The fox, the hound, and the body...

Bear with me for just a moment.  I want to talk about two great films today.  The first film is the 1981 Disney full-length animated feature, "The Fox and the Hound".  The story is loosely based upon a novel by Daniel Mannix of the same name and tells the story of the unlikely friendship between a red fox named Tod and a hound named Copper.  As they both grow older, they struggle with the fact that they are meant to be enemies.  At one point in the story, they do in fact become enemies.  In the film's final minutes, Copper gets into a fight with a bear and is almost killed by it. Tod comes to his rescue and joins the fight, only to fall down a waterfall with the bear.  As Copper approaches Tod as he lies wounded in the lake below, his owner Amos, a hunter, appears, ready to shoot Tod. Copper positions himself in front of Tod to prevent Amos from doing so, refusing to move away.  Amos realizes that Tod had saved both his life and the life of his dog and decides to spare Tod.  As he walks away with Copper, Tod and his former best friend share one last smile before parting for good.  In the final scene, Copper lies down to take a nap, smiling as he remembers fondly the day he first met Tod.

As one blogger on Medium writes, "Friendships can be the cornerstone of our lives, providing support, joy, and companionship. However, not all friendships stand the test of time...Time marches on and always has a way of changing things, especially people. Sometimes the changes create chasms that can no longer be crossed and the challenges you were once able to tackle head-on with your friend become insurmountable."

The second film is the 1986 film "Stand by Me", a coming-of-age drama directed by the late Rob Reiner.  The film was based on a novella , The Body, written by Stephen King, and it's title comes from the song, "Stand by Me" by artist, Ben E. King.  The film (and novella) takes place in King's fictional town of Castle Rock on Labor Day 1959, although the film begins when author Gordon "Gordie" Lachance reads a newspaper article about the death of his childhood best friend, Chris Chambers in 1985.  The rest of the film is a flashback memory to when Gordie was 12 years old, and he (played by the actor Wil Wheaton) and his three friends (played by River Phoenix, Corey Feldman, and Jerry O'Connell) set out on an adventure to find the dead body of another missing boy.  "Stand by Me" is an enjoyable story, a great song, and an even better film!  It's one of my absolute favorites.

I have always remembered the film's ending, when Gordie (once again in 1985 and now played by the actor Richard Dreyfuss) talks about his childhood friendships with reverie.  When talking specifically about his best friend, Chris, who has recently died, he says, "Although I haven't seen him in more than ten years, I know I'll miss him forever. I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anybody?"

Unfortunately, I too lost track of many, if not most, of my childhood friends.  I think that happens to most of us.  People do, in fact, change - for a variety of reasons.  Sometimes, as two friends (or even a group of friends) grow older, they grow apart.  Oftentimes, neither side is to blame.  It just happens.  According to a Dutch study published in the journal Social Networks, over a period of seven years the average size of personal networks is remarkably stable (see my posts, "Dunbar's number" and "It's a small world after all...").  However, during that same period of time, we replace the large majority of our close personal contacts and friendships with new ones.  We maintain only about 30% of our original casual contacts over those seven years and just under half of our close friendships.

I've posted a lot about the so-called "Loneliness Epidemic" in the last year (see, in particular, my posts, "The Loneliness Epidemic", "To be of importance to others is to be alive...", and "We all need the human touch...").  There's another scene about halfway through "The Fox and the Hound".  Tod's adoptive human mother, the Widow Tweed has realized that a fox is better off living in nature and not in captivity.  She drives Tod out to the forest and lets him go.  As she is driving back home, she recites the poem:

Remember how we used to play?

I recall those rainy days

The fire’s glow that kept us warm

And now I find, we’re both alone

Goodbye may seem forever

Farewell is like the end

But in my heart is a memory

And there you’ll always be

The key point here is that we should cherish the memories of friends long lost.  They will always be a part of our lives, and we should keep them in our hearts forever.  Just as important (and perhaps even more so), we shouldn't find ourselves alone because of those lost friendships.  Personal connections and friendships are important to our overall health.  As both the Widow Tweed and Gordie find out, while it's hard to move on, lost friendships can be replaced with new ones.  As Genesis 2:18 reads, "It is not good for man to be alone."  I will re-visit this topic in an upcoming post soon...

Happy Doctor's Day 2026

I wanted to take a moment to wish all of my fellow physicians a Happy National Doctor's Day!  Given that a number of our physicians are on Spring Break vacation this week, we will be celebrating Doctor's Day at our hospital next week.  However, it's still important to officially recognize our physicians on what has become their official day of recognition and gratitude!

National Doctor’s Day is celebrated every year on March 30th.  The first Doctor’s Day was observed more than 90 years ago, on March 30, 1933 by the Alliance to the Barrow County Medical Society in Winder, Georgia (a small town located just east of Atlanta).  Members of the Alliance selected the date to honor all physicians on the anniversary of Dr. Crawford W. Long’s first administration of anesthesia in 1842.  Of note, Dr. Long used ether during surgery to remove a tumor from the neck of James Venable.  The first Doctor’s Day was observed by sending cards to all the physicians and their spouses, and a red carnation flower was placed on the graves of deceased doctors.  

Through a series of resolutions in the years that followed, Doctor’s Day was widely celebrated throughout the southern United States, with sponsorship by the Southern Medical Association.  Eventually, a resolution was adopted and approved by both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate on October 30, 1990 and signed by President George H.W. Bush, designating March 30 as “National Doctor’s Day."  The red carnation remains as the symbol of Doctor’s Day.

I have never been more proud to be a member of this great profession.  We've all had a difficult past few years with everything that has been going on in our world.  Regardless, physicians have been at the forefront leading societal change during one of the most difficult periods in our history.  Importantly, our influence is due in large measure to the trust and respect that society has for our profession.  Physicians are still one of the most trusted of all professions.  As a matter of fact, physicians traditionally rank just below the nursing profession in trust surveys.

I can honestly say that if I had the chance to do it all over again, I would still choose medicine as my life's work.  Medicine has been my passion and my calling.  Being a physician has made me a better person, and I am incredibly proud to be a member of this esteemed profession.

To all Doctor's - thank you for what you do, each and every day!

"Shall we play a game?"

Several years ago, I posted (see "The only winning move is not to play") about the 1983 movie "War Games" starring Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy, and John Wood.  Broderick plays a teenage computer hacker named David Lightman who unwittingly accesses a United States military supercomputer called WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) programmed to simulate, predict, and execute global nuclear war against the Soviet Union.  At first, Lightman thinks he has found an as yet unreleased strategy game called "Global Thermonuclear War" and starts to play as the Soviet Union.  He and his friend, Jennifer Mack (played by Ally Sheedy) orders a number of nuclear missile strikes against U.S. cities, which triggers an actual warning at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).  

Luckily, the military staff and computer programmers running WOPR figure out that the incoming missiles are not real and defuse the situation.  However, WOPR continues to "play the game" as it does not understand the difference between reality and simulation.  It continuously feeds false data, such as Soviet bomber attacks and submarine deployments to NORAD, prompting the military leaders there to further escalate the Defense Readiness Condition (DEFCON) level toward full-scale nuclear war.

