Sports Leader Quotes

They turned to Angel. "We will call you Little One," the leader said, obviously deciding to dispense with the whole confusing name thing. "Okay," said Angel agreeably. "I'll call you Guy in a White Lab Coat." He frowned. "That can be his Indian name," I suggested.

You don't speak much, do you?" ter Borcht said, circling him slowly. Fittingly, Fang said nothing. Vhy do you let a girl be de leader?" ter Borcht asked, a calculating look in his eye. She's the tough one," Fang said. Dang right, I thought proudly. Is dere anysing special about you?" asked ter Borcht. "Anysing vorth saving?" Fang pretended to think, gazing up at the ceiling. "Besides my fashion sense? I play a mean harmonica.

Palestinian and Israeli leaders finally recover the Road Map to Peace, only to discover that, while they were looking for it, the Lug Nuts of Mutual Interest came off the Front Left Wheel of Accommodation, causing the Sport Utility Vehicle of Progress to crash into the Ditch of Despair.

Yes, I still know where I’m going!” I snapped as he emerged beside me yet again, cutting him off before he could say anything. Ash walked on my other side, silent and protective, but I caught him rolling his eyes as Glitch came up. The rebel leader scowled. “Relax, your highness. I wasn’t going to ask this time.” “Aw, that’s a shame,” Puck said, falling into step beside him. “You’re gonna make me lose my bet with ice-boy. Come on, be a sport. Say it one more time, for me?

The Director of the US Marshals Service, who does not like Pack: “Seems to me Simon Pack’s a grandstander. I remind you I’m a West Pointer myself. I remember his ill-fated year as Superintendent, acting as if he were MacArthur incarnate. The All-America player in a couple sports, the man in the College Football Hall of Fame; the Governor of a small state; the leader of a constitutional convention. And yeah, he was also a hobo, maybe the biggest grandstand move he ever undertook.

If you’re not certain of the value of mentorship, think of how many elite athletes or professional sports teams train without a coach. Zero. How many of your favorite films are made without a producer or director? Zero. How many of the best schools in the world function without teachers? Zero. It’s safe to say that every great leader, in any field, first had a great mentor. Finding a mentor who inspires and guides your growth is a life-changing experience. Mentors help us to transcend the limits, or perceived limits, of our abilities. A mentor can be anyone who teaches us and helps us to grow in ways we couldn’t have on our own.

He’d done it again. Screwed up in a social situation and dragged the whole team down with hm. His new team. The ones who were counting on him to be a leader on and off the field. He’d led them, all right, almost into a brawl.

The gene,” Dr. Narcejac-Boileau said, “is associated with social dominance and strong control over other people. We have isolated it in sports leaders, CEOs, and heads of state. We believe the gene is found in all dictators throughout history.

As a leader, it is so important that your words equal your actions. It is imperative that you make sure that you go through a self-evaluation process on an almost daily basis to make sure that your actions are in line with your words. You must do what you say and say what you do.

Effective leaders almost never need to yell. The leader will have created an environment where disappointing him causes his people to be disappointed in themselves. Guilt and affection are far more powerful motivators than fear. The great coaches of team sports are almost always people who simply need to say, in a quiet voice, “That wasn’t our best, now was it?” and his players melt. They love this man, know he loves them, and will work tirelessly not to disappoint him. People are drawn to this kind of leader, as I was drawn all those years ago to Harry Howell, the grocer. A leader who screams at his employees or belittles them will not attract and retain great talent over the long term.

Children are perceptive, and if they see leaders and parents talk with boredom and apathy about faith yet become overtly passionate about sports teams or shopping malls, they will think the sport or the mall is more attractive than Jesus.

If records refuse to be broken, shatter them.

Once war was considered the business of soldiers, international relations the concern of diplomats. But now that war has become seemingly total and seemingly permanent, the free sport of kings has become the forced and internecine business of people, and diplomatic codes of honor between nations have collapsed. Peace in no longer serious; only war is serious. Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion. When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as 'appeasement,' if not treason, the active role of the diplomat becomes meaningless; for diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war an interlude between wars, and in such a context the diplomat is replaced by the warlord.

The triviality of American popular culture, its emptiness and gossip, accelerates this destruction of critical thought. It expands the void, the mindlessness that makes the magic, mythology, and irrationality of the Christian Right palatable. Television, the movement’s primary medium, allows viewers to preoccupy themselves with context-free information. The homogenized empty chatter on the airwaves, the banal amusement and clichés, the bizarre doublespeak endlessly repeated on cable news channels and the huge spectacles in sports stadiums have replaced America’s political, social and moral life, indeed replaced community itself. Television lends itself perfectly to this world of signs and wonders, to the narcissism of national and religious self-exaltation. Television discourages real communication. Its rapid frames and movements, its constant use of emotional images, its sudden shifts from one theme to an unrelated theme, banish logic and reason with dizzying perplexity. It, too, makes us feel good. It, too, promises to protect and serve us. It, too, promises to life us up and thrill us. The televangelists have built their movement on these commercial precepts. The totalitarian creed of the Religious Right has found in television the perfect medium. Its leaders know how television can be used to seduce and encourage us to walk away from dwindling, less exciting collectives that protect and nurture us. They have mastered television’s imperceptible, slowly induced hypnosis. And they understand the enticement of credo quia absurdum—I believe because it is absurb.

Oppression is a sport for the small-minded. Empathy is the path to true power,” Merlin lectured. “A great leader respects all walks of life; otherwise, life will walk all over them.” “Ain’t that the truth,” Mother Goose agreed. “It’s just like I told my friends during the Boston Tea Party: Tyranny is a revolution’s welcome mat.

…golf was no longer the most popular sport among the corporate czars because they found playing with natural balls much more satisfying.

it struck me as extraordinary that the leaders of each of these countries bore such an intimate familial relationship to each other. It was as if the entire matter was nothing more than a childish game: Willy, Georgie, and Nicky running around a garden, setting out their forts and toy soldiers, enjoying an afternoon of great sport until one of them went too far and they had to be separated by a responsible adult.

Empirical evidence suggests that the relationship between the profitability of larger share and smaller share depends on the industry. Exhibit 7-1 compares the rate of return on equity of the largest firms accounting for at least 30 percent of industry sales (leaders) to the rate of return on equity of the medium-sized firms in the same industry (followers). In this calculation small firms with assets less than $500,000 were excluded. Although some of the industries in the sample are overly broad, it is striking that followers were noticeably more profitable than leaders in 15 of 38 industries. The industries in which the followers’ rates of return were higher appear generally to be those where economies of scale are either not great or absent (clothing, footwear, pottery, meat products, carpets) and/or those that are highly segmented (optical, medical and ophthalmic goods, liquor, periodicals, carpets, and toys and sporting goods). The industries in which leaders’ rates of return are higher seem to be generally those with heavy advertising (soap; perfumes; soft drinks; grain mill products, i.e., cereal; cutlery) and/or research outlays and production economies of scale (radio and television, drugs, photographic equipment). This outcome is as we would expect.

