My column in this week's Time is about John Mackey, the CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods Market, and Kip Tindell, the CEO and co-founder of the Container Store, and their shared belief that corporations perform a lot better over time if their executives focus more on employees and customers than on shareholders.Mackey and Tindell go way back--they shared a house in Austin with three friends one year in the mid-1970s as they worked their way through the University of Texas on the eight-year plan. They've recently begun hanging out together a bit, and when I met Tindell at a National Retail Federation event in New York late last year, he invited me to come down to Texas to talk to the two of them. So I did. We met at Whole Foods' headquarters in Austin, which is perched atop the chain's flagship store, and we talked, and talked. Tindell is stereotypical laid-back, slow-talking Texan. Mackey is a not so stereotypical hyper, fast-talking Texan. But they seemed to get along pretty well. As for me, I mostly just stayed out of the way.
What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation. I cut some stuff out, moved a few passages around, and removed a lot of "uhs" and "you knows" (mine as well as theirs). Beyond that it's a pretty faithful representation of what was said. It's pretty long, too. But most educational.
Why did banks become so overexposed in the run-up to the credit crunch? A risk manager at a large global bank--someone whose job it was to make sure that the firm did not take unnecessary risks -- explains in his own wordsIN JANUARY 2007 the world looked almost riskless. At the beginning of that year I gathered my team for an off-site meeting to identify our top five risks for the coming 12 months. We were paid to think about the downsides but it was hard to see where the problems would come from. Four years of falling credit spreads, low interest rates, virtually no defaults in our loan portfolio and historically low volatility levels: it was the most benign risk environment we had seen in 20 years.
As risk managers we were responsible for approving credit requests and transactions submitted to us by the bankers and traders in the front-line. We also monitored and reported the level of risk across the bank's portfolio and set limits for overall credit and market-risk positions.
"You have to worry about things you can do something about. I worry about people not being there and I want to make them aware." We should be mistrustful of knowledge. It is bad for us. Give a bookie 10 pieces of information about a race and he’ll pick his horses. Give him 50 and his picks will be no better, but he will, fatally, be more confident.We should be ecologically conservative – global warming may or may not be happening but why pollute the planet? – and probablistically conservative. The latter, however, has its limits. Nobody, not even Taleb, can live the sceptical life all the time – “It’s an art, it’s hard work.” So he doesn’t worry about crossing the road and doesn’t lock his front door – “I can’t start getting paranoid about that stuff.” His wife locks it, however.
He believes in aristocratic – though not, he insists, elitist – values: elegance of manner and mind, grace under pressure, which is why you must shave before being executed. He believes in the Mediterranean way of talking and listening. One piece of advice he gives everybody is: go to lots of parties and listen, you might learn something by exposing yourself to black swans.
I ask him what he thinks are the primary human virtues, and eventually he comes up with magnanimity – punish your enemies but don’t bear grudges; compassion – fairness always trumps efficiency; courage – very few people have this; and tenacity – tinker until it works for you.
Mr Gates also realised that making hardware and writing software could be stronger as separate businesses. Even as firms like Apple clung on to both the computer operating system and the hardware—just as mainframe companies had—Microsoft and Intel, which designed the PC’s microprocessors, blew computing’s business model apart. Hardware and software companies innovated in an ecosystem that the Wintel duopoly tightly controlled and—in spite of the bugs and crashes—used to reap vast economies of scale and profits. When mighty IBM unwittingly granted Microsoft the right to sell its PC operating system to other hardware firms, it did not see that it was creating legions of rivals for itself. Mr Gates did.....
And look at what happened when Mr Gates’s pragmatism failed him. Within Microsoft, they feared Bill for his relentless intellect, his grasp of detail and his brutal intolerance of anyone whom he thought “dumb”. But the legal system doesn’t do fear, and in a filmed deposition, when Microsoft was had up for being anti-competitive, the hectoring, irascible Mr Gates, rocking slightly in his chair, came across as spoilt and arrogant. It was a rare public airing of the sense of brainy entitlement that emboldened Mr Gates to get the world to yield to his will. On those rare occasions when Microsoft’s fortunes depended upon Mr Gates yielding to the world instead, the pragmatic circuit-breaker would kick in. In the antitrust case it did not, and, as this newspaper argued at the time, he was lucky that it did not lead to the break-up of his company.