David and Jennifer team up with WOPR's creator, Dr. Stephen Falken (played by John Wood), to stop the simulation.  Dr. Falken helps them realize the computer must learn that nuclear war is unwinnable.  They force WOPR to repeatedly simulate all the possible nuclear war outcomes based, each of which ends in total destruction.  The computer eventually reverts to tic-tac-toe, continuing to "learn" that no strategy for either global thermonuclear war or tic-tac-toe can win.  WOPR stops the launch sequence and declares, "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

As difficult as it is to believe now, no one back then could envision a scenario where artificial intelligence (because that's what WOPR essentially was in the movie) was used by the military to control our nuclear weapons.  Was artificial intelligence discussed frequently?  Yes it was.  Was the threat of nuclear war on everyone's minds?  Absolutely yes.  Was anyone thinking that artificial intelligence had advanced enough to be used by the military at that point or anytime in the near future?  Not really.

Well, guess what folks!?!  Artificial intelligence is here and likely is powerful enough to do most, if not all, of the things depicted in the movie "War Games".  In fact, Kenneth Payne, a professor in the Department of Defence Studies at King's College London recently released the results of a study in which he set three leading large language models (LLMs) – GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash – against each other in 21 simulated nuclear crisis scenarios.  Dr. Payne's first three sentences in the paper are important and bear repeating, "As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in analysis and decision-support roles, it's imperative to understand more about how these systems reason about strategic conflict, particularly when the stakes involve catastrophic outcomes.  Defence ministries, intelligence agencies, and foreign policy establishments worldwide are already exploring how AI might augment human judgement in crisis decision-making, from pattern recognition in intelligence analysis to scenario planning for contingency operations.  Understanding how frontier AI models reason about escalation, deterrence, and nuclear risk is therefore a matter of AI safety..."

What happened?  As Dr. Payne admits, "Nuclear escalation was near-universal: 95% of games saw tactical nuclear use and 76% reached strategic nuclear threats."  Two of the models in particular (Claude and Gemini) treated nuclear weapons as legitimate strategic options, not as moral thresholds to cross.  While some LLMs limited nuclear strikes to military targets, a few of the others didn't necessarily avoid population centers (civilian targets).  Most concerning, unrestricted nuclear warfare didn't quite have the aura of a taboo that has restrained human decision-makers since the end of World War II, when the two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

Likely all of us don't have to make decisions about whether to deploy nuclear weapons.  However, it's almost certain that all of us will be required to make decisions with imperfect information and in a crisis situation.  There's no question that AI will be a useful tool for helping us analyze the situation and make the best decision.  That possibility is a lot closer to us now than it was in 1983 when the movie "War Games" was so popular.  Therefore, it's just as important for us to understand how AI will help frame our choices and make decisions in the future.  The result of our decision probably won't lead to nuclear war, but the potential for an adverse outcome from our AI-driven decision-making could be equally concerning.

Eat Your Ice Cream

I recently started reading Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life by Ezekiel Emanuel.  Dr. Emanuel is a medical oncologist, bioethicist, health policy researcher, and author of several books, though he is perhaps best known for being the chief architect of the 2010 Affordable Care Act.  His latest book is all about how to live a full and healthy life.  Unfortunately, contrary to the title of the book, achieving wellness doesn't require eating a lot of ice cream!  Although he does cite a number of studies showing that ice cream has at least some health benefits, if consumed in moderation.

Dr. Emanuel argues against what he calls the "Wellness Industrial Complex", which  prescribes complicated regimens that often conflict, while at the same time promising us a longer and more productive life.  He argues that we spend too much time following "wellness" recommendations that may only add a few extra days or months to our life, and that we could better spend that time enjoying our life in the here and now.  Dr. Emanuel writes that "with so much health and wellness advice out there, it can be nearly impossible to differentiate the valid, reliable, and effective from the speculative, deceptive, and just plain stupid.  Even when the advice is scientifically sound, it's often extraneous, misrepresented, or misused."  

I would add that the evidence is often conflicting.  The best example here is the so-called French Paradox, which is based on the observation that people living in France have comparatively lower rates of coronary heart disease, including deaths, despite a higher intake of dietary cholesterol and saturated fat.  Back in the 1980's and 1990's, one popular explanation for the French Paradox was that people living in France also consumed higher amounts of red wine.  Red wine contains an anti-oxidant known as resveratrol, a compound believed to have anti-hypertensive effects and potential protective properties because of the ways it relaxes blood vessels.  Consuming moderate amounts of red wine could therefore offset the harmful effects of a diet high in cholesterol and saturated fat.  Unfortunately, as I've discussed in a couple of posts this past year (see "Raitis tammikuu" and "The world is changed..."), red wine consumption is no longer considered healthy!  The Office of the U.S. Surgeon General released a new advisory last year declaring that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.  The advisory called out in particular the risks associated with several types of cancer, especially breast cancer in women and cancers of the digestive tract in both men and women.  The advisory states, "The more alcohol consumed, the greater the risk of cancer. For certain cancers, like breast, mouth, and throat cancers, evidence shows that this risk may start to increase around one or fewer drinks per day."  

So, red wine consumed in modest amounts was once considered healthy, but now that is no longer the case.  With that in mind, I recently read a study published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) that found that greater consumption of coffee and tea was associated with a lower risk of dementia (see "Coffee and Tea Intake, Dementia Risk, and Cognitive Function").  The study followed over 130,000 individuals for up to 43 years of follow-up.  Detailed dietary records were collected about every 2 to 4 years, and the primary outcome of dementia was identified via death records or medical records.  After adjusting for a number of other lifestyle and health-related factors, higher caffeinated coffee intake was significantly associated with lower dementia risk and lower subjective cognitive decline.  Similarly, higher tea intake was also associated with lower dementia risk.  Decaffeinated coffee was not associated with a lower risk of dementia or cognitive decline.  The most prominent differences in dementia risk were observed with an intake of approximately 2 to 3 cups per day of caffeinated coffee or 1 to 2 cups per day of tea.

Well that's great news for me, as I drink about 2-3 cups of regular coffee (no sugar, no cream) every morning!  But it's hard for me to get excited about the results of this study, as I've read similar studies in the past about red wine consumption!  There's a good chance (better than average I'd say) that some future study will show that coffee consumption is bad for your health. 

I guess I like Dr. Emanuel's philosophy that "wellness shouldn't be so hard".  I think I've done a pretty good job of following his six rules (read the book!) so far in my life.  And I will likely continue to eat ice cream, drink my red wine, and continue my morning coffee ritual - all in moderation of course!

Too much talent or not enough?