Senior engineers can develop bad habits, and one of the worst is the tendency to lecture and debate with anyone who does not understand them or who disagrees with what they are saying. To work successfully with a newcomer or a more junior teammate, you must be able to listen and communicate in a way that person can understand, even if you have to try several times to get it right. Software development is a team sport in most companies, and teams have to communicate effectively to get anything done.

It took only three years for Jonathan Papelbon to surpass Bill Campbell, Lee Smith, Tom Gordon, Sparky Lyle, Derek Lowe, Jeff Reardon, Ellis Kinder, and Dick Radatz as he climbed the franchise leader board into second place all-time for saves. Papelbon closed out 2008 with 113 career saves—and on July 1, 2009, with his 20th save of the season he surpassed Bob Stanley to become the all-time franchise leader in saves.

As the manager of my hedge fund, I’ve shorted the stocks of over two hundred companies that have eventually gone bankrupt. Many of these businesses started out with promising, even inspired ideas: natural cures for common diseases, for example, or a cool new kind of sporting goods product. Others were once-thriving organizations trying to rebound from hard times. Despite their differences, they all failed because their leaders made one or more of six common mistakes that I look for: They learned from only the recent past. They relied too heavily on a formula for success. They misread or alienated their customers. They fell victim to a mania. They failed to adapt to tectonic shifts in their industries. They were physically or emotionally removed from their companies’ operations.

Strategy is important. Execution is imperative. However, the most overlooked aspect in team sports, and what most coaches and leaders fail to grasp, is the fact that it is your culture that will determine whether your strategy works and is sustainable. It is the culture you create that is going to determine whether your players perform and execute.

It isn’t hard to be good from time to time in sports. What’s tough is being good every day.

You want to be a passionate leader who makes decisions that are based on belief and principle over those that are based on feeling.

You show me a weak leader and I’ll show you someone who’s afraid to make decisions. Great achievers will sometimes make poor decisions, but they’ll never make weak decisions.

Have the courage to dream big. It’s the only way to be a leader. It’s the only way to reach your potential and to touch greatness. It’s the only way to really feel alive!

So is football a sports science? I think it is probably a human science and not a sports science.

How’s my guest keeping? Is she showing signs of cracking?” It amused her to know that the men hearing her on the other end of the transmission got nothing but a very mechanical simulation of her voice, a little precaution that kept her identity and voice pattern unrecognisable. “She’s holding out well. A tough cookie, probably ex-services. She knows she’s being watched.” “Good, more fun for later. Fleet Security are searching section by section down there. Make sure your perimeter monitors are functioning properly. I want no slip-ups.” “There won’t be, Leader.” “Make sure of it. I expect Heron will persuade his superiors he should be allowed to accept my terms soon, and I want him captured and shipped. But first I’m looking forward to a little sport with him.

Some of the more sought-after signers are, in no particular order, presidents, military heroes, sports icons, actors, singers, artists, religious and social leaders, scientists, astronauts, authors, and Kardashians.

When leaders become focused on the fruit instead of the root and worry about the outcome instead of the process of developing team members, they may survive in the short run, but they will not thrive in the long run.

In three weeks, the women's team had done more for soccer in the United States than any team had ever done. Yet, the United States Soccer Federation was unprepared and unwelcoming in its acerbic response to the women's success. With petty, resentful, chauvinistic behavior, the federation would bungle what should have been its greatest moment as a national governing body. Its leaders would criticize DiCicco instead of congratulating him, they would threaten to sue the women over an indoor victory tour and they would wait an unacceptably long period before entering into contract negotiations with the team. Then, at the end of the year, the federation would offer a deal that the women found insulting. Unwilling to trust that the federation was bargaining in good faith, the women would boycott a trip to a tournament in Australia. They would become champions of the world, embraced by the president, by the largest crowd ever to watch women play and by the largest television audience for soccer in this country, embraced by everyone, it seemed, but the officials who ran the sport with the vision of a student council. Increasingly, it appeared, the only amateurs left in sports were the people running the federations that governed them.

We decided to use the metaphor that the company was like a sports team, not a family. Just as a great sports teams are constantly scouting for new players and culling others from their lineups, our team leaders would need to continually look for talent and reconfigure team makeup.

Make sure you have the right team members to strengthen your culture instead of people who suck the energy out of it. You can do everything right as a leader and coach, but if you don't have positive mentors and team members in the locker room your culture and team will fall apart.

Effective leaders almost never need to yell. The leader will have created an environment where disappointing him causes his people to be disappointed in themselves. Guilt and affection are far more powerful motivators than fear. The great coaches of team sports are almost always people who simply need to say, in a quiet voice, “That wasn’t our best, now was it?” and his players melt. They love this man, know he loves them, and will work tirelessly not to disappoint him. People are drawn to this kind of leader, as I was drawn all those years ago to Harry Howell, the grocer. A leader who screams

Never doubt that the pitch is where you belong, and that we, as women, can stand out in any sport. Through sports, you can meet a lot of people who can become your friends and mentors. You can learn how to communicate, solve conflicts, be disciplined, work harder and go further, coexist, be a leader, and much more

That is the privilege of greatness, the luxury of the 1 percent, and that is the model of heroism bequeathed by the ancient world and, as Lewis notes, the pattern with us still when we learn at school that the sports captain “might well be a noisy, arrogant, overbearing bully,”40 and when we regularly see that, for our politicians, celebrities, and business leaders, there is “one rule for them, another rule for us.

I think the whole world has essentially been brought up not to be a girl. How do we bring up boys? What does it mean to be a boy? To be a boy really means not to be a girl. To be a man means not to be a girl. To be a woman means not to be a girl. To be strong means not to be a girl. To be a leader means not to be a girl. I actually think that being a girl is so powerful that we’ve had to train everyone not to be that.

In activist and progressive communities, we’re accustomed to attending one training or reading one essay and then declaring ourselves leaders and educators on an issue. I believe that the notion of instant expertise is contrary to our liberatory values. ... We must practice community safety much as one practices an instrument or a sport: in slow, measurable and deliberate ways. Only by practicing can we build the knowledge we need to defuse and address conflict within our communities.

Newspapers are always crowded with strange maps and names of towns, and every few months the earth seems to lurch from its path when you see something in the newspapers, such as the time Mussolini, who had almost seemed one of the eternal leaders, is photographed hanging upside down on a meathook. Everyone listens to news broadcasts five or six times every day. All pleasurable things, all travel and sports and entertainment and good food and fine clothes, are in the very shortest supply, always were and always will be.

Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing. When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team. Asking the Republican Party today to agree on a definition of conservatism is like asking New York Giants fans to have a consensus opinion on the Law of the Sea Treaty. It’s not just that no one knows anything about the subject; they don’t remotely care. All Republicans want to do is beat the team playing the Giants. They aren’t voters using active intelligence or participants in a civil democracy; they are fans. Their role is to cheer and fund their team and trash-talk whatever team is on the other side. This removes any of the seeming contradiction of having spent years supporting principles like free trade and personal responsibility to suddenly stop and support the opposite. Think of those principles like players on a team. You cheered for them when they were on your team, but then management fired them or traded them to another team, so of course you aren’t for them anymore. If your team suddenly decides to focus on running instead of passing, no fan cares—as long as the team wins. Stripped of any pretense of governing philosophy, a political party will default to being controlled by those who shout the loudest and are unhindered by any semblance of normalcy. It isn’t the quiet fans in the stands who get on television but the lunatics who paint their bodies with the team colors and go shirtless on frigid days. It’s the crazy person who lunges at the ref and jumps over seats to fight the other team’s fans who is cheered by his fellow fans as he is led away on the jumbotron. What is the forum in which the key issues of the day are discussed? Talk radio and the television shows sponsored by the team, like Fox & Friends, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity.

