Thoughts on winning

I literally wish I could go to my Administration of Sport class every day. Not just because my prof is the MAN and took me to Ireland but because it's what I like to spend my time talking about. It relates to my current but more future career. We've currently been given the task of writing a philosophy of management paper that has to be atleast 7-10 pages long. But listen, when you get to grad school, 7 pages is a break and most of the papers you right actually teach you something. So that's cool. In the case of this paper, we get to write about how we would motivate people, our ethics in the workplace, how we would create organizational culture, what our leadership styles are, and talk about some examples of who we think are good leaders. Just reading that line made some of you fall asleep, but for me, I cranked out 6 pages in one saturday afternoon. When I think about a good leader, I think about Coach K at Duke. Now whether you're a Duke fan or you think the Bluedevils are the actual devil, you can't say Coach K isn't one heck of a leader. He said in a recent interview, "If I spend every waking moment just trying to beat you, eventually that becomes a shallow life. That can't be what motivates me. I want to beat you, but that's not the bottom line for me." It's hard to think about, let alone write 10 pages about what your leadership style is or should be as a manager, but I will say that my thoughts on the matter have changed as I get older. Ask me what it was like to be captain of the soccer team in high school and I'd say it was great but it sucked because we never won games. I judged every game I played on how many goals I scored and what the final score was. I never judged myself on how I improved or what I could do to make my team better. If I ever get the opportunity to be a manager of an office or get to coach more as I get older, I hope that won't be the case. I'm reading a book on Coach John Wooden (probably the best basketball coach of all time) where he addresses his motto for his team, "We play to win. But my team must understand that while I play to win, always, winning was never the way I measured my success. Nor was it the way I gauged the success of those under my supervision." Needless to say I've loved writing this paper so far and I'm learning a lot about stuff I thought I had all figured out. Basically I'm asking myself, "how do I treat the people around me?" and "what is my influence on the people around me?" And thinking about that on any level is a good thing to do often, not just on Thursday nights. If only I could write the paper instead of blog about it. hmm.