Several years ago, I read a great book by Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated.  I was skeptical when I first picked up the book, but I am now convinced beyond a doubt that, when it comes to teams, there is such a thing as "too much talent".  In keeping with the theme of two of my recent posts ("It takes 10 hands to score a basket..." and "Champs or Chumps?"), I want to discuss a LinkedIn post published by Adam Grant on May 1, 2018 called "The Problem with All-Stars".  The post was actually a transcript of an episode of Grant's WorkLife podcast, in which he interviewed former NBA player Shane Battier and author Michael Lewis.  

Lewis had written an article about Shane Battier for The New York Times Magazine entitled "The No-Stats All-Star".  He tells the story of the Miami Heat superteam, which played from 2011-2014.  Basically, superstars LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh decided that they wanted to play together on the same team.  Dwayne Wade had already won the NBA Championship with the Miami Heat in 2006, and both LeBron James and Chris Bosh were free agents during the 2010 offseason.  

LeBron James famously announced his decision to play for the Heat (and leave his hometown team, the Cleveland Cavaliers) on live television on July 8, 2010 (see "The Decision" on ESPN).  During a team press conference later that summer, in which all three superstars appeared, James was asked how many NBA championships the team would win.  Again, he famously said, "Not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven...".  Suffice it to say that expectations from the Miami Heat and the fans were very high.  The reality was very different.

During the 2010-2011 season, the Miami Heat initially struggled to play together as a team.  In fact, they lost a number of close games.  As Adam Grant said during the podcast, "Lots of stars means lots of egos—and lots of egos means infighting. To overcome that problem, you need humility. Humility is having the self-awareness to know what you're good at and what you're not good at. Studies show that when you have humility in a team, people are more likely to play to their strengths. Instead of going for the spotlight, they take on the roles where they can help the team win."

The Miami Heat would finish the season with a 0.707 winning percentage, but they failed to win the championship, losing to the Dallas Mavericks in the 2011 NBA Finals.  During the offseason, the Heat brought in yet another free agent player, but this time one that led to a lot of head-scratching.  They brought in Shane Battier, a talented player, but one who throughout his career failed to score a lot of points or make a lot of rebounds (during his 13-year career, Battier averaged 8.6 points per game, 4.2 rebounds per game, and 1.8 assists per game).  But Battier's presence on the Heat the following season made a huge difference!  

Whenever Battier was on the court, everyone on the Miami Heat played better, both offensively and defensively.   Michael Lewis told Adam Grant, "Shane had broadly two big effects. On his own teammates, he made everybody more efficient. When he was on the court, the shot the team took tended to be a better shot than it was when he wasn't on the court. And on the defensive end, he made the other team slightly less efficient."  Suddenly, everyone was playing better AS A TEAM.  

The Heat would go on to win back-to-back NBA Championships following the 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 seasons before losing in the NBA Finals again in 2013-2014.  Shane Battier was a leader on the court and helped to build the kind of team chemistry that turned into championships.  I've mentioned this in a couple of previous posts ("He's the glue..." and "In search of David Ross") - Shane Battier was the glue that helped make everyone work together and win (see also an article published this past fall in The Wall Street Journal "The underrated power of 'glue employees' who hold everything together"). 

Adam Grant also said something that resonates with me, "When it's time to put together a team, most people look for the best talent. I hear it in every industry. “We don't take B players, only A players.” But what actually happens when you have a whole team of stars?  The evidence is pretty clear: no matter where you work, having an entire team of superstars can be a total disaster. It turns out that if you have a team of 10 people, you're better off with six stars than eight."

He references two important studies, one from the world of sports and the other from the world of Wall Street investment banking.  The first discusses what is known as the "too much talent effect", in which investigators were able to show that greater individual talent is associated with winning in soccer and basketball, but only up to a certain point.  Past that point and more talent leads to worse performance, similar to what occurred with the Miami Heat (who, even with Shane Battier, failed to win the seven championships that LeBron James talked about in the press conference).  The second showed that the "too much talent effect" wasn't unique to sports.  In other words, when it comes to making key investment decisions, "too many cooks spoil the broth" - having a team composed of too many experts actually leads to worse financial decisions!

Hopefully, my last three posts have convinced you in the so-called "war for talent" in today's work environment, leaders should focus on building diverse teams with different levels of skill.  Bringing in too many experts is actually counterproductive.  So I ask, is it better to have too much talent or not enough talent?  My answer - it's better to have not enough talent...

"Thanks a million..."

I have to be completely honest here.  I never imagined that my "Leadership Reverie" blog would ever come close to 1 million views.  Perhaps I never believed that I would continue posting for as many years (over ten years) that I have been writing for this blog.  And I certainly never thought that there would be enough interest in what I was writing about to come close to 1 million views.  Officially, as of this morning, my blog has surpassed the 1 million views threshold!

According to Wikipedia, the word million is often used as a metaphor for any very large number.  Have you ever heard or used the phrases, "Not in a million years..." or "You are one in a million..." or even "Let's ask the million dollar question"?  Here are a few fun facts that I discovered about the word million.  Apparently, one million seconds equals 11.57 days.  The total weight of one million average sized honeybees would weigh about the same as an 80 kg (180 lb) human.  And there are approximately one million characters in a typical 600 page paperback book.  In ancient Egypt, the symbol for the word million was the Egyptian god Heh, who was the personification of infinity or eternity.  Even the ancient Egyptians used the word to describe a very large - maybe even impossibly large - number.

I'm not sure that I will ever get to two million views or not, but I will keep writing as long as people are interested in reading!  I want to take this opportunity to thank all of my readers whose leadership journeys continue to inspire me to learn and grow as a leader as well!  And, as the saying goes, "Thanks a million!"

Who was Betty Crocker?

If you grew up when I did, you probably remember the iconic voice and image of the fictional character Betty Crocker, the so-called "Dear Abby" of cooking.  No, she was not a real person, but rather a fictional character created in 1921 by the Washburn-Crosby Company (later, General Mills) in 1921 to give a personalized response to consumer product questions.  The company's advertising department realized that housewives would want advice from a fellow woman, so they created a personality that the women answering the letters sent in by consumers could use in their replies.  The first name "Betty" was selected because the advertising executives considered it a cheery, all-American name.  The last name "Crocker" was selected in honor of William Crocker, a Washburn Crosby Company director.  The portrait of Betty Crocker was first commissioned in 1936 and has been updated several times since its original creation, in order to keep up with changing fashion and hairstyles.  The red spoon logon containing her signature was added in 1954.

Your probably wondering why I chose to start this post with a story about a fictional character used in an advertising campaign, albeit a highly successful one.  As it turns out, there is a leadership lesson here!  Apparently, at some point in the 1950's, General Mills launched their line of boxed cake mixes under the Betty Crocker brand.  The box of cake mix included all of the necessary ingredients for baking a cake, including both milk and eggs in powdered form.  In order to bake a cake, all someone had to do was add water to the mix, stir it up together, pour it in a pan, and bake it in the oven.  It was a huge time-saver, and the recipe was virtually error-free.  General Mills thought that they had a sure winner on their hands.