It has become rare in mainstream evangelicalism to hear in-depth theological teaching. Megachurch pastors of Greear’s variety wear not suits and ties, but checked sport shirts, the sleeves rolled up at the wrist, with maybe a fleece Patagonia vest in the fall. Their sermon style tends to be similarly informal, rarely taxing attendees’ attention by delving into theological terms like soteriology or hypostatic. Yet, in recent years, a new form of spiritual jargon—words like hegemony and cultural representation—has peppered their preaching.

We wanted to be accepted by our fellows, especially the influential natural leaders among us; and the ethos of my peers was – until my last year at Oundle – anti-intellectual. You had to pretend to be working less hard than you actually were. Native ability was respected; hard work was not. It was the same on the sports field. Sportsmen were admired more than scholars in any case. But if you could achieve sporting brilliance without training, so much the better. Why is native ability more admired than hard graft? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Then here came a gang of young bop musicians carrying their instruments out of cars. They piled right into a saloon and we followed them. They set themselves up and started blowing. There we were! The leader was a slender, drooping, curly-haired, pursy-mouthed tenorman, thin of shoulder, draped loose in a sports shirt, cool in the warm night, self-indulgence written in his eyes, who picked up his horn and frowned in it and blew cool and complex and was dainty stamping his foot to catch ideas, and ducked to miss others—and said, “Blow,” very quietly when the other boys took solos.

I once read a question that somone used to begin their self-assessment: who do you most admire and why? If you are an american and have a TV in your house, you'd probably be tempted to list some sports figure, actor, singer, artist, successful businessman, or influential leader. We have been led to equate greatness with success, talent, power and recognition. Would we include on our list a single mom or dad who has faithfully served their family, the person who volunteers at the soup kitchen or homeless shelter, the guy who shovels snow for the elderly couple down the street or the soldier serving somewhere around the globe?

Newspapers are always crowded with strange maps and names of towns, and every few months the earth seems to lurch from its path when you see something in the newspapers, such as the time Mussolini, who had almost seemed one of the eternal leaders, is photographed hanging upside down on a meathook. Everyone listens to news broadcasts five or six times every day. All pleasurable things, all travel and sports and entertainment and good food and fine clothes, are in the very shortest supply, always were and always will be. There are just tiny fragments of pleasure and luxury in the world, and there is something unpatriotic about enjoying them.

As for the world beyond my family—well, what they would see for most of my teenage years was not a budding leader but rather a lackadaisical student, a passionate basketball player of limited talent, and an incessant, dedicated partyer. No student government for me; no Eagle Scouts or interning at the local congressman’s office. Through high school, my friends and I didn’t discuss much beyond sports, girls, music, and plans for getting loaded. Three of these guys—Bobby Titcomb, Greg Orme, and Mike Ramos—remain some of my closest friends. To this day, we can laugh for hours over stories of our misspent youth. In later years, they would throw themselves into my campaigns with a loyalty for which I will always be grateful, becoming as skilled at defending my record as anyone on MSNBC. But there were also times during my presidency—after they had watched me speak to a big crowd, say, or receive a series of crisp salutes from young Marines during a base tour—when their faces would betray a certain bafflement, as if they were trying to reconcile the graying man in a suit and tie with the ill-defined man-child they’d once known. That guy? they must have said to themselves. How the hell did that happen? And if my friends had ever asked me directly, I’m not sure I’d have had a good answer.

PHYSIOLOGY 1. Sex 2. Age 3. Height and weight 4. Color of hair, eyes, skin 5. Posture 6. Appearance: good-looking, over- or underweight, clean, neat, pleasant, untidy. Shape of head, face, limbs. 7. Defects: deformities, abnormalities, birthmarks. Diseases. 8. Heredity SOCIOLOGY 1. Class: lower, middle, upper. 2. Occupation: type of work, hours of work, income, condition of work, union or nonunion, attitude toward organization, suitability for work. 3. Education: amount, kind of schools, marks, favorite subjects, poorest subjects, aptitudes. 4. Home life: parents living, earning power, orphan, parents separated or divorced, parents’ habits, parents’ mental development, parents’ vices, neglect. Character’s marital status. 5. Religion 6. Race, nationality 7. Place in community: leader among friends, clubs, sports. 8. Political affiliations 9. Amusements, hobbies: books, newspapers, magazines he reads. PSYCHOLOGY 1. Sex life, moral standards 2. Personal premise, ambition 3. Frustrations, chief disappointments 4. Temperament: choleric, easygoing, pessimistic, optimistic. 5. Attitude toward life: resigned, militant, defeatist. 6. Complexes: obsessions, inhibitions, superstitions, phobias. 7. Extrovert, introvert, ambivert 8. Abilities: languages, talents. 9. Qualities: imagination, judgment, taste, poise. 10. I.Q.

I tell them to recruit kids whose coaches report that they had tremendous work ethics. They lifted weights on their own during the off-season. They showed up early for practice, stayed late, and asked for extra help on their skills. They were leaders who helped push everyone on the team to work harder. And they displayed these traits both when the team did well and when it struggled through adversity. It’s relatively easy to be enthused and hardworking on a team that’s winning. It shows more character to display those same attributes on a team that’s losing. It speaks to a person’s mental toughness, toughness that will be invaluable in dealing with the setbacks and rejections that inevitably come along in a business career.

In 1933 a group of sincere and ardent collectivists seized control of the Democratic Party, used it as a means of grasping Federal power, and enthusiastically, from motives which many of them regard as the highest idealism, began to make America over. The Democratic Party is now a political mechanism having a genuine political principle: national socialism. The Republican Party remains a political mechanism with no political principle. It does not stand for American individualism. Its leaders continue to play the 70-year-old American professional sport of vote-getting, called politics. Americans (of both parties) who stand for American political principles therefore have no means of peaceful political action. A vote for the New Deal approves national socialism, but a vote for the Republican Party does not repudiate national socialism.