The deal is, we've been told, that CEO pay is so high because demand for the 9-sigma talent of these Water Walking Wonders, so very beyond your and my shriveled imaginations, wildly exceeds supply when it comes to the 500 jobs as Fortune 500 CEOs. I contend that there are exactly 500 Guys (almost all guys, hence I can safely use the term) who believe that line of reasoning—namely the 500 CEOs of the F500 companies. (I guess I could also throw in the heads of the biggest search firms, who unearthed many of these so-far-beyond-the-pale dudes, which perhaps puts the total at 505 True Believers.)The Inspiring Invincibles! Chuck Prince (Citigroup, formerly head of)! Stan O'Neal (Merrill Lynch, formerly head of)! Angelo Mozilo (Countrywide, formerly head of)! Tough cookies, each one. And yet, somehow, on their watches, The Three Geniuses allowed their firms, through grotesque negligence—maybe silliness or Theaters of the Absurd would be better words if the stakes weren't so high—to get into positions in which tens upon tens of BILLIONS of greenbacks had to be written off from their books of account. Dodger, my 5-year-old Aussie, could have done a better job. (He could have bitten anybody who tried to make a $500K loan to someone who had never had a job or paid a bill and signed his name with an "X"; and peed on the pants of any 22-year-old University of Chicago PhD who said, "With my clever algorithm I've designed what's called a 'derivative'—it'll make risk a thing of the past." Yes, had Dodger bitten and peed on schedule, the likes of Citigroup would be ten or twenty billion ahead of their current position.) But, since the demand is so strong for the 500 different-from-mere-vice-presidents-Monumental-Management-Marvels, and the supply is so short, The Three Geniuses, on the basis of "Upside Potential," were able to chalk up about a half BILLION buckaroos on their pay stubs over the last five years, while busily installing the tools necessary for Global Economic Meltdown. Well, I guess that means they're "excellent" at something. Isn't there some line about wool & eyes & pulling? (In most cases, their pay deals, especially the parts about "if you turn out to be an idiot, we'll pay you a king's ransom to clean out your desk," were effectively set before they set foot in the executive suite. Wow, I wanna piece of that action!)
At 6 on a Wednesday morning, Jim Bourgart is already 15 minutes into a 175-minute commute by foot, bus, train and foot again. From downtown San Francisco he'll catch an Amtrak motor coach to the Emeryville station, where he'll sit 20 minutes on a hard plastic bench waiting for the 6:40 to Sacramento.He doesn't mind as long as he is moving. It is the lost sleep time in the waiting room that hurts. Since the Capitol Corridor runs both the bus and the train, you'd think it could tighten the time-cushion allowed for traffic that never appears on the eastbound bridge.
"I could use those extra 20 minutes, or even 10 or 5," says Bourgart, who starts his day with a 12-minute walk in the dark from his SoMa condo to the bus stop at the Market Street entrance to Bloomingdale's. "Every minute counts, especially in the morning."
The Capitol Corridor is a line made possible by the voters, who in 1990 approved Prop. 116 to provide state funding for intercity passenger rail service. Until 1998, there were only four trains each direction per day and the morning commute was essentially westbound only. Now there are 16 roundtrips. The State of California owns the rolling stock, Union Pacific owns the tracks, BART supplies administration, Amtrak staffs the trains and stations and a joint powers authority oversees it. The Capitol Corridor is like Caltrain with more layers of agencies.
Kurt Matzler, Franz Bailom and Todd A. Mooradian:
Should executives make decisions based on what their “gut” tells them? Lately that idea has lost some favor, as technology’s ability to accumulate and analyze data has rapidly increased — supplanting, according to some accounts, the high-level manager’s need to draw heavily on intuition. But intuition needs some rescuing from its detractors, and the place to start is by clarifying what it really is, and how it should be developed.Intuition is not a magical sixth sense or a paranormal process; nor does it signify the opposite of reason or random and whimsical decision making. Rather, intuition is a highly complex and highly developed form of reasoning that is based on years of experience and learning, and on facts, patterns, concepts, procedures and abstractions stored in one’s head.
In this article, the authors draw on examples from the worlds of chess, neuroscience and business — especially Austria’s KTM Sportmotorcycle AG — to show that intuitive decision making should not be prematurely buried. They point out that although the study of intuition has not been extensively explored as a part of management science, studies reveal that several ingredients are critical to intuition’s development: years of domain-specific experience; the cultivation of personal and professional networks; the development of emotional intelligence; a tolerance for mistakes; a healthy sense of curiosity; and a sense of intuition’s limits.
Margalit Mathan and Peter August found themselves caught in a maze of medical appointments and conflicting professional opinions when their 7-year-old daughter developed serious eye problems related to her juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.The Berkeley family decided to consult yet another professional. They turned to a health care advocate, an adviser who specializes in helping patients and their families cut through the health care bureaucracy to find the help they need.
"It's been this huge roller coaster with the medical system and negotiating her different needs and the different information we're getting from different doctors," said Mathan, a high school psychologist. Her daughter, Siona, was diagnosed two years ago with arthritis, a condition that can cause eye inflammation and, in Siona's case, led to glaucoma.
Private health care advocacy is a new and growing field emerging at a time when an increasing number of Americans find themselves dealing with a chronic disease, aging family members or the bureaucracy of health insurance.
A professional advocate might have some background in health care, such as nursing or medical social work. But the business of health advocacy is unregulated, and people who call themselves a health advocate might have no training other than helping a family member through a difficult illness.
