign exchange students may change if the MHSAA is unsuccessful in defending its current rules through judicial proceedings in Michigan courts.
Presently under MHSAA rules, international transfer students are treated identically to domestic transfer students: unless the student meets one of 15 stated exceptions, that student is ineligible for approximately one semester and then becomes eligible insofar as the transfer regulation is concerned until that student’s high school graduation.
If, however, this student is a foreign exchange student placed in an MHSAA member school through a program listed by the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel, that student is permitted immediate eligibility and that student’s eligibility is limited to one academic year. This special exception for bona fide foreign exchange students is intended to maximize the benefits of their academic exchange year.
The current court challenge is to the absolute limit of one year of athletic eligibility for foreign exchange students. If the MHSAA is unsuccessful in preserving that one-year limit, schools may be forced to treat foreign exchange students as all other international transfer students who are ineligible for their first semester and thereafter eligible until graduation.
That solution may seem simple, but it would reduce the value of the academic exchange experience for bona fide foreign exchange students, and that would certainly drop Michigan from the top spot in the nation for foreign exchange student placements.