Jared Dudley, you inspire me!  You really do.

For my second sports blog of the day, I share with you three tweets that reveal why Jared Dudley succeeds.  Jared is a go-to bench player for the Phoenix Suns.  He has not been blessed with superlative talent.  In the high-flying, above-the-rim style of NBA basketball, he can barely dunk the basketball.  But the kid works, and works, and works … and his persistence pays off in games.  Time after time, his coming off the bench inspires the team to new levels of effort and performance.

A bit of his secret?

At 11pm on Tuesday night earlier this week, in the middle of the summer, Jared was watching film, trying to figure out how to improve his game.  He shares his thoughts with us:

Every night I been watching film on the top players I have to guard. Tonight is Kobe and the Lakers. It’s cuz of him I’m goin on this diet lol

I’m watching this WCF vs lakers, and Kobe can wear u down..Right when i thought I had some of his moves down he shows me something new

My thinking is I’m not getting any taller or a longer wing span.. So I better get in the best BBALL shape possible.. Back to the LAB

The best BBALL shape possible.  Yes, we can learn from that.  No matter where we are, or what we are doing in life, we can improve our performance, regardless of physical constraints that would hold us down.  We need to study, and work, and study and work some more.  Then, we can rise above our limitations and achieve greatness.

The Arizona Diamondbacks have given us little to cheer about this season.  They are mired at the bottom of the National League West with a dismal .400 record.  But yesterday, as reported by KTAR.com, “The Arizona Diamondbacks tied a major league record by hitting four consecutive home runs, with Adam LaRoche, Miguel Montero, Mark Reynolds and Stephen Drew connecting in the fourth inning Wednesday night to beat Milwaukee 8-2.”

You can view a video of all four solo shots here.

Only seven major league teams have accomplished this amazing feat in the history of the game.

The lesson? No matter how dark and impossible our world seems to be, we all have the potential to break out in a spectacular way.  In the face of immense opposition, we must, as urged by the Curtis Mayfield song, "Keep on Keeping On.”

Busticate: to break into pieces

Behemoth: any creature or thing of monstrous size or power

While I was in heads-down study mode for the CISSP exam last month, on two successive days, the Dictionary.com Word of the Day service sent out the words “Busticate” and “Behemoth” to my mobile phone.

I chuckled a  bit and tried to apply that advice to the exam: Break the broad spectrum of Information Security subject matter into manageable chunks and focus on each chunk in turn.  It seemed to help.  When I receive the results from my test (yes, I am anxious), I’ll have to attribute partial credit to Dictionary.com!

When confronted by seemingly insurmountable obstacles in our lives, we can benefit from this approach: Let’s break out our figurative big hammers and Busticate the Behemoths into manageable chunks that we can successfully manage.

At least for awhile, I think I’ll let this new addage replace the advice of “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, chew well.”

I was pleased to see the following video introducing the BYU Management Society, sponsored by my alma mater, Brigham Young University.

“The Management Society was founded in 1977 by Dean Merrill J. Bateman as an organization of alumni and friends of the BYU College of Business—now Marriott School of Management. Membership includes not only BYU and Marriott School alumni, but many other business professionals with the same desire for professional advancement, high ethical standards, career development, and continuing education. Twenty-Five years after its founding, the management society is an influential organization with about 6,000 members in 40 U.S. cities and 10 countries.”

The major objective of the BYU Management Society are:

“To extend the values and influence of moral and ethical leadership, the Marriott School, and BYU through a premier organization for the development of management and business leaders.”

I graduated from the BYU engineering college, not the management school, and didn’t actively participate in the Society until about 10 years ago, but I have certainly enjoyed my relationship with an outstanding group of people from varied backgrounds during the years I have been involved.

Back on November 11th, I posted a blog entitled “Innovation Requires Bold Courage.”

Today, an interesting related quote attributed to Aesop crossed my desk: “It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.”

I suppose this applies to all the armchair quarterbacks of the world and to all the folks who dream of innovation without really getting their hands dirty.  For football players, really bold courage means giving it all on icy Lambeau field in January.  For those who really innovate in technology, it means down-and-dirty, against-all-odds kind of innovation – a grind-it-out persistence in the face of criticism and doubt – not second guessing from the safe distance of the ivory tower.

I tip my hat to those who really innovate – and to those who brave the bitter cold of January football games in uncovered stadiums.

Technorati Tags: leadership, innovation, aesop, courage

Thanks to Chris Thomason for pointing out today’s leadership quotation via Twitter (@christhomason):

“If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”
Thomas A. Edison

Thanks to Thomas Edison for inspiring us and inventing all that stuff (1,093 U.S. Patents)!
Technorati Tags: Edison, Potential, Leadership

Creative: Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative.

Synergy:  The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.

The most exciting and satisfying part of my career is best labeled “Creative Synergy,” where the interaction between two or more people yields more creative results than any of the participants could deliver individually.

This is something that can’t be forced, but is exciting when it happens.  I just experienced it again this afternoon at an adhoc meeting here at Sun’s Customer Engineering Conference in Las Vegas.  Not a huge flash, not a ground-breaking innovation, but a creative bit of terminology that may make a big difference in how an important concept can be communicated.

And I’m not even going to tell you what we discovered.  I’ll leave this to my colleague who’ll blog about it soon.  Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: creativity, synergy, idea

At Sun Microsystem’s Customer Engineering Conference, Sun Vice President Hal Stern proposed that courage was essential for innovation. His challenge seemed particularly relevant as we seek to thrive amidst challenging times.

I enjoy exploring the meanings of words, so I turned to Dictionary.com for assistance as I pondered this concept:

• Innovate: “to begin or introduce something new”
• New: “of a kind now existing or appearing for the first time”
• First: “being before all others with respect to time”

Basically, innovation demands that we do something before anyone else does it – before “best practices” are known, before markets are proven, before all the “gotchas” have been experienced. To those who try to innovate, there always seems to be an abundance of people who point out potential pitfalls, pose a host of reasons things won’t work and warn of impending doom.

In a Sun sales training conference last August, a featured speaker, Robert Kriegel, called this oppressive phenomena the “firehose principle” – where naysayers always seem to appear with virtual fire hoses to douse the emerging flame of any new idea … which brings us to a second essential word – Courage.

• Courage: “the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear”
• Danger: “liability or exposure to harm or injury; risk; peril”
• Fear: “a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined”

Because fire hosers seem always to emerge in opposition to new ideas, we must cultivate a courageous quality of mind or spirit that will enable us to face opposition without fear.  Then we can innovate.

In another recent dictionary discovery session, I found that “Valiant” means “boldly courageous”.  I think that is the type of courage Hal Stern challenged us to foster.  This is not a call for rose-colored glasses or intellectual dishonesty, but it is the type of courage that drives us to overcome obstacles, find answers to tough questions, fight the opposition and persevere to win.

In these troubled times, we at Sun need that type of bold courage.  We need to leverage our culture of innovation, not just in technology, but in business practice and personal performance, to conquer the fire hoses and deliver results.

Technorati Tags: Courage, Innovation, Leadership

“No sky is heavy if the heart be light.”

-Winston Churchill, British statesman.

When I sense a virtual heavy sky, I am uplifted by the inspiring optimism and tenacious courage of this remarkable political leader, who, in the depths of World War II, when his country was being ferociously bombed by the enemy, urged his countrymen, “Never, never, never, never give up!”

Technorati Tags: Churchill, Optimism, Courage

“Resolve to perform what you ought.  Perform without fail what you resolve.”

- Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America.

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