We treat politics as a sport, political parties as the teams we root for, and political leaders as our favorite sports stars. But we forget that politics is not an entertainment sport. In sports, rivalry between fans of opposing teams is "Them vs Us", but in politics such rivalry becomes "Us vs Us". Political outcomes have far greater effect on our life than sports outcomes. In a democracy, "we, the people" are supposed to be the kings, not the pawns. We are the examiners and watchdogs of the political system, not the fans. We should step back from our blind loyalty to a party, and start taking an educated stand. Instead of forming our opinions based on hearsay and emotions, we should form our opinions based on hard facts. The time has come to stop being loyal to any political party, and start being loyal to our country and its betterment.

something that cannot be memorized and graded: a great doctor must have a huge heart and a distended aorta through which pumps a vast lake of compassion and human kindness. At least, that’s what you’d think. In reality, medical schools don’t give the shiniest shit about any of that. They don’t even check you’re OK with the sight of blood. Instead, they fixate on extracurricular activities. Their ideal student is captain of two sports teams, the county swimming champion, leader of the youth orchestra and editor of the school newspaper. It’s basically a Miss Congeniality contest without the sash. Look at the Wikipedia entry for any famous doctor, and you’ll see: ‘He proved himself an accomplished rugby player in youth leagues. He excelled as a distance runner and in his final year at school was vice-captain of the athletics team.’ This particular description is of a certain Dr H. Shipman, so perhaps it’s not a rock-solid system.

Thiel, the PayPal cofounder who had invested in SpaceX, holds a conference each year with the leaders of companies financed by his Founders Fund. At the 2012 gathering, Musk met Demis Hassabis, a neuroscientist, video-game designer, and artificial intelligence researcher with a courteous manner that conceals a competitive mind. A chess prodigy at age four, he became the five-time champion of an international Mind Sports Olympiad that includes competition in chess, poker, Mastermind, and backgammon. In his modern London office is an original edition of Alan Turing’s seminal 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which proposed an “imitation game” that would pit a human against a ChatGPT–like machine. If the responses of the two were indistinguishable, he wrote, then it would be reasonable to say that machines could “think.” Influenced by Turing’s argument, Hassabis cofounded a company called DeepMind that sought to design computer-based neural networks that could achieve artificial general intelligence. In other words, it sought to make machines that could learn how to think like humans.

It doesn’t need a Che Guevara to raise a guerrilla army. The leaders have already been elected to state, local, and federal governments. Sympathizers have been infiltrated into our media establishment, entertainment industry, big tech, academia, even professional sports. Breitbart was right, ‘politics is downstream from culture.’ “You don’t need to take up arms in this war. Their weapons are hurled from social media platforms from which there is no defense and the assassinations are character assassinations. Public executions come not from a slice of the guillotine but by tweet, gleefully cheered on by the mob. You can fight it from your mom’s basement as you eat Cheetos and collect an unemployment check from the very government you seek to destroy. It doesn’t take courage, moral or physical, nor does it take resiliency. In fact, it takes the opposite of those once-lauded traits. It takes apathy. You don’t have to be creative, well-read, in shape, resourceful, or strong. The weaker your mind and body the better. You can be taken advantage of. You are ripe for recruitment. Racism is the witchcraft of the twenty-first century, and cancel culture is the stake at which you are burned.

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the hatred shown toward Hillary Clinton far outstripped even the most virulent criticisms that could legitimately be pinned on her. She was linked with “evil” and widely compared to a witch, which is to say that she was attacked as a woman, not as a political leader. After her defeat, some of those critics dug out the song “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead,” sung in The Wizard of Oz to celebrate the Witch of the East’s death—a jingle already revived in the UK at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013. This reference was brandished not only by Donald Trump’s electors, but also by supporters of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main rival in the primaries. On Sanders’ official site, a fundraising initiative was announced under the punning title “Bern the Witch”—an announcement that the Vermont senator’s campaign team took down as soon as it was brought to his attention. Continuing this series of limp quips, the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh quipped, “She’s a witch with a capital B”—he can’t have known that, at the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century, a key figure had already exploited this consonance by calling his servant, Sarah Churchill, who was one of his accusers, “bitch witch.” In reaction, female Democrat voters started sporting badges calling themselves “Witches for Hillary” or “Hags for Hillary.”48

A Favorite start to a book [sorry it's long!]: "In yesterday’s Sunday Times, a report from Francistown in Botswana. Sometime last week, in the middle of the night, a car, a white American model, drove up to a house in a residential area. Men wearing balaclavas jumped out, kicked down the front door, and began shooting. When they had done with shooting they set fire to the house and drove off. From the embers the neighbors dragged seven charred bodies: two men, three women, two children. Th killers appeared to be black, but one of the neighbors heard them speaking Afrikaans among themselves. And was convinced they were whites in blackface. The dead were South Africans, refugees who had moved into the house mere weeks ago. Approached for comment, the SA Minister of Foreign Affairs, through a spokesman, calls the report ‘unverified’. Inquiries will be undertaken, he says, to determine whether the deceased were indeed SA citizens. As for the military, an unnamed source denies that the SA Defence Force had anything to do with the matter. The killings are probably an internal ANC matter, he suggests, reflecting ‘ongoing tensions between factions. So they come out, week after week, these tales from the borderlands, murders followed by bland denials. He reads the reports and feels soiled. So this is what he has come back to! Yet where in the world can one hide where one will not feel soiled? Would he feel any cleaner in the snows of Sweden, reading at a distance about his people and their latest pranks? How to escape the filth: not a new question. An old rat-question that will not let go, that leaves its nasty, suppurating wound. Agenbite of inwit. ‘I see the Defense Force is up to its old tricks again,’ he remarks to his father. ‘In Botswana this time.’ But his father is too wary to rise to the bait. When his father picks up the newspaper, he cares to skip straight to the sports pages, missing out the politics—the politics and the killings. His father has nothing but disdain for the continent to the north of them. Buffoons is the word he uses to dismiss the leaders of African states: petty tyrants who can barely spell their own names, chauffeured from one banquet to another in their Rolls-Royces, wearing Ruritanian uniforms festooned with medals they have awarded themselves. Africa: a place of starving masses with homicidal buffoons lording over them. ‘They broke into a house in Francistown and killed everyone,’ he presses on nonetheless. ‘Executed them .Including the children. Look. Read the report. It’s on the front page.’ His father shrugs. His father can find no form of words spacious enough to cover his distaste for, on one hand, thugs who slaughter defenceless women and children and, on the other, terrorists who wage war from havens across the border. He resolves the problem by immersing himself in the cricket scores. As a response to moral dilemma it is feeble; yet is his own response—fits of anger and despair—any better?" Summertime, Coetzee

ever and again we find some leader or some tribe amidst the disorder of free and independent nomads, powerful enough to force a sort of unity upon its kindred tribes, and then woe betide the nearest civilization. Down pour the united nomads on the unwarlike, unarmed plains, and there ensues a war of conquest. Instead of carrying off the booty, the conquerors settle down on the conquered land, which becomes all booty for them; the villagers and townsmen are reduced to servitude and tribute paying, they become hewers of wood and drawers of water, and the leaders of the nomads become kings and princes, masters and aristocrats. They, too, settle down, they learn many of the arts and refinements of the conquered, they cease to be lean and hungry, but for many generations they retain traces of their old nomadic habits, they hunt and indulge in open-air sports, they drive and race chariots, they regard work, especially agricultural work, as the lot of an inferior race and class. This in a thousand variations has been one of the main stories in history for the last seventy centuries or more. In the first history that we can clearly decipher we find already in all the civilized regions a distinction between a non-working ruler class and the working mass of the population. And we find, too, that after some generations, the aristocrat, having settled down, begins to respect the arts and refinements and law-abidingness, of settlement, and to lose something of his original hardihood. He intermarries, he patches up a sort of toleration between conqueror and conquered; he exchanges religious ideas and learns the lessons upon which soil and climate insist. He becomes a part of the civilization he has captured; and as he does so, events gather towards a, fresh invasion by the free adventurers of the outer world. Early

