Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers, used to tell his players, “Chase perfection and you may catch excellence.” What is excellence? It may be difficult to define, but my good friend and fellow coach, Jack Hermanski, may have an insight. We tried to give our basketball players credit for Effort Points…
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Pat Dunne, the head football coach at Chicago’s Marist High School, rewarded excellence in a unique way this past football season. He saw excellence and rewarded it where no other coach whom I know ever did. Ray Holmes, a senior volleyball player at Marist, served as the Manager of the football team for the previous…
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I have been speaking for twenty plus years on the importance of attitude in a leadership position and in 2013 published a book on this topic, Attitude – The Cornerstone of Leadership. I use the word, ATTITUDE, as an acronym and give each letter of the word a characteristic that might make for a quality…
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I very seldom get angry over an athlete’s comments in the newspapers. I think you just kind of read the comments, give them little thought, and move on. However, we had something said recently that, I believe, made a lot of people in the Chicago area very angry. At the initial Chicago Bulls media day…
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Frank and George Black are two outstanding lawyers in Morris, Illinois. Years ago, they gave me a book of quotes written by their lawyer father, August Black. “My Briefs on Life” reminds me of another book, “The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain.” Both books entice readers to reflect on the really important things in…
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Roy Disney wrote, “Decisions are easy to make when you know your values.” I disagree to some extent. Tough decisions are never easy to make and I can certainly recall agonizing over truly difficult decisions. But, ultimately, your values do lead you to your final decisions. I can recall thinking as a college student that…
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Henry Ford wrote: “If there is any secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as your own.” The best leaders I have known do this very well. I served on two cabinets in my educational career. One…
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How often the simple is the profound. I do believe that in so many areas of life, we make things so complicated. I once read that the entire law that was passed as Social Security was 17 pages long and this was certainly a law that has had a profound effect on all us…
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It is such a simple concept. How do you succeed in life? How do you make teams, businesses, or institutions succeed? There can be a number of reasons for success in any arena, but the one recurrent concept that always comes to the front is work. Besides leading his team to the NBA championship, Stephen…
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I had the great opportunity of listening to Oliver Gibson last month at a Hall of Fame induction in Joliet. He was a football player at local Romeoville High School. He went on the star at Notre Dame and had a nine-year playing career in the NFL, including a Super Bowl appearance with the Steelers.…
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