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.
Summer Football Safety
July 23, 2018
(This blog first appeared on MHSAA.com on June 23, 2017.)
Across the U.S. this summer, school-age football players are flocking to camps conducted by colleges and commercial interests. They get outfitted in full gear and launch themselves into drills and skills work.
Unlike the start of the interscholastic football season, the players usually do this without several days of acclimatization to avoid heat illness, and without limits on player-to-player contact to reduce head injuries.
Required precautions of the school season are generally ignored at non-school summer camps.
One notable exception to this foolish behavior is found in Michigan where the Michigan High School Athletic Association prohibits member schools’ student-athletes from using full equipment and participating in full-contact activities outside the high school football season. This is not a recent change; it’s been the MHSAA’s explicit policy for more than four decades.
And it’s a policy that has never been more in style and in favor than it is today.