Guy Kawasaki interviews new Madison resident Penelope Trunk:
Question: Will getting an MBA or any other type of advanced degree be a good use of time and money since I can’t find a job?Answer: No. If you can’t find a job, then you should invest in something like better grooming, or a better resume, or a coach for poor social skills. These are the things that keep people from getting jobs. Instead of running back to school, figure out why you can’t get a job, because maybe it’s something that a degree can’t overcome.
Grad school generally makes you less employable, not more employable. For example, people who get a graduate degree in the humanities would have had a better chance of surviving the Titanic than getting a tenured teaching job.
These issues pale in comparison to one problem that could make or break Toyota’s North American operations: their relationship with their hourly workers. In a confidential memo that accidentally ended up in workers’ hands, Seiichi Sudo, president of Engineering and Manufacturing in North America, discussed the cost of American labor and the steps they need to take to control those costs.Ed Wallace on the upcoming truck wars.
The memo, which was inadvertently stored on a shared computer drive, states the US auto industry pays some of the highest manufacturing wages in the world. It compares American wages to those in France and Japan (50 percent higher) and Mexico (500 percent higher). They project their American labor costs will increase by $900m over the next four years.
Bogle believes investors should simply buy the lowest-cost index funds available and hold them forever. His rule of thumb is to take your age minus 10 and hold that percentage of your assets in a total bond market index fund and the rest in a total stock market index fund. For example, a 30-year old would put 20 percent in bonds and 80 percent in stocks.Bogle wrote the excellent "Battle for the Soul of Capitalism".
This strategy nearly eliminates "the two greatest enemies of equity investing -- expenses and emotions," Bogle said.
Bogle's attitudes have barely changed since he started the first index fund in August 1976.
That fund, now called Vanguard Index 500, has about $112 billion in retail assets and is the second-largest fund after American Funds' Growth Fund of America, according to Morningstar.
When he died in 1848, John Jacob Astor was America's richest man, leaving a fortune of $20 million that had been earned mainly from real estate and fur trading. Despite his riches, Astor's business was mainly a one-man show. He employed only a handful of workers, most of them clerks. This was typical of his time, when the farmer, the craftsman, the small partnership and the independent merchant ruled the economy. Only 50 years later, almost everything had changed. Giant industrial enterprises -- making steel, producing oil, refining sugar and much more -- had come to dominate.
The rise of big business is one of the seminal events in American history, and if you want to think about it intelligently, you consult historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr., its pre-eminent chronicler. At 88, Chandler has retired from the Harvard Business School but is still churning out books and articles. It is an apt moment to revisit his ideas because the present upheavals in business are second only to those of a century ago.
Until Chandler, the emergence of big business was all about titans. The Rockefellers, Carnegies and Fords were either "robber barons'' whose greed and ruthlessness allowed them to smother competitors and establish monopolistic empires. Or they were "captains of industry'' whose genius and ambition laid the industrial foundations for modern prosperity. But when Chandler meticulously examined business records, he uncovered a more subtle story. New technologies (the railroad, telegraph and steam power) favored the creation of massive businesses that needed -- and, in turn, gave rise to -- superstructures of professional managers: engineers, accountants and supervisors.
While many U.S. manufacturers are decamping to greener, and cheaper, pastures overseas, Bobcat, a division of Ingersoll-Rand Co. Ltd., has found advantages sticking close to its North Dakota roots to build the little machines that, among other things, are used to clean barns, dig dirt and plow snow. Bobcat has exploited its location to keep a finger on the pulse of its core market of small landscaping and construction contractors, helping it quickly develop and ship products. Also, the company's rural setting, executives say, has bred the kind of culture where problems are solved with the can-do, make-do ethos of the farm.
"There are a lot of barriers any foreign producer has to overcome to give us a real challenge," says Richard F. Pedtke, the president of Ingersoll-Rand's compact vehicle division.
For example, the company usually can deliver any of the hundreds of attachments it sells for its machines to a customer within four days, a feat almost impossible and certainly costly for any company with long supply lines stretching overseas. And by keeping manufacturing, engineering, and marketing closely linked, with people in those roles sometimes living across the street from each other, the company is better able to anticipate how markets are shifting and find new applications for its machines, says Mr. Pedtke.
The most enduring and intriguing California politician of our generation is sitting in a sidewalk café, enjoying a balmy offshore breeze in this city's upscale Belmont Shore district. Yet not a single passerby knows it's him.I voted for Jerry once, in the 1992 Presidential Primary.
Laid-back shoppers stream past in linen sundresses and camouflage shorts. This decidedly un-hip man is slightly out of place in his conservative gray suit, fussy dress shirt and white Carroll O'Connor eyebrows. He's not Arnold, instant traffic-stopper. Yet if anyone peered closely, they'd probably recognize the burning eyes of Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, the darkly handsome upstart governor of the 1970s, now a gray and balding 68-year-old.