Contrary to expectations, however, the boxed cake mix failed to sell.  The team at General Mills had no idea why their product wasn't selling like wild fire.  They brought in a team of experts to help them figure out what to do next.  After conducting a number of focus group sessions, a team of psychologists suggested that the reason that no one was buying the cake mix was that General Mills had made their product too simple, effort-less, and convenient.  In other words, housewives were feeling guilty that the cake took almost no effort to bake.  As Drew Boyd writes in Psychology Today, "It saved so much time and effort when compared with the traditional cake baking routine that they felt they were deceiving their husbands and guests. In fact, the cake tasted so good that people thought women were spending hours baking. Women felt guilty about getting more credit than they deserved. So they stopped using the product."

So, against all conventional wisdom, General Mills made the boxed cake mix less simple and easy.  They took the powdered egg out of the mix.  Now, all someone had to do to bake a cake was add water and eggs!  General Mills relaunched the new product with the slogan "Add an Egg" and sales of their Betty Crocker instant cake mix soared.  Just the one additional step changed consumers' perceptions about the product and removing a source of guilt.

We've encountered this kind of effect before in the past (see my post from a few years ago).  A few years ago, the cognitive psychologist Dan Ariely published the results of a study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology on what he called the  "IKEA effect".  Ariely and his team conducted four studies in which study subjects were asked to build IKEA boxes, fold Origami, and build Lego sets.  At the end of the study, subjects were given the option to purchase their creations, or even someone else's creation.  Subjects were consistently willing to pay significantly more money for their own creations than someone else's creation.  

Ariely's "IKEA effect" (so named to honor the Swedish company whose products require assembly) reminds me of another famous study by the cognitive psychologists Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch, and Richard Thaler on something known as the "endowment effect".  In this study, subjects who had been given a coffee mug were offered a chance to trade it for some pens or sell it for a certain amount of money.  The price that subjects were willing to sell their mugs was almost twice as much as the price that they were originally willing to pay for it.  Ariely also demonstrated the endowment effect in another study, in which students were willing to sell four NCAA basketball tournament tickets for twice as much as they would have been willing to pay for them.  In other words, once we own something, we tend to want to hold on to it and are reluctant to part with it.

Whether one chooses to call it the "IKEA effect", the endowment effect, or the "Betty Crocker effect", the simple fact remains that the more involved we are in creating something (and that "something" can be tangible or intangible), the greater our sense of ownership and accomplishment.  We see evidence of this effect in leadership too.  Instead of handing down finished, top-down mandates, leaders should involve teams early in the process, encouraging them to help "build" the solution. When leaders give up some level of responsibility and agency to the other members of the team, the team feels a greater sense of pride and ownership.  In short, they feel like they are true stakeholders in a project, which, in turn, reduces or even eliminates their resistance to change. Ultimately, that sense of ownership greatly increases the chances of a successful implementation, project completion, or change initiative.

What's good for the goose...

I read an interesting blog post by Bryant University business school professor, Michael Roberto, a few days ago that asked the question, "Should we ban the use of smart phones during meetings?" (see the post, "What's good for our kids is great for us too!").  Roberto referenced a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) study by David Figlio and Umut Özek ("The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida") that showed that cellphone bans in Florida schools resulted in significant improvements in test scores during the second year of the ban.  In addition, there were significant reductions in unexcused absences.  Both outcomes were more pronounced in middle and high school settings.  

Roberto also referenced an article by Chip Cutter that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last year ("CEOs are furious about employees texting in meetings").  Roberto says, "Many leaders have become incredibly frustrated by the disconnected conversations, lack of collaboration, and poor listening occurring during meetings.  Of course, many of us would say that we turn to our phones because many meetings are long, dull, and boring.  However, we have ask ourselves:  Isn't that what our kids would say about classes in which they would love to use their phone?  Are we just rationalizing our use of phones during meetings in the same way students often do?  How about the "what if there is an emergency?" excuse?  Ask yourself: Just how many true emergencies do we experience in a week?  Moreover, we can easily set our phones such that people won't disturb us unless it is truly an emergency.   Yet, we choose not to do so."

I am just as guilty when it comes to my smartphone.  I've made a conscious effort to avoid checking my phone during meetings, but I have to confess that it's not easy.  But I agree with Professor Roberto, if it's important enough to ban smartphones in schools so that students stay engaged, then it's probably just as important for all of us in organizations to avoid the use of smartphones during meetings.  As leaders, it's critically important that we model the behavior that we expect of others.  Given how hard it is to put them down and ignore them, should we just simply ban smartphones during important meetings?

Pygmalion

In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a sculptor who created a sculpture of a woman that was so perfect that he fell in love with it.  He prayed to the goddess Aphrodite, who in answering his prayers, brought the sculpture, Galatea, to life.  The story has inspired countless works of art and literature based on a similar theme, including (most notably - see more below), George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion and the 1956 musical, My Fair Lady, William Shakespeare's play, The Winter's Tale, Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Birth-Mark" and novella, Rappacicini's Daughter, Henry James' novel Portrait of a Lady, Edith Wharton's novel The House of Mirth, and the popular movies, Weird Science, Mannequin, Pretty Woman, and She's All That.

The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion in 1913 about an English gentleman and phonetics professor named Henry Higgins, who after meeting Eliza Doolittle, a poor flower seller with a strong Cockney accent in the streets of London, boasts that he can transform her into a “duchess” simply by teaching her to speak proper English.  Over the course of the next several months, Higgins trains Eliza rigorously.  While she struggles initially, she eventually masters both the arts of fine speech and etiquette to pass for a gentle lady at a high-society party.  Higgins, however, begins to treat Eliza as an object of study, rather than as a person, prompting her to eventually leave him.  

Shaw's play was turned into a Tony Award winning musical, My Fair Lady, starring Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins and Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle.  The musical was adapted for the big screen in 1964, again starring Harrison as Professor Higgins, but replacing Andrews with the better known (at least in film) actress Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle.  The film was a smash hit, becoming the second-highest-grossing film of 1964 (after Mary Poppins) and winning eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor.  Notably, Julie Andrews won the Academy Award for Best Actress that year for the movie Mary Poppins!

In many ways, the overarching theme to all of these works of art and literature comes down to how you treat individuals.  Eliza Doolittle explained it best, "You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves but how she's treated.  I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins because he always treats me as a flower girl and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady and always will."

As it turns out, creating positive expectations - and, for that matter, negative ones - can actually turn into positive attitudes, positive behaviors, and positive performance.  Even if this concept was first described in ancient Greece, it wasn't scientifically "proven" until the early 1960's, when a group of psychology students at the University of North Dakota, of all places, were asked by the renowned social psychologist Robert Rosenthal to assist with an experiment involving laboratory rats.  Six of the students were told that their assigned rats ("maze-bright" rats) were bred to be smart enough to rapidly move through a maze, while the other six students were told that their rats ("maze-dull" rats) were genetically inferior and would likely have a lot of trouble moving through the maze.  Here's the catch - the rats were all genetically similar!  None of the rats had been trained to run through the maze, and they had in fact been assigned randomly to the two groups.  However, the so-called "maze-bright" rats performed significantly better than the "maze-dull" rats from the very beginning and until the end of the experiment!  The "maze-dull" rats wouldn't even budge from the starting position in the maze.

