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.
Who’s the Customer?
February 18, 2014
“If you ask your board, ‘who are your customers?’, you are likely to hear a lot of comments and no consensus.” That’s what I heard a speaker say to a group of association leaders last summer; and it has set me on a course of asking different groups this question: “Who is/are the MHSAA’s customers?” We allow respondents to allocate up to 100 points so they can give weight to their responses. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
The board of directors of the Michigan Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association (MIAAA) rated athletic directors as the top customer of the MHSAA (by a wide margin), followed in order by student-athletes, coaches and officials.
By an even wider margin, the MHSAA Student Advisory Council named student-athletes as the MHSAA’s top customer, followed by athletic directors and coaches tying for a distant second, and officials an even more distant fourth.
And the MHSAA’s governing body, the Representative Council, agreed that student-athletes are the top customer. Athletic directors were second, coaches third and officials fourth.
I suppose that when we ask audiences of coaches or officials or principals or others who they believe is or are the MHSAA’s customer(s), there will be some variation in the order of things. But I think we can already discern a comfortable pattern so far: everyone puts a premium on student-athletes. And that’s as it should be.
The MHSAA is unique among the state’s educational groups – we’re not an association of school boards only, or superintendents only, or principals only, or athletic directors or coaches or any other single group. We’re an association of schools, undertaking to represent all those groups and student-athletes themselves.