My dear boys, what are you thinking about?” exclaimed Mrs. Lynn. “I cannot possibly countenance any such inconsistent proceeding,” chimed in the Dowager Ingram. “Indeed, mama, but you can—and will,” pronounced the haughty voice of Blanche, as she turned round on the piano-stool; where till now she had sat silent, apparently examining sundry sheets of music. “I have a curiosity to hear my fortune told: therefore, Sam, order the beldame forward.” “My darling Blanche! recollect—” “I do—I recollect all you can suggest; and I must have my will—quick, Sam!” “Yes—yes—yes!” cried all the juveniles, both ladies and gentlemen. “Let her come—it will be excellent sport!” The footman still lingered. “She looks such a rough one,” said he. “Go!” ejaculated Miss Ingram, and the man went. Excitement instantly seized the whole party: a running fire of raillery and jests was proceeding when Sam returned. “She won’t come now,” said he. “She says it’s not her mission to appear before the ‘vulgar herd’ (them’s her words). I must show her into a room by herself, and then those who wish to consult her must go to her one by one.” “You see now, my queenly Blanche,” began Lady Ingram, “she encroaches. Be advised, my angel girl—and—” “Show her into the library, of course,” cut in the “angel girl.” “It is not my mission to listen to her before the vulgar herd either: I mean to have her all to myself. Is there a fire in the library?” “Yes, ma’am—but she looks such a tinkler.” “Cease that chatter, blockhead! and do my bidding.” Again Sam vanished; and mystery, animation, expectation rose to full flow once more. “She’s ready now,” said the footman, as he reappeared. “She wishes to know who will be her first visitor.” “I think I had better just look in upon her before any of the ladies go,” said Colonel Dent. “Tell her, Sam, a gentleman is coming.” Sam went and returned. “She says, sir, that she’ll have no gentlemen; they need not trouble themselves to come near her; nor,” he added, with difficulty suppressing a titter, “any ladies either, except the young, and single.” “By Jove, she has taste!” exclaimed Henry Lynn. Miss Ingram rose solemnly: “I go first,” she said, in a tone which might have befitted the leader of a forlorn hope, mounting a breach in the van of his men.

Twas the night before Christmas and in SICU All the patients were stirring, the nurses were, too. Some Levophed hung from an IMED with care In hopes that a blood pressure soon would be there. One patient was resting all snug in his bed While visions—from Versed—danced in his head. I, in my scrubs, with flowsheet in hand, Had just settled down to chart the care plan. Then from room 17 there arose such a clatter We sprang from the station to see what was the matter. Away to the bedside we flew like a flash, Saved the man from falling, with restraints from the stash. “Do you know where you are?” one nurse asked while tying; “Of course! I’m in France in a jail, and I’m dying!” Then what to my wondering eyes should appear? But a heart rate of 50, the alarm in my ear. The patient’s face paled, his skin became slick And he said in a moment, “I’m going to be sick!” Someone found the Inapsine and injected a port, Then ran for a basin, as if it were sport. His heart rhythm quieted back to a sinus, We soothed him and calmed him with old-fashioned kindness. And then in a twinkling we hear from room 11 First a plea for assistance, then a swearing to heaven. As I drew in my breath and was turning around, Through the unit I hurried to respond to the sound. “This one’s having chest pain,” the nurse said and then She gave her some nitro, then morphine and when She showed not relief from IV analgesia Her breathing was failing: time to call anesthesia. “Page Dr. Wilson, or May, or Banoub! Get Dr. Epperson! She ought to be tubed!” While the unit clerk paged them, the monitor showed V-tach and low pressure with no pulse: “Call a code!” More rapid than eagles, the code team they came. The leader took charge and he called drugs by name: “Now epi! Now lido! Some bicarb and mag! You shock and you chart it! You push med! You bag!” And so to the crash cart, the nurses we flew With a handful of meds, and some dopamine, too! From the head of the bed, the doc gave his call: “Resume CPR!” So we worked one and all. Then Doc said no more, but went straight to his work, Intubated the patient, then turned with a jerk. While placing his fingers aside of her nose, And giving a nod, hooked the vent to the hose. The team placed an art-line and a right triple-lumen. And when they were through, she scarcely looked human: When the patient was stable, the doc gave a whistle. A progress note added as he wrote his epistle. But I heard him exclaim ere he strode out of sight, “Merry Christmas to all! But no more codes for tonight!” Jamie L. Beeley Submitted by Nell Britton

I used to tell people, ‘If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes real good, you did it.’ That’s what being a leader means. The buck stops with you when there are problems. No excuses. No blaming others.

Many leaders of the Christian right like to dress up in red, white, and blue and announce themselves as true patriots. But they are the same people who seek to pervert our institutions, betray our international alliances and make friends with despots, degrade the public discourse, treat the Constitution as a subcategory of their holy texts, demean whole segments of the population, foist their authoritarian creed upon other people's children, and celebrate the elevation of a ‘king’ to the presidency who has made a sport out of violating democratic laws and norms. We don't need lessons on patriotism from Christian nationalists.

Talent alone is not enough, although it certainly helps. To get through the door at an elite sporting organisation talent is a prerequisite. We would be naive to think any differently, but in high-stakes environments it is the interaction between grit, talent and character that critically impacts an individual’s development and growth.

In existing writings about federally recognized tribes and their engagement with tribal acknowledgment politics, a palpable theme is clear: presently recognized nations are not acting the ‘Indian way’ when they refuse to acknowledge their less fortunate Indian relatives and share with them. To many writers, federally recognized tribal leaders are so ensconced in the hegemonic colonial order that they are no even aware that they are replicated and reinforcing it inequities. According to this line, because the Five Tribes and related groups like the Mississippi Band of Choctaws and the Eastern Band of Cherokees have embraced nonindigenous notions of ‘being Indian’ and tribal citizenship using federal censuses such as the Dawes Rolls and blood quantum they are not being authentic. Some critics charge that modern tribes like the Choctaw Nation have rejected aboriginal notions and conceptions of Indian social organization and nationhood. This thinking, however, seems to me to once again reinforce stereotypes about Indians as largely unchanging, primordial societies. The fact that the Creek and Cherokee Nations have evolved and adopted European notions of citizenship and nationhood is somehow held against them in tribal acknowledgment debates. We hear echoes of the ‘Noble Savage’ idea once again. In other context when tribes have demanded a assay in controlling their cultural property and identities – by protesting Indian sports mascots or the marketing of cars and clothing with their tribal names, or by arguing that studios should hire real Indians as actors – these actions are applauded. However, when these occur in tribal recognition contexts, the tribes are viewed as greedy or racists. The unspoken theme is that tribes are not actin gin the ‘traditional’ Indian way…With their cultures seen as frozen in time, the more tribes deviate from popular representation, the more they are seen as inauthentic. To the degree that they are seen as assimilated (or colonized and enveloped in the hegemonic order), they are also seen as inauthentic, corrupted, and polluted. The supreme irony is that when recognized tribes demand empirical data to prove tribal authenticity, critics charge that they are not being authentically ingenious by doing so.