He's just emerged from a nearly invisible summer to launch a blatantly negative TV ad against his rival for attorney general of California, and he's finally granting interviews -- including one to me. Barring a brilliant turnaround by his lesser-known but respected competitor, Republican state Sen. Charles Poochigian of Fresno, Mr. Brown will be the next California attorney general.
If you want to change something in your life, it's common to try to stop the behaviors you don't like. While this certainly seems logical, it seldom works. The reason is simple - it unintentionally creates a vacuum where the old behaviors used to be. And since nature hates a vacuum it will fill it with anything it can find - usually the very behaviors you're trying to stop since they're so familiar. Instead of stopping certain behaviors, try focusing on what you want to create - and the new behaviors you need to get there. Eventually, with practice, new behaviors will develop enough muscle to naturally replace the old ones.
MONEY Magazine and Salary.com researched hundreds of jobs, considering their growth, pay, stress-levels and other factors. These careers ranked highest
When James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras wrote their hugely popular 1994 book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, they began by stating clearly that they did not mean to write about visionary leaders. Their goal was to find visionary companies -- the crown jewels of their industries -- and discover what made them extraordinary. Then questions arose about the extent to which the principles of Built to Last might apply to individuals. That sparked another investigation that has now led to a follow-up book, Success Built to Last, which will be published by Wharton School Publishing later this year.
Savvy companies understand the competitive value of talented people and spend considerable time identifying and recruiting high-caliber individuals wherever they can be found. The trouble is that too many companies pay too little attention to allocating their internal talent resources effectively. Few companies use talented people in a competitively advantageous way—by maximizing their visibility and mobility and creating work experiences that help them feed and develop their expertise. Many a frustrated manager has searched in vain for the right person for a particular job, knowing that he or she works somewhere in the company. And many talented people have had the experience of getting stuck in a dead-end corner of a company, never finding the right experiences and challenges to grow, and, finally, bailing out
Carol Bartz has outlasted most CEOs of big companies. She has been chief executive of Autodesk for the past 14 years, when the median tenure is just five years. She led the Silicon Valley software company through economic ups and downs. In May, Ms. Bartz will relinquish her CEO post and become executive chairman. But her longevity as CEO gives her a rare perspective on what it takes to weather mistakes and business cycles and to be an agent of change.
Don't rest on your honeymoon-period laurels.
When she first became CEO, Ms. Bartz joked that her task was "playing Wendy to the Lost Boys of Autodesk." The company had one product, profits were sagging and employees, who brought their dogs and cats to the office, weren't used to answering to anyone. Even by Silicon Valley standards, the atmosphere was chaotic, choking creativity.
I sat there listening to the Ford Motor Company press conference Monday morning - as first Bill Ford, Jim Padilla and then Mark Fields outlined the "Way Forward," confirming the elimination of up to 30,000 jobs and the closings of 14 manufacturing facilities over the next several years, while basically admitting that the company was culturally bankrupt, bureaucratically paralyzed, and woefully and relentlessly clueless about how to function in the modern automotive world - and the first thought that came to my mind is that it's a flat-out miracle this iconic American company has managed to survive this long.I have to agree with Peter. Reading the blowback from Ford's Monday announcements, I, too wondered where the company is heading, and, if indeed it has been so rudderless, how has it survived?
Monday morning's presentation, designed to take us under the tent with Ford executives thinking and talking out loud for the assembled media, financial analysts and a worldwide Ford company audience, was a lurid combination of multiple mea culpas and a blatant pep rally - and the net-net of it was that it exposed Ford to be a company so far out of touch and so far removed from being a competitive force in the U.S. market that I was literally stunned at what I was hearing.
Changing planes at O'hare recently, I stood next to an early 20's woman trying to fly standby to Dayton, Ohio. I discovered that she structured work to support her travel wants.
My fellow traveller said that she joined the Air Force out of High School to "see the world". The Air Force promptly sent her to Dayton, Ohio for the length of her tour. Now in the AF reserves, she works part time for United Airlines loading bags at the Dayton Airport and for the local Marriott hotel (also part time). These jobs provide incredible travel benefits - unless one cannot obtain a timely seat.
The recent fruits of her work?The 49ers had not bothered to interview college coaches for the head-coaching job in part because its front-office analysis found that most of the college coaches hired in the past 20 years to run N.F.L. teams had failed. But in Schwartz's view, college coaches tended to fail in the N.F.L. mainly because the pros hired the famous coaches from the old-money schools, on the premise that those who won the most games were the best coaches. But was this smart? Notre Dame might have a good football team, but how much of its success came from the desire of every Catholic in the country to play for Notre Dame?