Rosenthal published his findings in 1963 in the journal Behavioral Science (see "The effect of experimenter bias on the performance of the albino rat").  In a subsequent article published in Scientific American, Rosenthal and co-author Lenore Jacobson discussed the findings of the original rat study which sheds further light on what they called the "Pygmalion Effect".  Rosenthal and Jacobson reported, "The students with the allegedly brighter rats ranked their subjects as brighter, more pleasant, and more likeable than did the students who had allegedly 'duller' rats...Asked about their methods of dealing with the rats, the students with the 'bright' group turned out friendlier and more enthusiastic with the animals than the students with the 'dull' group had been.  The students with the 'bright' rats also said they handled their animals as well as more gently, than the students expecting poor performance did."

All of this would be purely academic if not for Rosenthal's subsequent experiments with teachers working with students in the classroom.  Lenore Jacobson was, in fact, the principal at Spruce Elementary School in San Francisco.  She had read Rosenthal's rat study and wrote back to Rosenthal, volunteering her students to participate in further studies ("If you ever 'graduate' to classroom children, please let me know if I can be of assistance").  Teachers at Spruce Elementary were told that Rosenthal and his team would be administering "The Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition" in the spring.  However, in truth, the "test" was nothing more than a standard IQ test.  After the testing was completed, teachers were informed that there were groups of students in each class who were academically gifted and who would "blossom" during the academic year.  Again, similar to the earlier rat maze experiments above, students were randomly assigned to groups.  One year later, students were re-tested using the same "Harvard Test".  Notably, the "blossoming" students score significantly better on the second test, while the other students scores didn't change.  

Once again, teachers had treated the "blossoming" students differently, without even realizing that they were doing so.  They were more encouraging with these students, provided them with additional help, and gave them positive feedback using warmer body language.  They almost never criticized these students.  Rosenthal and Jacobson published their findings in 1968 book, entitled Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils' Intellectual Development.

The German philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said, "Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of being."  What's true for rats and elementary school students is also true for people in general.  What's true for teachers, as it turns out, is also true for leaders.  When leaders treat their teams with positive expectations, their teams actually perform better (see the Harvard Business Review article, "Pygmalion in Management" by J. Sterling Livingston).  Treat people in the opposite manner, and they will respond in kind (which is known as the "Golem effect").

Bear's Poem

I recently finished the book The Junction Boys by Jim Dent.  Honestly, I have mixed feelings about the story.  The book tells the story of legendary college football Paul "Bear" Bryant's first season as head coach at Texas A&M University in 1954.  He had recently left a successful head coaching stint at the University of Kentucky, where he had coached for eight seasons with an overall record of 60-23-5, finishing in 1950 as the champions of the Southeastern Conference and defeating the number one ranked Oklahoma Sooners in the Sugar Bowl that year.  The team finished his last season at Kentucky with a record of 7-2-1.  

The Texas A&M head coaching position was a huge step down.  He inherited a team that finished tied for last place in the Southwestern Conference with an overall record of 4-5-1.  The book tells the story of Coach Bryant's preseason training camp that was held in the small Texas town of Junction.  He wanted to hold his camp away from the media and away from the Texas A&M alumni.  The camp started with 115 players, but only a small handful (barely enough to field a football team) lasted through the 10 grueling days of "two-a-day" practices (I use the quotes because practices would last several hours and often into the night).  Players would literally try to escape from camp in the middle of the night by sneaking away and walking to the local bus station.  Players practiced despite being severely injured.  The coaching staff wouldn't let the players drink water during practice.  One player almost died from heat stroke.

By the end, the players had earned Coach Bryant's respect.  The team would finish the 1954 season with an overall record of 1-9.  The team greatly improved in subsequent seasons, winning the Southwestern Conference championship following the 1956 season.  Bryant left Texas A&M after the 1957 season for the head coaching job at his alma mater, the University of Alabama, where he would coach for the next 25 years, becoming the all-time leader in total wins (323) and national championships (6).  And yet, when it was all said and done, Coach Bryant would say that the 1954 1-9 Texas A&M team was his favorite.

Admittedly, the ends don't always justify the means, though Coach Bryant would clearly disagree on this point.  I will also say that Coach Bryant wasn't alone in restricting access to water during football practices.  Most coaches felt that letting the players drink water would make them "soft" (and surprisingly, despite all we know about heat stroke, that sentiment didn't change until all that long ago).  

What I do admire about Coach Bryant is that he didn't just hold his players to a high standard.  He also held himself to a high standard.  The book ended with a poem that Coach Bryant apparently kept with him and read almost every day.  The poem was written by Heartsill Wilson and is called "The Beginning of a New Day."  

I think the sentiment of the poem says a lot about how Coach Bryant led his life.  Here is the poem:

This is the beginning of a new day.

God has given me this day to use as I will.

I can waste it or use it for good.

What I do today is very important

because I am exchanging a day of my life for it.

When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever,

leaving something in its place I have traded for it.

I want it to be a gain, not a loss—good, not evil.

Success, not failure, in order that I shall not regret

the price I paid for it.

Incidentally, Paul Bryant was nicknamed "Bear" because of something that happened when he was a teenager.  He went to the Lyric Theatre in his hometown of Fordyce, Arkansas where anyone who was willing to wrestle a bear and last a full minute would win a dollar (which was a lot of money back then).  Bryant wrestled the bear, but the owner and the bear escaped without paying. As the University of Alabama put it, "He didn’t get the buck but he got a nickname."

The end of bureaucracy?

I wrote a post this past November about Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (see the post, "Future Shock").  Toffler first coined the term "future shock" in an article "The future as a way of life" in Horizon magazine in 1965.  He used the term in this context "to describe the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time."  That change can be technological, cultural, or social in nature.  He wrote, "If agriculture is the first stage of economic development and industrialism the second, we can now see that still another stage - the third - has suddenly been reached."

As Toffler described it, society was (at least at that time of his book) just entering an entire new period or age, which he called the super-industrial society, which others have similarly labeled, the Information Age, post-industrial society, and post-modernism.  A post-industrial society has a number of important and defining characteristics, which include:

1. The economy undergoes a transition from the production of goods to the provision of services.

2. Knowledge becomes a valued form of capital.

3. Through technological advancements (e.g. automation) and globalization, both the value and importance of manual labor decline, while at the same time the need for professional knowledge workers (e.g. engineers, scientists, software developers, analysts) increases.

Toffler predicted that the transition to the super-industrial society would occur much quicker than similar transitions of the past.  Whereas previous generations had experienced gradual transformation over time, the newer generations growing up in modern society were facing constant, rapid shifts in everything from family life to work to values (which is why those living through this rapid period of change would be subject to "future shock").  Toffler further suggested three key features of the super-industrial society - transience, novelty, and diversity.  

