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Top of Mind Thursday Memo Archive
Top of Mind Thursday – January 25, 2024: Shattering a Record
This week, a new record was set in NCAA Division I basketball–the most wins by a college basketball coach:
The coach that broke Duke Coach Mike Krzyzweski’s record with 1203 career wins is Tara Vanderveer, long-time coach of the Stanford Women’s Basketball team.
Over 38 years, Tara has coached the Stanford women’s team to three NCAA titles, was named national coach of the year five times and Pac-12 coach of the year 17 times, and coached the US women’s team to Olympic Gold in 1996.
Throughout her long career, Tara has inspired women athletes of all ages, advocated for equity in women’s sports, and pushed for more hiring of female coaches. Just as important, on a daily basis, she pushed her players to be role models—both on the court and off.
My daughter had the opportunity to be a ball girl for the Stanford women’s team for two years, during which she got to see the way Tara operated up close. Where egos and personalities often dominate the men’s game, Tara’s players were always the epitome of role models: showing great sportsmanship and professionalism regardless of the outcome of a game. The team always came first, regardless of the talent or aspirations of any individual player.
Over nearly half a century, Tara has taken women’s basketball to a new level. There’s a new GOAT in college basketball, and it’s fitting that Tara wears the crown.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – January 18, 2024: Breaking Out of the Comfort Zone
It’s a new year, full of resolutions and goals, aspirations and hopes. But too often, these intentions never turn into actual results.
This is especially true when we reach outside our comfort zone: whether it’s to lose weight, get in shape, learn a new language, or develop a new habit. The status quo sets in and we go back to what’s known and comfortable. And safe.
Often times, we bite off more than we (or anyone, for that matter) could comfortably chew. Then, in frustration, we throw the whole darn meal away and wonder why we haven’t satisfied our hunger for change.
My colleague Huge Blane suggests a better way to approach this. Focus on one thing only. Just one thing you want to change, improve, increase, or decrease. This should be something that will give you the most leverage—the biggest bang for your buck, so to speak—not the simplest or hardest to accomplish, but the one that matters.
This is true for your business, as well as for your personal goals. Too often, I see clients who want to try a little bit of everything in their marketing—kind of like the kid in the candy store who wants to sample every kind of sweet. Better to focus on just one new marketing program and initiative, get results there, then find the one next thing you want to tackle.
In some cases, marketing may not even be where your energy is best put right now. If you’ve got product or distribution issues, fix those first before starting a marketing program that will generate demand for something you can’t (or shouldn’t) fulfill.
Will making this decision be uncomfortable? Possibly. Should you move forward anyway? That’s up to you. But remember that doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. And that’s not a comfortable place to wind up.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – January 11, 2024: Flying High
Since the start of the year, we’ve seen two scary incidents involving in-flight aircraft.
In the first, a JAL wide-body plane burst into flames when it collided on landing with a Japanese coast guard plane about to take off from the same runway. Five people on the coast guard plane were killed, but everyone on the JAL flight survived with only a few minor injuries.
Then, three days later, a piece of the fuselage blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight shortly after it left Portland, OR. The plane was able to return to the airport and land safely without losing any passengers or crew.
Two incidents this close together may feed a fear of flying in some people, but there’s good news here.
First, safety procedures really do work. The JAL crew followed procedures to evacuate all passengers and crew in minutes, in spite of fire and smoke filling the cabin. The flight crew on the Alaska flight followed procedures for handling a rapid depressurization and brought the aircraft to the ground without further incident.
That’s not to say the people involved aren’t traumatized by these events, but they could have been a lot worse. In the case of the Alaska flight, it was sheer luck that no one was sitting next to the door plug that blew out. The JAL situation was helped by the fact that passengers followed crew instructions and left their carryon baggage behind as they exited the aircraft using only some of the emergency evacuation slides.
Second, in both cases, forensic teams immediately jumped into action to determine what caused the incidents. In the case of the Alaska flight, the NTSB and FAA immediately called for grounding all similar Boeing aircraft until they could be inspected and deemed safe. United Airlines found loose bolts on several of their planes, other potential tragedies have been diverted.
The last fatal airline crash in the US was in 2009, likely caused by pilot fatigue. It’s safer to fly now than it is to drive on your local freeway. We have systems in place to analyze incidents like this and take swift appropriate action to see they don’t occur again.
What processes do you have in your organization to review failures and learn from them? Are you prepared to take action to change direction when necessary? Do you have a plan for how to quickly respond to a serious crisis?
We can’t avoid all failures, but how we respond to issues when they occur separates those who will continue to soar from the ones who drop out of circulation.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – January 4, 2024: Above Reproach
This week, Claudine Gay resigned her position as president of Harvard University.
Gay was one of three college presidents who, during testimony before Congress, equivocated on whether calling for the genocide of Jews would be against their school’s policies. Liz McGill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, has already resigned (as has the chairman of the Penn Board of Trustees), because of the school’s tepid response to ongoing antisemitic acts at Penn. The third president, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, remains in her role.
The Congressional testimony was damaging and Gay apologized afterwards. But she has a unique situation the other leaders aren’t facing—charges of plagiarism based on not citing primary sources for Gay’s scholarly research.
Following her resignation, Gay says she was the target of racist attacks. While I’m sure there are those who didn’t like having an African-American woman as president of Harvard, her race or gender had nothing to do with why she was pressed to leave.
Anyone can make a mistake and improperly forget to cite a source, but Gay has been accused of plagiarism more than 40 times!
Some have said what Gay did was more likely “plagiarism light” and that she shouldn’t have been harshly punished. Really? We have to wonder if a Harvard student had the exact same charges made against them, would they still be associated with the university after even the first or second incident? Most likely not.
One researcher who does feel harmed by Gay’s actions is also an African-American woman. Supposedly Gay picked up entire sentences from this woman’s work without attribution. How is that acceptable?
Earlier last year, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned as president of Stanford after allegations arose of falsified data in his research. It was determined that Tessier-Lavigne wasn’t involved in the falsification but hadn’t properly supervised those who should have been on top of the situation. So he had to go.
Gay, McGill, and Tessier-Lavigne were pushed out because their behavior was not what was expected from leaders of elite educational institutions. The head of a university is an exemplar for the student population. Let’s hope other schools copy the correct behavior moving forward.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com