Looking for fresh coaching talent, Schwartz analyzed the offensive and defensive statistics of what he called the "midlevel schools" in search of any that had enjoyed success out of proportion to their stature. On offense, Texas Tech's numbers leapt out as positively freakish: a midlevel school, playing against the toughest football schools in the country, with the nation's highest scoring offense. Mike Leach had become the Texas Tech head coach before the 2000 season, and from that moment its quarterbacks were transformed into superstars. In Leach's first three seasons, he played a quarterback, Kliff Kingsbury, who wound up passing for more yards than all but three quarterbacks in the history of major college football. When Kingsbury graduated (he is now with the New York Jets), he was replaced by a fifth-year senior named B.J. Symons, who threw 52 touchdown passes and set a single-season college record for passing yards (5,833). The next year, Symons graduated and was succeeded by another senior - like Symons, a fifth-year senior, meaning he had sat out a season. The new quarterback, who had seldom played at Tech before then, was Sonny Cumbie, and Cumbie's 4,742 passing yards in 2004 was the sixth-best year in N.C.A.A. history.
A substantial portion of older Americans now in the work force chose to return there after retiring, and how well they're enjoying their labor now depends a lot on whether they're self-employed, according to two new reports.About 10% of workers 40 and older are retirees who've returned to the work force, according to a recent survey that screened more than 17,200 workers to find retirees who went back to work, conducted for Putnam Investments by Brightwork Partners, a research firm.
Bradford C. Johnson, James M. Manyika, and Lareina A. Yee:
In today's developed economies, the significant nuances in employment concern interactions: the searching, monitoring, and coordinating required to manage the exchange of goods and services. Since 1997, extensive McKinsey research on jobs in many industries has revealed that globalization, specialization, and new technologies are making interactions far more pervasive in developed economies. Currently, jobs that involve participating in interactions rather than extracting raw materials or making finished goods account for more than 80 percent of all employment in the United States. And jobs involving the most complex type of interactions—those requiring employees to analyze information, grapple with ambiguity, and solve problems—make up the fastest-growing segment.This shift toward more complex interactions has dramatic implications for how companies organize and operate. In the mid-1990s, McKinsey studied the growing impact of interactions on the way people exchange ideas and information and how businesses cooperate or compete. In 1997, "A revolution in interaction" presented the findings of that research.
There are no guarantees that GM will succeed with its turnaround plant. That means there are no long-term guarantees for the Janesville plant.
But in today's rapidly changing economy, there are few guarantees for anyone.
The lesson for Wisconsin is that knowledge is vital. The knowledge-based economy is transforming all industries, from auto makers to software developers to genetic engineers. The state should invest in its knowledge assets its schools, colleges and universities. They will not only produce the educated work force we will depend upon but also the research that will generate many new businesses.
Families should also invest in knowledge the education and re-education that will be required to prepare for the changing job market.
More than half of female workers have already left or are seriously considering escaping conventional nine-to-five working in a bid to invent their own working patterns, according to a new report.
The survey by recruitment and HR consultancy Hudson of more than 1,000 UK employees and 500 employers has found the majority (84 per cent) of professional women believe the nine-to-five routine is being spurned by their gender.
They are instead preferring to follow a career path offering flexibility and professional autonomy rather than fit in with the demands of the corporate world
All must be corralled in one place and then processed using Allen's core mantra of "Do it, delegate it, defer it". If the action takes less than two minutes, do it there and then. If longer, you either hand off to someone else or defer it into your pending tray. Otherwise it is trashed or filed. The in-tray thereby becomes sacrosanct. You never put stuff back into "In". Never.Getting Things Done by David Allen
On the web, for example, Getting Things Done (GTD) has gone supernova. Web and IT professionals have taken Allen's core ideas and refined them into ever more effective tips called "life hacks". Adherents swap these across a broad network of blogs, wikis and websites such as 43Folders.com - all amid a considerable amount of one-upmanship over who has the biggest and best system.
Rajesh Setty [PDF]:
Why should you distinguish yourself?
Short answer: Being part of the commodity crowd erodes your value.
Long answer: Technology professionals worldwide are getting caught in a tsunami of massive commoditization. Technologies are changing very fast. What seemed hot today is not hot anymore. There is a constant pressure to give more, be more effective, be more efficient and be more productive. This forces most technology professionals to go after “short-term skills”. Of course, going after “short-term skills” will provide “short-term results” but will hurt them in the “long-run”. Competency in technical skills is necessary to succeed in this world but they are not sufficient to thrive. The question is what can one do differently so that he or she can distinguish and move above the commodity crowd ? The goal of this manifesto is to provide 25 ways to do just that.Bonus: You have reached where you are by doing whatever you have done so far. If you need to leapfrog and succeed beyond dreams, continuing to do whatever you have done in the past may not be the answer. You need to think and be different. In other words, you need to distinguish yourself!
Colleges and training programs aren't keeping up with the demand for skilled workers in a variety of industries, the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development has found. Rough state projections show Wisconsin needs 2,430 registered nurses to enter the work force each year until 2012. But in 2004, only 1,755 nursing graduates took the state exam to become registered nurses.Meanwhile, Joel Dresang writes in the Milwuakee Journal-Sentinel that we don't have enough jobs for graduates.
Wisconsin's construction industry needs a projected 1,020 new carpenters a year, but only 340 carpentry graduates are coming out of the state's apprenticeship and tech college programs.