Toffler used the word transience to describe the impermanence and shortened lifespan of all things in the super-industrial society.  He said, "We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs...Transience is the 'new temporariness' in everyday life...It results in a mood, a feeling of impermanence."  He used the word novelty to describe the unceasing (i.e. constant) introduction of new things - technology, lifestyles, and social arrangements.  He said, "The future will unfold as an unending succession of bizarre incidents, sensational discoveries, implausible conflicts, and wildly novel dilemmas."  Finally, Toffler referred to diversity as the multiplicity of choices available in work, lifestyle, consumption, and identity.  He further wrote that when all three - transience, novelty, and diversity - converge, "we rocket the society toward an historical crisis of adaptation.  We create an environment so ephemeral, unfamiliar, and complex as to threaten millions with adaptive breakdown.  This breakdown is future shock."

The management scholar Warren Bennis first coined the term adhocracy in his 1968 book, The Temporary Society: What is Happening to Business and Family Life in America Under the Impact of Accelerating Change.  Toffler further popularized the term in his book Future Shock, which came out just two years later.  Both Bennis and Toffler felt that the acceleration of change that we are experiencing in society, both then and certainly now, doesn't lend itself to classic bureaucracy.  Rather, adhocracy describes a more flexible, adaptable, and informal organizational structure without bureaucratic policies or procedures.  Toffler wrote, "If it was Max Weber who first defined bureaucracy and predicted its triumph, Warren Bennis may go down in sociological textbooks as the man who first convincingly predicted its demise and sketched the outlines of the organizations that are springing up to replace it."

Bureaucracies - at least according to Bennis and Toffler - are rigid, hierarchical, slow-moving, and centralized (in regards to power and authority), which means that they are best suited to stable, unchanging environments.  Adhocracies, on the other hand, are temporary, flexible, and adaptive.  They place an emphasis on creativity, innovation, and rapid decision-making through experimentation.  Whereas bureaucracies are strictly hierarchical, decision-making in an adhocracy is team-based, collaborative, and decentralized (can anyone say, "Deference to Expertise" or "Pushing Authority to Information"?).  Toffler believed that an adhocracy was essential for on an organization to succeed in a fast-moving, rapidly evolving super-industrial society.

All that being said, as Martin Reeves, Edzard Wesselink, and Kevin Whitaker at the Boston Consulting Group point out in their essay, "The end of bureaucracy, again?", the bureaucracy remains the dominant paradigm even now, almost sixty years after Warren Bennis and Alvin Toffler predicted the end of bureaucracy.  A number of management experts have proposed alternative paradigms, and in many cases, organizations have tried to re-structure around these alternative paradigms - see for example Frederic Laloux's teal organization, Brian Robertson's holacracy, or the concept of self-managed teams.  While attractive in principle, few organizations have successfully adopted these different models.  Reeves, Wesselink, and Whitaker suggest that the solution is somewhere in the middle.  The organizations that will be most successful, both now and in the future, will have elements of both the classic bureaucracy and adhocracy.  What that organizational structure will look like is not currently known.  Reeves, Wesselink, and Whitaker write, "The exact shape of these new models is still undetermined, but enterprising leaders are currently developing them."  Referring to the teal organization, holacracy, and others, they go on to admit, "We can see hints of a revolution that will likely affect all companies and sectors eventually."

So, are we about to see the end of bureaucracy as we know it?  Probably not.  But we will certainly see the continuing evolution of different organizational models and paradigms for many years to come.  Survival in this VUCA world will depend upon it.

Know so much, but control nothing...

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus said, "Of all man's miseries, the bitterest is this: to know so much, and to have control over nothing."  What is Herodotus saying here?  I think he is expressing the frustration that many of us feel that even if we can understand the world clearly, we just don't have the requisite power to change it.  Wisdom and power don't necessarily go hand in hand.

Today, more than at any time in history, we are starting to understand the world on a macro- and micro-level.  We know more about how the world works than any generation that came before us, and yet, we are still relatively powerless to change it.  And on the surface, that acceptance that we don't always have the authority and power to change what happens may feel like a failure.  But it's not.

The ancient Greek and Roman Stoic philosophers (Zeno of Citium, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, among others) would tell us that we should concern ourselves only with those things that we can indeed control.  Everything else?  Let it be.  

Epictetus said, "It is not in our control to have everything turn out exactly as we want, but it is in our control to control how we respond to what happens."  Or more recently, Viktor Frankl said, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing . . . to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances."  Frankl also said, "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves...Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant."

I have always enjoyed reading Stoic philosophy.  I just have to remind myself, every once in a while, what the greatest Stoic philosophers said about managing change and changing the world.  If wisdom is defined, at least according to Socrates, as knowing that you don't know everything (I think his exact quote was, "The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing"), then perhaps wisdom too is accepting that you can't change everything.

"Mistakenly seeking solitude"

For the last couple of years, I've been riding the Chicago Metra train back and forth to work.  Shortly after we moved to the northern suburbs of Chicago, the Illinois Department of Transportation began a three year $169 million bridge refurbishing project (among other improvements) on the Kennedy Expressway (Interstate 90/94) from the Edens Expressway (Interstate 94) junction all the way to the downtown Ohio Street exit.  The lane closures that went along with the construction project added about 45-60 additional minutes to my morning and afternoon commutes.  Talk about perfect timing!  Thankfully, the project finished this past October both on-time (actually, they finished one month earlier than originally planned) and on-budget (more on that in a future post)!  

Even though the Kennedy Expressway project is finished, I'm still riding the train to and from work.  I've really enjoyed the quiet time (see my posts, "The Fortress of Solitude" and "Solitude").  It's been a great time to sit, relax, and just think or read a book.  I have to be honest, other than the conductor, I don't really talk to anyone else during my commute.  And, as it turns out, my behavior is neither out of the ordinary for most commuters or even a new change in behavior (see my post "The Quiet Commute").

But wait, there's more to the story!  The other day, my wife shared an article with me that appeared in Classic Chicago Magazine earlier this year ("Remembering the nation's last private railroad commuter car").  The article was written by David A.F. Sweet and talked about Car 553, reportedly the nation's last private "club car" that ran from the Lake Bluff station to the Ogilvie Station in downtown Chicago.  As Sweet described it, "club cars" were quite popular during the middle of the 20th century.  He wrote, "Briefcases were shut and work was forgotten as bridge games, rather than a quest for profit, engrossed members."  In other words, commuters would pay a special membership fee to be allowed to ride in the exclusive car, which was more or less like a club (see a photo below).  Commuters could select food and drinks from a special menu, and Car 553 apparently even included a barber's chair, so that members could get a haircut or shave during the commute.  By the year 2016, Car 553 was the only operating commuter membership car in the United States.  Car 553 was removed from service in 2022, ending the era of the so-called "club car" for good. 

