The late Bear Bryant, the legendary football coach at Alabama was so confident in his coaching abilities he was quoted as saying, “I’ll take mine and beat your’n, or I’ll take your’n and beat mine.” He did not mean to imply that his players were not great, just that he would stack his coaching staff [...]

Southwest Airlines has always been a fun experience mainly because of the fun brought to the situation by the flight attendants.  They sing songs, tell jokes and generally make the plane more relaxing for everyone. It is hard to tell whether yesterday on Delta from Atlanta to San Francisco was an isolated event or a [...]

How important is INNOVATION? Drive through West Point, Georgia, and Lanette, Alabama, once mighty textile towns along the Ga/Ala border on the Chattahoochee River, once headquarters to West Point Pepperill, and notice the quiet of today’s moment. Mills everywhere. Absolutely none of them running. The scene is eerily like the shut down auto plants in [...]

I saw a diagram the other day that showed that RESULTS exist in the space between what you DEMAND and what you TOLERATE.  I think that there is some truth in this statement, but it is in conflict with our definition of leadership. We believe that a LEADER is someone whom others CHOOSE to FOLLOW.  [...]

Yesterday’s USA Today reminded us of the United snafoo during the Christmas holidays when they diverted two planes originally bound for Denver to Cheyenne, Wyoming, because of weather. Diversion for safety reasons of course is not a snafoo. However in United’s case, they stranded the passengers in Cheyenne the next morning and flew the empty [...]