"In many cases, the jobs aren't here," says Karen Stauffacher, assistant dean and director of the Business Career Center at UW-Madison.
As of last week, more than a third of the job offers accepted by the business school's spring graduates were with companies based in Minneapolis (18% of the accepted offers) and Chicago (17%).
Only 31% of accepted offers were from Wisconsin employers, mostly in Madison (13%) and Milwaukee (8%). On average, the Chicago employers offered salaries $10,000 higher than in Madison, and Minneapolis companies offered about $7,000 more.
Surviving a meeting today, I recalled the essential skill that makes a great salesperson: the ability to listen, sometimes for extensive periods of time. I'm always amazed when a person selling something can't be bothered to actually listen to what the buyer has to say (another way one might put this, when the cluetrain made a stop, they failed to board).
It can be difficult, for sure. I remember one meeting, where there was 3 or 4 minutes of silence. Anyone involved in sales and marketing should become familiar with the term markets are conversations. Learn more at the cluetrain.
 | Pearly Kiley - wishoops.net [PDF Version 103K] |
"With all this talent, why arent we winning more games?""My kid averaged 20 points in summer league, why isnt he playing more?"
"Why are we walking the ball up the floor all the time?"
"I wish we had the old coach back."
These unfounded sentiments were also a major reason why over 80 coaches
chose to resign, were relieved of duty or retired since last season.There are coaches who point to AAU basketball and all its dramatically improving impact. Some blame school administrators for showing more allegiance to parents than them in disputes over individual roles and playing time. Still others say it takes too much time and impossible patience to deal with the increasingly overzealous parent.
At the high school level, the rewards arent tangible, said former Waupaca coach Tim Locum, who resigned after last season and is currently an assistant coach at UW-Oshkosh.
There is no shoe deal, radio show, big contract, national TV exposure or endorsements. What keeps a coach going is the joy of watching young men mature, the pat on the back from an AD, a thank you from a parent. Instances such as those have continued to slowly dwindle, if not disappear altogether. And what is left is over 80 Wisconsin Boys Varsity positions turning over in one year almost 20% of the schools!David Bernhardt raised some related issues (kids & sports) recently at www.schoolinfosystem.orgAre parents and fans simply out of control?
I point to my hometown of Cuba City as an example, where longtime coach Jerry Petitgoue has won 654 games and is the all-time leader in coaching wins in Wisconsin history.
If two weeks from now they held a referendum on the boys basketball job, and whether he should keep his job or be fired, I believe that vote would actually be very close. What does this say about the state of high school athletics in Wisconsin?
(Im not sure its an altogether new thing, though. Hollywood captured the idea perfectly in Hoosiers; George, Milan Highs interim coach before coach Norman Dale, summed it up perfectly:
"Look mister, there's two kinds of dumb ... the guy that gets naked and runs out in the snow and barks at the moon, and the guy who does the same thing in my living room. The first one don't matter, and the second one you're kinda forced to deal with."
How much money do we think George would be spending on his kid to play AAU basketball nowadays? How crazy would he have gotten when, after spending all this money, his kid wasnt playing significant minutes or getting scholarship offers? The issue today is that parents handle the problems much more subtly and administrations arent near as loyal as principal Cletus.
In the 1950s parents simply bought a basketball, in some cases a hoop, and kids became great players the old fashioned way, by working on their fundamentals and developing a jump shot -- yes, a jump shot (Jimmy Chitwood made 98% of his shots!). The point is, too many parents are spending too much money nowadays, and when results dont materialize, they cast their blame on the easiest and most visible target.
Its human nature for parents to see the best in their own kids, said Cuba City coach and Executive Director of the WBCA Jerry Petitgoue.
Kids are starting to play competitively in third and fourth grade nowadays and most of the time its parents that are coaching. With this, parents start thinking they know the game as well as the high school coach and therein lies the problem.
All you have to do is sit in the crowd at any basketball game and youre guaranteed to learn more about the game from some parents and fans than youd learn if you were listening to John Wooden himself.
Dont think so? Just go to your local pub and theyll tell ya.
Wisconsin Rapids coach Dan Witter was forewarned well before he got into coaching.
An administrator who was also a former coach warned me that most of my friends that have kids will likely stop talking to me if I dont play, or cut, their kid, and as a coach you have to go into it knowing your not going to be friends with everyone and your going to upset some people.
Sound fun yet?
The Time Issue
In many castes, coaches have families of their own. How can they be expected to do all the work that goes into coaching in todays climate?As a head coach, Locum said, taking a deep breath, you are expected to know the game, teach it to your players, relate to their adolescent minds and emotions, scout and break down your opponents, come early, stay late, watch film, track your players academic and behavioral progress, fund raise to get the extras everyone else has, help and inspire your youth coaches and programs, make sure the high school assistants are prepared, and oh yeah.win most if not all of your games."