L’idea che l’esperienza del materno debba rendere piú umane le donne eccellenti ha come contraltare il fatto che le donne che scelgono di non essere madri sono invece raccontate o sottintese come creature disumane, mancanti della parte piú realizzata della loro essenza. La donna potente, se è madre, sembra far meno paura a chi il potere lo ha visto fino a quel momento solo in mano agli uomini, il cui essere padri o meno ovviamente non ha mai fatto alcuna differenza sul loro grado di ferocia. L’ossessione della mammizzazione delle donne che arrivano all’apice è parossistica nei media italiani. Dallo sport alla politica, dal cinema all’economia, dalla scienza all’arte, ogni donna che si trovasse a raggiungere risultati tali da costituire notizia si sentirà chiedere se ha un marito e dei figli o se li ha dovuti «sacrificare» sull’altare della sua eccellenza. La domanda sulla conciliazione tra lavoro e famiglia è un must di ogni intervista alla donna di successo, mentre nessuno si sogna di rivolgerla a un uomo al culmine della carriera. Ma se anche glielo si chiedesse, un uomo potrebbe tranquillamente rispondere che vive per il suo lavoro, perché uno che mette il lavoro prima di tutto il resto è l’indefesso leader che ogni azienda vorrebbe sulla sedia da amministratore delegato, mentre una donna che facesse lo stesso sarebbe giudicata insensibile e spietata; [...] In questo discorso c’è un’implicita nota di colpevolizzazione sociale agita contro le donne che, per qualche ragione, hanno scelto di lavorare e non avere figli. Il dato viene evidenziato come un’anomalia, perché, anche se i risultati personali vengono raccontati come azioni vincenti, l’assenza di prole resta qualcosa da dover motivare.

Stay Positive It’s easy to be positive when everything in life is going great. The hard part is staying positive when you get knocked down and kicked around. The fact is, no one goes through life untested. If you study history, sports, and business, you will find that every great leader and team had to overcome adversity and challenges to define themselves and their success

Leadership, unlike heroism, is a team sport --always. It is based on consistency and progress.

Aimee Mullins, the president of the Women's Sports Foundation, told me recently that 84% of women business leaders in this country say that they were athletes. I'm not surprised: athletics breeds a level of confidence and leadership that can be hard for girls to find elsewhere. Parents act like they want their daughters to be as strong as their sons, but they're much tougher on the boys. Sports, on the other hand, doesn't discriminate. There's no opportunity to cover up anything on the court: you either get it done, or you don't.

Leadership is not a sports game. That is why it does not require players. It only requires role players because leadership is about real life.

Most of us carry a faded old picture in our heads of what a great captain looks like. It’s usually an attractive person who possesses an abundance of strength, skill, wisdom, charisma, diplomacy, and unflappable calm. These people are not supposed to be difficult to spot. In our imaginations they’re talkative and articulate, charismatic but firm, tough but gracious, and respectful of authority. We expect leaders, especially in sports, to pursue their goals with gusto but to never wander from the principles of sportsmanship and fair play. We believe, as the Stanford social psychologist Deborah Gruenfeld put it, that power is reserved for the kind of person “who possesses some combination of superior charm and ruthless ambition that the rest of us don’t.

Sports teams conduct practice sessions and call time-outs mid-game to quickly review what’s going wrong and introduce modified approaches. This is true even in sports that don’t allow breaks. In rowing, for instance, a coxswain might call on a crew to focus on a particular aspect of their technique for five or ten strokes to recover their timing. A basketball point guard might dribble a few seconds off the shot clock while shouting directions to her teammates so they can regroup. Similarly, leaders must reserve time for slowification. Toyota, studied for their organizational learning and outstanding performance, routinely puts breaks between shifts so leaders can run problem-solving and improvement activities before production resumes. When production is interrupted, downtime is often used as a slowification opportunity.

Charles Schwab was paid a salary of a million dollars a year in the steel business, and he told me that he was paid this huge salary largely because of his ability to handle people. Imagine that! A million dollars a year because he was able to handle people! One day at noontime, Schwab was walking through one of his steel mills when he came across a group of men smoking directly under a sign that said No Smoking. Do you suppose that Charles Schwab pointed at the sign and said, “Can’t you read?” Absolutely not, not that master of human relations. Mr. Schwab chatted with the men in a friendly way and never said a word about the fact that they were smoking under a No Smoking sign. Finally he handed them some cigars and said with a twinkle in his eye, “I’d appreciate it, boys, if you’d smoke these outside.” That is all he said. Those men knew that he knew that they had broken a rule, and they admired him because he hadn’t called them down. He had been such a good sport with them that they in turn wanted to be good sports with him. —DALE CARNEGIE

million-dollar smile. The earnest, all-American niceness of the guy. Not to mention the pure, high, spiraling arc of the thrown football as it zeros in, laser-like, on the expected position of the wide receiver. Never mind that said receiver is flat-out running for his life, dancing, dodging, leaping and spinning in a million directions just inches ahead of several thundering tons of rival linebackers. And never mind that the architect of that exquisite spiral was himself beset, nanoseconds earlier, with similar masses of murderous muscle bearing down on him as he threw. The ball hammers down precisely into the receiver’s arms as he sails across the line, and the fans go wild. TOUCHDOWN! Who could not love Tom Brady? The accomplishments, honors, and accolades go on and on: youngest quarterback ever to win three Super Bowls. Only quarterback ever to win NFL MVP by unanimous vote. As of 2013 he had been twice Super Bowl MVP, twice NFL MVP, nine times invited to the Pro Bowl, twice on the AP All-Pro First Team, five times an AFC Champion, and twice leader of the NFL in passing yards. He had also been (at least once, and in some cases multiple times) Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year, Sporting News Sportsman of the year, AP Male Athlete of the Year, NFL Offensive Player of the Year, AFC Offensive Player of the Year, AP NFL Comeback Player of the Year, PFWA NFL Comeback Player of the Year, and the New England Patriots’ all-time leader in passing touchdowns, passing yards, pass completion, pass attempts, and career wins. But Tom Brady didn’t get to be Tom Brady overnight. And he didn’t get there alone.

When most people commit to becoming great leaders, they operate from a place of wanting to be the best for others. When we start the journey that way, we take in so much information from the business itself and from business partners, spouses, colleagues, employees, parents, friends, books, thought leaders, peer groups, coaches, therapists, vendors, clients, sports greats, world leaders current and past, and we lose touch with our internal navigation system.

Steve Klubertanz's role as an Inspection/Maintenance Specialist at Scenic Traveler in Baraboo, WI, showcases his critical role in maintaining the RV dealership's quality reputation.

In a lot of jobs outside the world of sports, there may not be as clear or singular a goal, but I still think it’s critical for leaders to create an environment where colleagues have a collective purpose they can strive toward. People are inspired when they work for organizations that have a shared vision. They’re more passionate and productive, they take pride in their work, and a culture of trust and commitment is created. They also have a lot more fun.

