Excuse me for wanting to stretch Wisconsin’s glorious victory over Kentucky in the NCAA Basketball Final Four into another day. But I can’t resist. There are business leadership lessons for us to learn. Kentucky is mostly a one-and-done school when it comes to basketball. Coach Calipari recruits young men ready for the pros to spend their requisite waiting-year in college. According to the coach’s website, “Since the 2008 draft, 24 of Coach Cal’s players have been taken in the NBA Draft, including 17 first-rounders.” For seven straight drafts, he’s produced a top-10 pick, something no other school has accomplished. Bo Ryan, the coach of the Wisconsin Badgers, has had some future pro players but for the most part grooms the less talented in whom he sees terrific potential and a willingness to play Badger basketball. As a freshman, Frank Kaminsky looked nothing like…
Disrupting the workplace
In 1989, the CEO of my global employer allowed me to work from home rather than demand I move halfway across the US to be near corporate headquarters. Two technologies made his decision possible: Overnight delivery and an early fax machine. I was the first distributed worker other than our sales and product service representatives. Flash forward to 2013. I worked for IBM where 45% of its global workforce (and growing) worked from home offices. Those of us already virtual referred to IBM as “I’m By Myself.” We used a shared on-line knowledge base so poorly structured that we often entered the IBM site pretending to be a customer—it was the fastest way to find the information that we needed to complete a pitch deck. Many a day, I thought I was working for a computer, not a company. Distributed work is an…
Business model excellence from Badger Coach Bo Ryan
A sports fan, I am not. So why was this otherwise buttoned up intellectual screaming (and at times uncharacteristically swearing) while watching the Badger’s win Saturday’s battle against Arizona? Because I love Bo Ryan’s leadership and my spirit is awakened by what his system represents. In a culture that increasingly celebrates individual excellence, Bo’s business model is centered on teamwork as its competitive advantage – unselfish, disciplined, focused and motivated by a deeper purpose. Bo wants to make an enduring, positive difference in the lives of young men. I challenge anyone to identify a corporate or political leader as gifted. Ryan, interviewed minutes after his team’s victory, had just achieved a lifelong goal he shared with his recently deceased dad – mentor, role model, and source of hope after heart-breaking NCAA losses. Yet the first thing Bo does is to thank his team…