Despite all these factors, most coaches truly enjoy their job, work hard, and want the best for the kids they coach. Problems arise when you factor in everything coaches simply dont have enough time to do, while still doing the job the way they think it should be done.
"With the changing role of today's family, it is not uncommon for both spouses to work, WIAA Associate Director Deb Hauser said. Thus, the pressures and expectations at home require both parents to provide time for household duties. Many young coaches will try coaching for a short time, feel the pressures from parents and fans, and opt to spend more time with their own families instead.
We all know that anyone who coaches at the high school doesn't do it for the money but rather for the love of the game. Thus, the transition back to spending time with one's own family has become the more popular choice."
Choosing between your children and spouse and dealing with what some of these coaches do is simple, isnt it?Whats easy is criticizing an overworked and underpaid coach, getting pleasure from Monday morning quarterbacking every move he or she makes. This is becoming the reality for more and more coaches, who rarely get the great gratitude and respect from their communities that they deserve.
New game, new eraThen again, how can we expect kids to listen to a coach trying to teach them fundamentals of the game? Consider the influences on todays players: Michael Jordan and the glorification of the slam dunk, AAUs run-and-gun style, ESPN SportsCenter, and the And 1 Tour.
Kids are no longer dedicated and willing to sacrifice to be the best they can be, said Oshkosh North coach Frank Schade. They simply have too many other outside influences and interests.
A daily look at WisHoops offers confirmation. Threads on how to jump higher, the states best dunker, peoples favorite player on the AND 1 Tour. These posts are fun, but they are also strong statement about this generation of basketball players.
Im still waiting for someone to ask how to shoot better, the best way to work on your ball skills, or how to best position yourself to become a better rebounder.
A big problem is that kids are playing over 50 games in the spring and summer nowadays and think thats good enough. Many are becoming more interested in playing during the summer with their AAU team and less in playing with their high school team during the school year, posing several problems for high school coaches.
Whats a high school coach to do when they rightfully bench a kid for lack of hustle or insubordination, only to have an AAU coach swoop in after the game, consoling and assuring the player that things will be different when summer rolls around.
While most AAU coaches support their high school counterparts 100 percent, there are some out there who undermine the authority of the high school coach. Worse, yet, they can potentially damage the attitude and work ethic of the player, which hurts them greatly if they continue to play at college level where things dont come so easily.
The bottom line is that while some parents and AAU coaches are busy enabling kids that arent working as hard as they should be, the people getting hurt ever more are the varsity coaches.
Wheres the support from the top?If you hire a coach that wins games, treats all kids equally, and has respect from fellow coaches, thats all you ask for. Isnt it?
You would certainly think so, but what happened at Cedarburg High School this offseason tells a different story.
A few months after the season ended, Cedarburg coach Ben Siebert received a letter from school board President Jack Dobson. The letter indicated that the school was seeking a new coach but gave no reason as to why, saying only that the move wasnt inspired by the teams prior performance.
The letter asked Siebert to attend a school board meeting, where they would vote on whether or not to retain him as the head coach. The meeting took place behind closed doors, despite requests by Coach Siebert and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to open it to the public.
Coach Siebert read a prepared statement, which received not a single word response from anyone on the board. Three and a half hours later, Siebert was told he would not be returning.
The shadowy decision left him piecing together a complex puzzle without a picture.
The school boards position was that it retained the right to look for a new coach if it was an attempt to improve the high quality of service the district provided to its students.
Which begs the question: what, exactly, was it about Sieberts performance what wasnt high quality?
Siebert had a zero tolerance policy when it came to violating the rules, and when three of his players admitted their involvement in conduct against the athletic code they were dismissed from the team. The violations took place when the team and coaches stayed at the home of one of Sieberts relative in Sheboygan while participating in a Christmas tournament in 2003.
Two families filed a lawsuit against the school following Sieberts decision, citing their sons emotional distress that came from being thrown off the team. The parents alleged a lack of supervision on the part of the coaches, but Siebert and others have refuted that claim.
Keep in mind, though, that both sets of parents signed contracts before the season agreeing to the zero tolerance policy. In addition, the school has since adopted a new policy that it sees as much stricter than the one formerly in place.
One can only assume that Cedarburgs new coach will think twice before enforcing these new rules, lest he face a similar fate as Siebert.
"What he brings to high school basketball is great respect," fellow North Shore Conference coach Paul Hepp told the Journal Sentinel in June about Siebert. "His players are always very respectful, and they play the game the way that it's supposed to be played. I think he's a great all-around coach and gets the most out of them and their potential, year in and year out."
Oh, and then theres Sieberts performance on the court: he coached his players to a 56-33 record in a tough North Shore conference before being dismissed.
Schools boards and administrators are asking for a revolving door of coaches if they continue this process. Precedents are being set for how to easily remove coaches, and this trend will only continue to hurt the game.
What can coaches do?There are no definite answers to these problems. That said, here are a few words of caution and advice to anyone considering a high school coaching position.
