eating together - our secret weapon

The Golden State Warriors have made a custom of eating out together following road games.

"Our secret weapon" is how Shaun Livingston describes it.

Warriors' ownership rents out a room in a local restaurant for the team's traveling parties, which includes players, coaches, staff and family members.

"Instead of everyone going their separate ways, we have one spot we can go and just enjoy each other's company," Stephen Curry says. "It just continues to build the camaraderie that you need to be successful from year to year."

Livingston has played for 10 teams and he has never played for a franchise that ate together like the Warriors do.

"This is amazing," Anderson Varejao said. "It's great to keep the team together, and it's been especially good for me now, getting to know the guys."

Jordan Brenner

"The Warriors' secret sauce? Team dinners on the road" ESPN. 4/11/2016

as found on RealGM.com

Bono’s leadership playbook

Bono (No. 14, World’s Greatest Leaders) finds a potential ally in the crowd. It’s young Barbara Bush, the daughter of former President George W. Bush and granddaughter of the first President Bush, whom Bono wickedly prank-called from U2’s Zoo Tour concert stage in the early 1990s. All is forgiven. “I saw your sister last week, swollen with child,” he says to Barbara Bush, talking about her twin, Jenna Bush Hager. “Absolutely beautiful she was!” Then he leans in for the drop. “You know, I do want to call your dad,” he says. “I have for about a week.” The world is now on track to eliminate the AIDS epidemic by 2030. Had she heard? “Your father, he was part of this,” Bono says, referring to the creation of Pepfar (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) in 2003, the legislation that has earmarked some $60 billion in the fight against AIDS to date. It remains the largest financial commitment of any country to combat a single infectious disease. It had bipartisan support. Its passage brought global attention to an illness that was on its way to becoming a deadly, uncontrollable pandemic. Says Bono: “I don’t think the American people understand how many lives they’ve saved.” Later he reformulates the message, spinning it into a clever political tagline: “If you’re a taxpayer, you’re an AIDS activist.”

The line reflects a classic scrimmage call from Bono’s leadership playbook: One, spread the credit liberally for every success. Two, remind people that they are essential to the mission. Three, ask for more. Repeat steps one through three.

Ellen McGirt
"Bono: I Will Follow" Fortune. 4/1/2016

effective safety leadership

Five critical components must be present in order to implement effective safety leadership.

1. Your company must first establish a field presence. The best way to measure your company’s safety culture and its effectiveness is for managers to obtain feedback from their workforce. This not only shows your workers that you care about their well-being, but also establishes the importance of demonstrating safety leadership.

2. Effective safety leadership requires effective communication skills. Failure of management to effectively communicate with workers after an incident, allows false and misleading information to spread—which can be detrimental to your organization’s safety culture. The most opportune way to effectively communicate safety expectations and gain the trust and respect of your workforce is to utilize newsletters, as well as toolbox meetings to get the word out.

3. Establishing a feedback mechanism opens up a direct avenue of communication between your workforce and management. Creating a safety committee that includes representatives from the workforce can contribute to a better understanding of your organization’s safety culture. Additionally, routinely scheduling field walks is a good way to solicit direct feedback on workplace health and safety perceptions and issues.

4. A lack of accountability for the organization’s safety program can result in silent rebellion, especially if it is a phenomenon of “does as I say and not as I do”. Therefore, all members of your organization, regardless of job title and role should follow safety rules at all times. Everyone must be held accountable for his or her actions, starting with Management.

5. Finally, benchmarking with your competitors or joining industry groups that openly share the best-known methods, is one of the best ways to assess the contents of your organization’s safety program, as well as its overall performance. Thus, continuous improvement is the key to a successful organizational culture of safety.

Kurina Baksh

"Why Safety Leadership Matters" Huffington Post. 4/4/2016

all plans fall apart on the first round

[Y]ou need to establish clear lines of trust and communication between you and your subordinates.

The rationale is actually quite simple: The moment the shooting starts and everything goes to shit, it becomes critically important that you understand your mission and its end-state.

“There’s an old adage, which is very true: that all plans fall apart on the first round fired and things start going to hell in a handbasket,” explains Smith. “If everybody understands what the real intent is, what the real purpose, the larger purpose of a particular action is, when shit goes to pot, people can be guided by what we’re really trying to accomplish instead of just doing exactly what they were told in the plan....”

“I would say that the more nebulous the environment the more important that everybody down to the lowest ranking private understands the larger purpose of every action, so as to be guided when things go to hell,” explains Smith.

James Clark

"6 Combat Leadership Tips From A Badass Marine General" Task & Purpose. 4/5/2016

Note: Marine Maj. Gen. Ray L. Smith is a tested and proven combat leader and a highly decorated Marine veteran with more than 33 years of service under his belt. He is a recipient of the Navy Cross, two Silver Star Medals, a Bronze Star Medal with Valor, and three Purple Hearts for injuries sustained in combat. Smith served in Vietnam, Grenada, and Beirut and has led men under fire and commanded troops at every level.

whatever a man does, he’s bound to take some risks

…in the late 1860’s… Papa and a bunch of other Salt Licks formed a “pool herd” of their little separate bunches of steers and trailed them to the new cattle market at Abilene, Kansas.

This was to get “cash money,” a thing that all Texans were short of in those years right after the Civil War. We lived then in a new country and a good one. As Papa pointed out the day the men talked over making the drive, we had plenty of grass, wood, and water. We had wild game for killing, fertile ground for growing bread corn, and the Indians had been put onto reservations with the return of U.S. soldiers to the Texas forts.

“In fact,” Papa wound up, “all we lack having a tight tail-hold on the world is a little cash money. And we can get that in Abilene.”

Well, the idea sounded good, but some of the men still hesitated. Abilene was better than six hundred miles north of the Texas hill country we lived in. It would take months for the men to make the drive and ride back home. And all that time the womenfolks and children of Salt Licks would be left in a wild frontier settlement to make out the best they could.

Still, they needed money, and they realized that whatever a man does, he’s bound to take some risks.


Fred Gipson
Old Yeller. Haper Collins. 1956.