Sports are what we watch when we just can’t look at another spreadsheet. They’re what we use when we need to get away from our lives for a little bit. Every human needs the escape, and sports provides this splendidly.

Leadership Leadership has a lot more to it than simply telling people what to do, keeping track of efforts, penalizing those who are late or who disrupt, and hiring / firing. Great leaders are also great workers with a level of competence and confidence learned on the job that others accept and are willing to follow. These leaders are good at working with themselves, they have developed discipline, an ability to delay gratification, curiosity as to why people think or do things the way they do, and are open minded and accepting of change. Just look at any sports team, military unit or successful company and you will read or hear about all the leaders that make up the company. Most frequently these leaders are not the ones with a title, but the ones who make the place run through their efforts, focus, determination and ability to overcome obstacles. It is from these ranks that titles are granted and rewards given. These people have proven that they can lead by example, are able to shoulder the load and have what it takes to lead others, helping them grow just as they were helped on their way. My book entitled YOU Working With YOU is all about you, helping you to become the leader that you are capable of becoming. Just showing up to work might keep you employed, stepping up and leading by example is what others will notice and align with.

It takes more than one individual to make a team.

Seeds of greatness My question for you is this: Are you really alive? Are you passionate about your life or are you stuck in a rut, letting the pressures of life weigh you down, or taking for granted what you have? You weren’t created to simply exist, to endure, or to go through the motions; you were created to be really alive. You have seeds of greatness on the inside. There’s something more for you to accomplish. The day you quit being excited about your future is the day you quit living. When you quit being passionate about your future, you go from living to merely existing. In the natural there may not be anything for you to be excited about. When you look into the future, all you see is more of the same. You have to be strong and say, “I refuse to drag through this day with no passion. I am grateful that I’m alive. I’m grateful that I can breathe without pain. I’m grateful that I can hear my children playing. I am grateful that I was not hurt in that accident. I’m grateful that I have opportunity. I’m not just alive--I’m really alive.” This is what Paul told Timothy in the Bible: “Stir up the gift, fan the flame.” When you stir up the passion, your faith will allow God to do amazing things. If you want to remain passionate, you cannot let what once was a miracle become ordinary. When you stared that new job you were so excited. You told all your friends. You knew it was God’s favor. Don’t lose the excitement just because you’ve had it for five years. When you fell in love after meeting the person of your dreams, you were on cloud nine. You knew this match was the result of God’s goodness. Don’t take it for granted. Remember what God has done. When your children were born, you cried for joy. Their births were miracles. You were so excited. Now you have teenagers and you’re saying, “God, why did you do this to me?” Don’t let what was once a miracle become so common that it’s ordinary. Every time you see your children you should say, “Thank you, Lord, for the gift you’ve given me.” We worked for three years to acquire the former Houston Rockets basketball arena for our church. During that time, it was still for sports and music events. When there wasn’t a ball game or concert, Victoria and I would come up late at night and walk around it. We’d pray and ask God for His favor. When the city leaders approved our purchase, we celebrated. It was a dream come true. Nearly ten years later, it’s easy to get used to. Holding services in such a huge building could become common, ordinary, and routine because we’ve been doing it so long now. But I have to admit that every time I walk in the building, I can’t help but say, “God, thank you. You have done more than I can ask or think.

One person who did that extraordinarily well all his life was Rahul Dravid, who combined work ethic with great ability. He believes it is always better to set challenging goals even if that means occasionally falling slightly short, rather than set simple goals which could lead to dissatisfaction and leave you wondering if they were too easy. Often people are inclined to set rather simple goals for themselves, and in the process they forget that the kind of goals one sets tells the world what kind of person you are. This is perhaps best highlighted in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when Dumbledore tells the young Harry Potter, ‘It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.’ This applies to young students, sales executives, opening batsmen and leaders of giant corporations equally.

Harry was glad school was over, but there was no escaping Dudley’s gang, who visited the house every single day. Piers, Dennis, Malcolm and Gordon were all big and stupid, but as Dudley was the biggest and stupidest of the lot, he was the leader. The rest of them were all quite happy to join in Dudley’s favourite sport: Harry- hunting.

Pep used to feel unprepared when it came to certain topics like defensive concepts or particular training methodologies. When he needed answers he would turn to Lillo at any time of day: ‘How do you solve this type of situation?’ ‘If I do this what will happen?’ According to Pep, Lillo is one of the best prepared coaches in the world and a leader in his field when it comes to developing a vision of the game, despite the fact that the world of elite sports hasn’t been kind in rewarding him.

YOU CAN DO ANYTHING was the refrain of my childhood. I was a daughter of the Title-IX generation, a lucky girl in a decade when lucky girls of lucky parents were encouraged to play sports, be leaders, wear pants, believe themselves good at math, and aspire to become the first female President of the United States. The culture validated this norm. Politicians and advertisers loved girls... But if girls were taught to be winners, boys were not taught to be losers. On the contrary, to lose was a man’s worst fate — especially if he was straight — because winning meant access to sex (a belief held most firmly by the involuntarily celibate). Even then I understood that someone’s gain was bound to be perceived as someone else’s loss, and over time, I learned not to be too brazen...

Champion... being a champion has nothing to do with sports... its a mindset.. A skill of looking at challenges that seem impossible, and Rising Up To Overcome.. You don't quit, you don't give up.... You get it Done no matter what.. No matter how many losses you get,, No matter how big the obstacles are.. You outlast until you are the one on top with your Team Mates.. Period.. IT takes a Leader and a Championship Team... but you only get that with The Mindset of a Champion...

A leader in sports, business, or any other field of endeavor should possess and provide the same qualities inherent in a good parent: character, consistency, dependability, accountability, knowledge, good judgment, selflessness, respect, courage, discipline, fairness, and structure.

We say submarining is a team sport, but in practice it often amounts to a bunch of individuals, each working in his own shell, rather than a rich collaboration.

You see, team,” Dan said passionately, “our problem is negativity, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. I believe where there is a void, negativity will fill it. And, unfortunately, within every organization you get voids in communication between leaders and their employees and between different teams and team members. It happens everywhere: with sports teams, work teams, family teams. Within these voids, negativity starts to breed and grow and, eventually, like a cancer it will spread if you don’t address it. As an executive team it’s up to us to do everything we can to prevent these voids from occurring and when they do occur, we must quickly fill them with positive communication and positive energy. People don’t just want to be seen and heard. They want to hear and see, and if they don’t feel like they are part of the company then they will assume the worst and act accordingly.