Get support before taking job
Potential coaches need to demand backing from the administration when interviewing for jobs. Otherwise, they should simply walk away and say no thank you. Without the full support of Superintendent, Principal, and School Board, you simply wont survive in todays climate in most cities.
Have thicker skin and ignore the criticism.
If you work hard and can hit the pillow each night knowing you did your best, nothing any parent or fan should get under your skin. As one coach once said, If I stay out of the bars I never hear a negative word about me.
Pretty good advice I think.
Communicate and have a dialogue with parents.
If youre truthful with parents before the season starts and let them know what you want from their son/daughter, I think it can help alleviate potential problems. If you appear to care and show them you want the best for their child, I think they will show you respect you deserve. The worst thing you can do is give them more ammo to use by ignoring them and showing them disrespect; after all, you are coaching their child and you have to expect them to see things differently and be blinded by emotion sometimes.
Have fun coaching.
Some coaches never seem to be enjoying themselves, and I think that translates to kids not having fun playing the game. Basketball is a great game and should be played and coached with enthusiasm. Sixteen- and 17-year-old kids dont like it when everything is negative and often take that negativity home with them, opening up the potential for parents to blame the coach.
Continue your hard work and youll be successful.
The greatest coach of all-time, John Wooden, defines success better than
anyone:Success is peace of mind that is the direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.
Furthermore, only one person can ultimately judge the level of your success you. Think about that for a moment.
I believe that is what true success is all about. Anything stemming from that success is simply a by-product, whether it be the score, the trophy, a national championship, fame, or fortune. They are all by-products of success, rather than success itself, indicators that you perhaps succeeded in the more important contest.
That real contest, of course, is striving to reach your personal best, and that is totally under your control.
When you achieve that, you have achieved success. Period! You are a winner and only you fully know if you won.
A great place to end I think.
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Rick Romell's summary of CFED's Development Report Cards for the States does not shed a whole lot of new thinking on Wisconsin's entrepreneurial dilemna:
Candinas Chocolatier is the type of business we should seek to emulate. Markus started the company in 1994, after completing an apprenticeship in Switzerland. Today, over 10 years later, he is still in business and clearly enjoys what he's doing. The attention to detail illustrated in the product photos above demonstrates the devotion required to succeed. Let's call it passion. Another interesting local firm, Planet Propaganda created his packaging.
Candinas' products are certainly not inexpensive, nor are they run of the mill. Rather, Markus has taken a quality position in the market and continued to improve his chocolates. This is a very long term approach to business. I need say no more on this subject as Consumer Reports discovered:
The best chocolates came from lesser-known makers, the magazine pronounced in its February issue. Lesser-known as in Candinas Chocolates, of Verona, Wisconsin (www.candinas.com). Candinas was one of only three chocolate makers nationwide to achieve the rating of excellent, ranking behind Martines Chocolates and La Maison du Chocolat in that category.The winning assortment was the Candinas 36-piece box (price: $41). Ultra-smooth dark and milk chocolates with especially good hazelnut, caramel, and liqueur-flavored centers, praises the magazine, accentuating the fresh cream and butter notes.
Fine chocolates from Wisconsin may boggle the mind, but consider: chocolatier Markus Candinas, 32, has Swiss parents and trained as a confectioner in their homeland.
Great chocolate makes perfect sense - we have fantastic dairy products. Perhaps we'd be better off further leveraging our dairy business (designer milks and more cheese varieties?).
Entrepreneurs are born, not trained. We simply, as Romell's article notes, need to find more people willing to give it a try.
A useful book, sort of related is Mintzburg's Managers Not MBA's.
A term coined in 1942 by Joseph Schumpeter in his work, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, to denote a "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one."
I thought of this concept (which I learned in High School many years ago) and refined at the UW recently while visiting with a local small business owner. This guy's firm formerly sold voice mail systems. That business has changed quite a bit therefore, he is now selling services and IT solutions including replication, archive and "secure" email products.
I told him that I was impressed by his ability to zig and zag as the market changed. It's clear that every worker today, at any level must be ready for new challenges and opportunities, as this article on the NY Times outsourcing plans illustrates.
GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt gave this useful commencement speech at Dartmouth this past spring. Immelt formerly ran Waukesha based GE Medical, prior to replacing Jack Welch.
This is the second graduation I have attended at Dartmouth, and here is what I remember from the commencement speaker at my graduation. Hmm, hmm, see, so I know my role today is to be brief and I promise to pay more attention this time...Via Powerline.[T]o be honest I'm a little intimidated [giving this speech]. You know The Dartmouth quoted students calling me an uninspiring and uninteresting choice for commencement speaker. You would have preferred Bono or Jon Stewart or Colin Powell and you have every right to expect that the fortune your parents paid for your education should get you a world leader. But do you really believe that an aging rock star would speak to the class that created Keggy, a human beer keg, to be the new college mascot?
Maureen Wallenfang profiles wedding photojournalist/portrait photographer Lindsey Van Roy