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What Kind of Person?

November 30, 2012

The Nov. 12, 2012 issue of Fortune magazine asked 21 high-profile people from all walks of life for the one piece of wisdom that got them where they are today.  The responses were typical tripe . . . except from Scott Griffith, Chairman and CEO of Zipcar.  Griffith said he received this advice from his brother 15 years ago:

"You have to think about what kind of person you want to be when you’re done with this experience.  Think about coming out of this a different person than you go in.”

Mr. Griffith got this advice shortly after he was diagnosed with stage 2 Hodgkins lymphoma.  But he came to see how this advice could be applied to any challenge – positive or negative – in his or anybody else’s life.

Think how different things would be if Pete Rose had asked this before betting that he could get away with gambling during his Major League Baseball career; or if Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens or others had asked it before the start of their steroid-stained MLB careers.

Which takes me to more recent fallen heroes:  Lance Armstrong, and Generals David Petraeus and John Allen. All three have done so much that is so good, most of which has unraveled with their ruined reputations.

If they had only asked, “What kind of person do I want to be when I’m done with this experience?”

They have come out of their experiences different than they went in, but not at all as they had hoped.

We used to say, “No good deed goes unpunished.”  It’s also true these days that no bad deed goes undiscovered.

More than Fun and Games

September 24, 2014

Five years ago there were many skeptics when the MHSAA redesigned its website and included twice-weekly blogs by the executive director and active Facebook and Twitter pages as well as YouTube channels, and gave constituents and critics alike an opportunity to post comments. Some skeptics said we were being distracted with frivolous fun and games, and others said all this interaction would be a persistent source of problems.
In fact, for the MHSAA, this constituent engagement has been about much more than fun and games and it’s been a means to solve problems.
Our primary use of social media and other means of constituent engagement has been to drive people to high school events and to the MHSAA website where the distinctive messages of educational athletics would stand out.
Rather than creating problems, allowing the crowd to enter scores on MHSAA.com has led us to post more accurate scores more rapidly than when we depended on school coaches or administrators alone.
More recently we have been reviewing our event emergency plans and our office business continuation plans, which had been developed before social media became a fact of life; and now we are revising those documents to make social media the primary means of communication during such problems.
It is entirely through social media, primarily Facebook and YouTube – that the MHSAA has caused people to be talking about sportsmanship and inciting larger, more positive student and adult spectator sections at high school contests. That’s our award-winning “Battle of the Fans” that moves into its fourth year in 2014-15.