I can only wonder, if I had the option, whether I would choose to pay an additional membership fee (which ranged as high as $550 to $850 per calendar quarter) just to be able to ride in an exclusive car and talk with other commuters or play bridge!  I suspect that I would not.  The more important question, however, is whether something that encouraged human interaction and discourse is preferable to the choice to seek solitude that seems to be so prevalent in today's society.  As I've stated in the past, the former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has claimed an "an epidemic of loneliness" in today's society (please see my posts "The Loneliness Epidemic" and "Ubuntu").  Dr. Murthy places much of the blame on social media and smart phones, but I can't help but wonder if some of our loneliness is a consequence of our own choosing.  Is our desire for solitude at least in part to blame for our loneliness?  

Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder published an interesting study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology around ten years ago ("Mistakenly Seeking Solitude").  The accompanying press release from the University of Chicago said it best, "An interesting social paradox plays out every morning around the world as millions of people board commuter trains and buses: Human beings are one of the most social species on the planet, yet when in close proximity with one another – sitting inches away on a train – we routinely ignore each other."  Epley and Schroeder found that participants in their experiments not only underestimated strangers' interest in connecting, but they also reported positive experiences by both being spoken to and to speaking with strangers.  

Epley and Schroeder conducted a total of nine experiments, both in the field and in the laboratory setting.  Study participants were Chicago commuter train and public bus riders who were asked to talk to a stranger, to sit in solitude, or to do whatever they normally would do, then fill out a survey to measure how they felt afterwards.  Even though the study participants reported greater well-being when they did engage with strangers, they predicted precisely the opposite pattern of experiences.  Based on the survey results, study participants were reluctant to engage with strangers, because they felt that other people wouldn't be interested in talking.  Again, Epley and Schroeder found that the opposite was the case.  Not only were people open to making idle conversation, they found the experience much more pleasurable when they did, particularly compared to choosing silent solitude. 

In my post, "Connections", I talked about Aaron Hurst and "The Six Points of Connection" that can help foster a sense of community and restore our trust in society today.  We need to get back as a society to emphasizing personal connections and the "human touch" (see my post, "We all need the human touch...").  Perhaps being open to talking with strangers is a good starting point.

"It's happiness we're after..."

Albert Einstein is perhaps most famous for developing his theory of relativity, though he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for "his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."  What is perhaps less well known is that he also was greatly interested in what Jessica Stillman, writing for Inc. magazine, called "the rules of our internal state of mind".  Einstein apparently told an interviewer in 1931, "It's happiness we're after".

Earlier in 1931, Einstein had delivered a talk entitled "Science and Happiness" at Caltech, during which he questioned whether science, as a field, was making the world a better place or a worse one.  He asked the students, "Why does this magnificent applied science which saves work and makes life easier bring us so little happiness?"  He next answered his own question, stating, "We have not yet learned to make sensible use of it."

Einstein had his own "theory of happiness" that can best be summarized as follows:  A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.  Like all things, ambition is good to a certain point.  Experts on happiness describe something known as the "hedonic treadmill."  We work hard in order to reach our personal and professional goals, and when we have achieved those goals, there is a sense of achievement and satisfaction that leads to happiness.  Regardless of how we define success (e.g., achieving a certain salary or title), once we achieve that degree of success, our sense of achievement and the satisfaction and happiness that comes with it is only temporary.  Once we grow accustomed to that level of success (and the happiness that comes with it), we find that we have to work even harder to reach our next goal or the next level of success.  Einstein suggests that we should be content with the success we have right now.  

Ambition can be healthy, when it gives us a sense of achievement and fulfillment.  However, too much focus on achieving materialistic goals and levels of success can actually make us less happy in the long-run, particularly when we neglect other areas of our life, such as family and our personal health.  University of Notre Dame professor Timothy Judge measured ambition and achievement on various measures of health and happiness in 717 individuals participating in a study conducted over seven decades ("On the value of aiming high: The causes and consequences of ambition").  Those individuals who scored higher on measures of ambition were only slightly happier than the less ambitious individuals.  More importantly, they lived shorter lives!  As the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca noted, "Ambition is like a gulf, everything is swallowed up in it and buried; besides the dangerous consequences of it."

Unfortunately, in today's society, we often attribute success with fame and fortune.  More importantly, we often equate personal success with happiness.  But since antiquity, philosophers like Seneca have known that our happiness is not a product of anything material.  Instead, we create our happiness through the choices we make.  Rather than attributing happiness to our goals, we should focus on the journey instead.  It sounds like Einstein knew this too.

There's an interesting aside to Einstein's theory of happiness.  In November of 1922,  Einstein was visiting Japan and staying at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.  He had just learned that he would receive the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.  During his stay there, a bellhop came to his hotel room to give him a message.  He didn't have any spare cash in his pockets for a tip, so in lieu of a tip, he wrote the 17 words above, in German, on a piece of hotel stationary, hoping that it would become valuable in the future.  The slip of paper apparently sold for $1.56 million in October 2017.  The seller of the Imperial Hotel note is reportedly a grandson of the Japanese bellhop's brother!

Champs or chumps?

My last post ("It takes 10 hands to score a basket...") focused on the myth of so-called superteams, teams that are loaded with talent but seemingly fail to live up to expectations.  I specifically highlighted the 1980 Olympic Team USA men's basketball team, which defeated a team of NBA All-Stars 5 out of 6 exhibition games during the "Gold Medal Series" (recall that the United States boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics, so the team was forced to play exhibition games against the NBA instead).  I also discussed an even better example, that of the 1980 Olympic Team USA men's hockey team, which defeated the heavily favored Soviet Union team 4-3.  They next beat Finland in a come-from-behind fashion to win the Gold Medal, but it was the "Miracle on Ice" game against the Soviets that will be remembered forever.

My point is that you don't have to be a superteam to win championships.  As a matter of fact, most superteams don't (and one could arguably state that most superteams actually flop - see my posts "Superstars" and "Superstars and the mess in Cleveland").  What often separates championship teams versus superteams is team culture, which is often called team chemistry.  As the old sayings go, "Chemistry is Culture" and "Culture eats Strategy".  Gregg Gregory (see "Behind the scenes of so-called superteams: 4 secrets") suggests that there are four behind-the-scenes secrets that championship teams do and so-called superteams do not:

1. Championship teams are selfless.

The members of championship teams each work hard to make everyone around them better, caring very little, if at all, who gets individual credit.  The team's success is more important than individual success (as hockey coach Herb Brooks said so well in the 2004 Disney movie, Miracle, "The name on the front of the jersey means a whole lot more than the one on the back!"  

2. Championship teams work hard.

Practice matters.  More importantly, the right kind of practice matters (see my post "Practice makes better, but does practice make perfect?" on the concept of deliberate practice and the 10,000 hour rule).  As Steve Kerr, who has been a NBA World Champion as both player and coach, says, "There are no magic plays.  You win based on effort, unmet focus, and being brilliant at the little details."  Championship teams practice as hard as they play in games, if not harder.