The young man making a hash of his visit to the Garden of Allah that December evening was a mess of contradictions. He was a cofounder of one of the most successful startups ever, but he didn’t want to be seen as a businessman. He craved the advice of mentors, and yet resented those in power. He dropped acid, walked barefoot, wore scraggly jeans, and liked the idea of living in a commune, yet he also loved nothing more than speeding down the highway in a finely crafted German sports car. He had a vague desire to support good causes, but he hated the inefficiency of most charities. He was impatient as hell and knew that the only problems worth solving were ones that would take years to tackle. He was a practicing Buddhist and an unrepentant capitalist. He was an overbearing know-it-all berating people who were wiser and immensely more experienced, and yet he was absolutely right about their fundamental marketing naïveté. He could be aggressively rude and then truly contrite. He was intransigent, and yet eager to learn. He walked away, and he walked back in to apologize. At the Garden of Allah he displayed all the brash, ugly behavior that became an entrenched part of the Steve Jobs myth. And he showed a softer side that would go less recognized over the years. To truly understand Steve and the incredible journey he was about to undergo, the full transformation that he would experience over his rich life, you have to recognize, accept, and try to reconcile both sides of the man.

It wasn't enough to just build a team culture. To have sustained success, we needed a winning organizational culture, and I knew that by working closely with the leadership group to define and set the culture, we would be able to have that. I needed the owner and leaders to buy in and be an integral part of the process. Their buy-in needed to be as deep as the players

There are probably as many different definitions of leadership as there are roles for leaders. There are civic leaders, political, religious and academic leaders. There are “captains” of industry and “skippers” of sports teams. There are leaders by achievement, assignment or necessity. Some leaders are official, others just emerge. Some lead by insignia, some by action, some by both. Some lead in public and some, like the head of a family, lead in private. There are at least ten different theories of leadership and ten times ten books on how to lead. Despite this complexity of characterizing leadership, or more precisely effective leadership, there is one indisputable reality, a requirement common to all those who would effect successful action. They have the ability to handle crisis because they possess the necessary skills to remain calm and functional when others are rendered confused or overwhelmed by difficult circumstances.

Hockey and cooking are similar in so many ways, especially if you are a player-coach, the guy in charge on the ice, a role I would closely relate to that of a chef in the kitchen - they are both contact sports. You've gotta keep your head up, keep moving and communicate well. Even though you might be the leader in the kitchen or on the ice, you need to understand that that you're part of a working machine and that machine stops working if one of the pieces isn't working in unison with the others. I learned from a very young age the importance of being part of this team dynamic and how hard work can take you to so many different places. (Chef Duane Keller)

Many leaders of the Christian right like to dress up in red, white, and blue and announce themselves as true patriots. But they are the same people who seek to pervert our institutions, betray our international alliances and make friends with despots, degrade the public discourse, treat the Constitution as a subcategory of their holy texts, demean whole segments of the population, foist their authoritarian creed upon other people’s children, and celebrate the elevation of a “king” to the presidency who has made a sport out of violating democratic laws and norms.

also brought home a set of fly-fishing how-to videotapes. This is the eighties, I reasoned, the age of video. What better way to take up a sport than from a comfortable armchair? That’s where I’m at my best with most sports anyway. There were three tapes. The first one claimed it would teach me to cast. The second would teach me to “advanced cast.” And the third would tell me where trout live, how they spend their weekends, and what they’d order for lunch if there were underwater delicatessens for fish. I started the VCR and a squeaky little guy with an earnest manner and a double-funny hat came on, began heaving fly line around, telling me the secret to making beautiful casting loops is … Whoever made these tapes apparently assumed I knew how to tie backing to reel and line to backing and leader to line and so on all the way out to the little feather and fuzz fish snack at the end. I didn’t know how to put my rod together. I had to go to the children’s section at the public library and check out My Big Book of Fishing and begin with how to open the package it all came in. A triple granny got things started on the spool. After twelve hours and help from pop rivets and a tube of Krazy Glue, I managed an Albright knot between backing and line. But my version of a nail knot in the leader put Mr. Gordian of ancient Greek knot fame strictly on the shelf. It was the size of a hamster and resembled one of the Woolly Bugger flies I’d bought except in the size you use for killer whales. I don’t want to talk about blood knots and tippets. There I was with two pieces of invisible plastic, trying to use fingers the size of a man’s thumb while holding a magnifying glass and a Tensor lamp between my teeth and gripping nasty tangles of monofilament with each big toe. My girlfriend had to come over and cut me out of this with pinking shears. Personally, I’m going to get one of those nine-year-old Persian kids that they use to make incredibly tiny knots in fine Bukhara rugs and just take him with me on all my fishing trips.

Leading, on the other hand, is about creating something new. A leader must lead his people to new heights. A leader moves forward, thinks bigger, and creates a new path—a path that wasn’t there before. A leader isn’t afraid to dream big even though he must face the unknown and the untried. A leader looks at what he has and asks how he can take it to a whole new level, a level that most people think is unrealistic or unreasonable.

What makes a bad coach? They don't study the current live game that is playing to know what to do. They always study previous games. Come with a plan and no matter what. They stick to that plan. They are not checking if the plan will work on the current game or match.

Jack the Giant Slayer needs to be cunning. He needs to be able to analyse giants and detect their weakness and vulnerabilities. He must work out his giant-killing tactics. The holy grail for the giant slayers is the mind. The giants can control the body. They can get the physically best players. What they can’t get is the mentally best players, i.e. the most resilient, robust, fastest-thinking, the best leaders, the most composed, and so on. That’s because they can see the body and not the mind. What they can’t see, they are much shakier on. That’s where small teams have so much scope. Their task is to find mentally better players, more consistent, more able to work in a team, more able to cope with changing circumstances. The sky’s the limit for mental footballers versus physical footballers. It’s time for mental Moneyball, for psychological football – for Sun Tzu and Clausewitz footballers. Jack can outsmart the giants. They’re very big and very rich, but not very smart. It’s time to bring them down and take control of the golden goose. Come on guys, let’s get this revolution started. Let’s beat the odds. It’s time for our day in the sun, lifting the big trophy!

Today the intellectual leaders of the Republican Party are the paranoids, kooks, know-nothings, and bigots who once could be heard only on late-night talk shows, the stations you listened to on long drives because it was hard to fall asleep while laughing. When any political movement loses all sense of self and has no unifying theory of government, it ceases to function as a collective rooted in thought and becomes more like fans of a sports team.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Falwell used military and sports analogies interchangeably. By the 1990s, however, as some evangelicals began to back away from militaristic rhetoric, sports offered a more palatable alternative. In 1996, for instance, Ralph Reed sent a memo instructing grassroots leaders of the Christian Coalition to “avoid military rhetoric and to use sports metaphors instead.

Culture is a contact sport—Participate!

It was the USSR, as an emerging basketball power in the 1950s, that first called on Olympic leaders to officially add women's basketball to the program as a medal sport, a half century after the Fort Shaw girls demonstrated the game in St. Louis. Their first attempt came during a June 1955 meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Paris, where the Soviets asked delegates to vote on the adding women's competitions in volleyball, basketball, speed skating, and rowing, all of which were already open to male athletes.

Mired in a complex situation, the leader must rise above it to understand it. Preserving distance may be the only way to see the full picture.24 This skill is similar to an athlete leaving the playing field and going to the press box to observe the game and see its broader context. Thus, strategic managers must be able to keep perspective and see the big picture – not get lost in the action. Continuing the sports metaphor, to truly understand the big picture, one must not only go to the press box to observe the “game,” but must also have a “quiet room” to periodically think about it, to understand it, and perhaps to change the strategy or players.