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We Must Do Better

July 16, 2012

Everybody is expressing opinions about the US Supreme Court’s various written opinions regarding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

However, my mind goes back to the heated debate the previous year, to a passage about this topic in a July 13, 2009 Businessweek column co-authored by Benjamin E. Sasse, US Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2007 until taking a teaching position at the University of Texas in Austin in 2009, and Kerry N. Weems, an independent consultant who previously served 28 years in federal government, most recently as the head of Medicare and Medicaid.

Sasse and Weems wrote:  “. . . passionate certainty that things are broken is not the same as dispassionate clarity about how to fix them.”  They were critical of people on both sides of the health care debate who were “still campaigning on the issue when what’s needed is a detailed conversation.”

What bothered Sasse and Weems on July 13, 2009, seven months into President Obama’s first term, has only gotten worse on July 13, 2012, four months prior to the next election.  Many are campaigning – on health care, as well as the economy, the environment, education and every other pressing issue of our times and our children’s times – but few are truly leading on those issues.

Borrowing from the title of Bill Bradley’s latest book, which he borrowed from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, "we can all do better."  In fact, we not only can, we must.  It’s a matter of will more than it is of wisdom.

In Others’ Words

August 22, 2014

I’ve read and heard multiple times – so I’ve come to believe it’s at least partly true – that one of the techniques that marketing departments or agencies use when developing campaigns to promote a product or service is to look at it from the consumer’s, customer’s or client’s perspective.

The point is often brought home that if management would use this technique as much as marketers, then management would be more effective and would label itself, rather than marketers, as the “creative team.” It chafes me to hear a CEO say he or she wants to know what “creative” has to say about a sponsorship initiative before the CEO will offer an opinion.

Thinking about what our customers want doesn’t require that leaders suspend their personal beliefs or reverse experience-based opinions. It merely asks that we look at things from a different and sometimes even opposite point of view. And to be truly revealing, it asks that we try to put into words where other people stand on a particular topic.

It asks us to actually try to describe what our customers see from where they stand and what they say they want. For example, in our work, it would ask administrators to think about and actually describe what coaches want, and vice versa. And it asks both coaches and administrators to think about and put into their own words what student-athletes want, and what their parents want.

This has been an ongoing part of my life, provoked I suppose by my marriage of 42 years to a woman whose political views often point 180 degrees from my own. And this approach has been especially enlightening on school sports’ most troublesome topics, some of which we are tackling at this time, like ...

  • Out-of-season coaching rules
  • Junior high/middle school programming
  • Health and safety mandates