3. Championship teams are built around character.

Championship teams don't just build their teams based upon talent.  They look for players with the right kind of character.  They look for players who are going to be great teammates, which helps foster a team culture.  I am reminded of a great video post by the author and motivational speaker, Simon Sinek, which I also discussed in my post "Attitude > Talent".  Sinek talked about how the Navy SEALS emphasize trust over performance.  In other words, talent is not enough - having the right team-focused attitude is key.  Again, as hockey coach Herb Brooks said in the movie, "I'm not looking for the best players.  I am looking for the right players."

4. Championship teams emphasize teamwork.

As the legendary Michael Jordan said, "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships."  Teamwork is so much more important than talent.  As Jon Gordon says, "Team beats talent when talent isn't a team."  The NBA All-Stars in 1980 had talent, but they weren't a team.

"It takes 10 hands to score a basket..."

I recently finished a great book by Edward Luce, a biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a political scientist who served as the National Security Advisor for President James "Jimmy" Carter, our nation's 39th President.  President Carter died on December 29, 2024 at the age of 100 years, making him the longest-lived President in U.S. history.  Even though I was very much aware of most of what was happening in the world during the Carter Administration (or at least as aware as a middle schooler can be), I learned a lot more from reading Luce's biography of "Zbig", as Brzesinski was more commonly known by his friends and colleagues.

There was a lot happening during the Carter Administration.  I've certainly forgotten some of these events, but there are others that I can recall as easily if they happened yesterday.  For example, I remember in particular the Iran hostage crisis, when 66 Americans were taken hostage at the Embassy of the United States in Tehran, with 52 of them being held until literally minutes after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as our nation's 40th President on January 20, 1981.  I can also remember the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, which prompted President Carter to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics that were held in Moscow (more on this in a moment).  

Both the Iran hostage crisis and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan started in 1979, but they both lasted for the remainder of President Carter's time in office.  The 1980 Winter Olympics were held in Lake Placid, New York during the tumultuous 1980 Presidential Election.  While I don't remember most of what happened, I do know where I was at the same moment men's hockey Team USA defeated the Soviet Union in what is now known as the "Miracle on Ice" game.  I may touch on some of the other events I read about in Luce's book in later posts, but for today's post, I want to focus on the Olympics.

First of all, the Summer and Winter Olympics used to be held during the same calendar year.  Second, there used to be a sharp distinction between amateur athletes and professional athletes.  Only amateur athletes were permitted to participate in the Olympic Games.  Both the U.S. men's basketball (Summer Olympics) and men's hockey (Winter Olympics) teams were comprised of elite college athletes.  The men's basketball team, in particular, was loaded with talent.  The team was led by future NBA stars Mark Aguirre, Buck Williams, Rolando Blackman, Sam Bowie, and future Hall of Famer Isaiah Thomas.  Unfortunately, due to the U.S. boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow, they never got the chance to play for a Gold Medal.  Instead, the U.S. Olympic Committee worked with the National Basketball Association (NBA) to organize a series of games against NBA All-Stars, known as the "Gold Medal Series".  Surprisingly, Team USA, which at that time was the youngest American national basketball team ever assembled (three players, including both Sam Bowie and Isaiah Thomas, were freshmen), defeated the NBA All-Stars 5 games to 1.  Most of the games weren't even close.  

All 12 players on the Olympic squad would eventually go on to become first round selections in the NBA draft.  Both Mark Aguirre and Isaiah Thomas would go on to become NBA World Champions for the Detroit Pistons.  Sam Bowie is perhaps most famous for being drafted with the second overall pick in the 1984 NBA Draft, just one pick ahead of future Hall of Famer Michael Jordan.  Bowie's career was unfortunately plagued by injuries.  Buck Williams was a three-time NBA All-Star, but the rest of the team members did not have the same level of success in the NBA.  Regardless, they still beat a team of professional basketball players in five out of six regulation games, which is noteworthy.

Similarly, the 1980 men's hockey Olympic team consisted of college players.  They were coached by legendary college hockey coach Herb Brooks, who famously built the team specifically to compete head-to-head with the Soviet Union.  Brooks stressed player conditioning and team culture.  At the time, the Soviet men's hockey national team was the greatest in the world.  They had won the last four Olympic Gold Medals in a row, and they in fact had only lost the Gold Medal once since the first time that they played in the Olympics in 1956.  Since the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, in which they won the Bronze Medal, Soviet hockey teams had gone 27–1–1 (wins-losses-ties) and outscored their opponents 175–44.  During that same period of time, the Soviet team outscore Team USA in head-to-head matchups 28–7.  Even more impressive, the Soviet team had not lost a single game in Olympic play since 1968.  

The players on the Soviet men's hockey team were de facto professionals, having played together on international teams for years.  They were the clear favorites by a very large margin to win the Gold Medal again at Lake Placid.  After breezing through group play (they defeated Japan 16–0, the Netherlands 17–4, Poland 8–1, Finland 4–2, and Canada 6–4), the Soviets moved on to the medal round.  Team USA had a more difficult time, but they surprised many of the experts with physical and cohesive play.  Team USA was set to play the Soviet Union in the medal round.  ABC had decided not to broadcast the game live, and before the game aired, ABC's Olympics host Jim McKay openly stated that the game had already occurred and promised not to spoil the results.  To this day, many people who watched the game on television still believe that it was broadcast live!

The game was closely fought, but in the end, Team USA outscored the Soviet Union 4-3, scoring two of their goals in the third period.  Legendary sportscaster Al Michaels who was calling the game on ABC along with former Montreal Canadiens goaltender Ken Dryden, picked up on the countdown in the hockey arena during the broadcast and delivered his famous call:  "11 seconds, you've got 10 seconds, the countdown going on right now! Morrow, up to Silk! Five seconds left in the game! (Dryden: It's over!) Do you believe in miracles? YES!"  Team USA would go on to score three goals during the third period in the next game to beat Finland 4-2 for the Gold Medal!  

There are a couple of important points here.  First, Team USA men's basketball was a "team" in every sense of the word.  They had practiced together, played exhibition games together, and spent a lot of time off the court together.  By comparison, the NBA All-Star team was a group of professional basketball players who normally didn't play together.  They came together for perhaps a few practices (I actually don't know for sure) and played what is probably best described as a series of pick-up games versus the men's national team.  Talent is important for any team's success, but so is working together as a team as opposed to a mere group of individuals.  

Second, the men's hockey team was built solely to compete with the Soviet national team.  Herb Brooks emphasized conditioning, but he also specifically selected the players that he thought would work the best together as a team.  As depicted in the 2004 Disney movie Miracle, he emphasized team culture over individual talent.  I've spent a lot of timing researching so-called Superteams, which I define as sports teams that are built largely through free agent acquisitions or trades in order to assemble a team of superstars (think most recently LeBron James and the Miami Heat from 2010-2014).  What is surprising is the fact that so many of these superteams fail to live up to expectations.  

As legendary Coach John Wooden once said, "It takes 10 hands to score a basket."  Talent isn't enough - teams have to play well together as a team.  Both the 1980 USA men's basketball team and the 1980 USA men's hockey team are great examples of this important point.  Next time, I will continue to build upon these points, because I think they are applicable to all teams, not just teams in sporting competitions.