Posted by Larry Wallace on September 20, 2010 under Everything else | 
Coach Mike Sherman, Head Football Coach for Texas A&M, was the offensive line coach when I played football at A&M in the early 90′s. He later went on to be the head coach for the Green Bay Packers before returning back to A&M a couple of years ago to take over as head coach.
Both the Aggies and the Packers are rich with tradition and a remarkable history. As head coach of the Packers, he didn’t have to go far from his desk to be reminded of the greatness of Coach Vince Lombardi and all that he meant to the Packers and football in general. Many players under his his coaching felt their success not only on the field but to lift after football was a direct reflection on Coach Lombardi’s pre-season speech to his team in 1962 and the implementation of those principles every single day after that.
Coach Sherman sent out a letter to me and the rest of my fellow Aggie Football Alumni that read this: “You may have read excerpts from (Coach Lombardi’s) speech but I do not think you get the full effect of it until you read the entire speech. The following is Paul Hornung’s (Former Packer Great) recollection of the speech. It can be found also in his 2004 book, The Golden Boy.”
The Habit of Winning
by Vince Lombardi
“Winning is not a sometime thing,” Lombardi said. “You don’t win once in a while. You don’t do things right once in a while. You do them all the time. Winning is a habit.
“Every time a football player goes out to play, he’s got to play from the ground up. From the soles of his feet right to his head. Every inch of him has to play. Some guys play with their head. That’s OK; you’ve got to be smart to be No. 1 in any business. But in football, you’ve got to play with your heart. With every fiber of your body. If you are lucky enough to find a guy with a lot of head and a lot of heart, he’s never going to come off the field for a second.”
“Running a football team is not different from running any other kind of organization – an army, a political party, a business. The problems are the same. The objective is to win. To beat the other guy. Maybe that sounds hard or cruel. I don’t think so.”
“It is a reality of life that men are competitive and the most competitive games draw the most competitive men. That’s why they’re there – to compete. They know the rules and the objectives when they get in the game. The objective is to win – fairly, squarely, decently, by the rules – but to win. And in truth, I have never known a man worth his salt who in the long run, deep down, did not appreciate the grind. The discipline. There is something in good men that yearns for – needs – discipline and the harsh reality of head to head combat.”
“I don’t say these things because I believe in the “brute” nature of man, or that man must be brutalized to be in combat. I believe in God and I believe in human decency. But I firmly believe that any mans finest hours, his greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear, is the moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle victorious.”
Tags: Business, Football, Habbit, larry, Larry Wallace, Life, Lombardi, Sherman, Success, Texas A&M, Vince, wallace, Winning
Posted by Larry Wallace on September 28, 2009 under Everything else |
Long before the famous discovery of Alexander Graham Bell, Wilhelm Reiss, the German schoolmaster, constructed a telephone through which he could whistle or hum. However, the gadget couldn’t transmit speech. Something was lacking! Reiss never let the electrodes touch in his telephone. Bell then followed Reiss and discovered that a little screw controlled the telephone electrodes. Accidentally, he moved the screw one-thousandth of an inch and speech, articulate and clear, came through. History records that the fraction of an inch made an enormous difference.
Just “That Much More” makes the difference in winners…
Posted by Larry Wallace on November 8, 2008 under Mobile, Social |
This afternoon, I sat on a bench at the neighborhood playground. While my kids played, I was thinking about a recent conversation I had about location services and social-mapping. Companies such as Whrrl, Loopt and others provide the ability to write reviews for businesses and restaurants that you frequent in addition to keeping track of where your friends are located.
While I love the idea of being able to read reviews to help persuade me as I look to find a particular product or a good restaurant to visit in my city, the benefits are so much greater than even a personal benefit.
Imagine how social mapping can aid in the goal of improving customer service. For example: If I have a bad experience at a store or restaurant, I may go home and tell my wife and probably a few friends. Those people, however, will probably not tell anyone else. However, if I write a review about my experience with a social-mapping service, I have then told hundreds, if not thousands of people, that the service at that establishment needs improvement. And chances are, they will tell a few people as well, without ever experiencing the bad service first hand.
The goal, of course is not to shut businesses down, although without reform, they may need to do so. Instead, the objective is to create a checks and balances service of what we as consumers expect from the companies that earn our dollars.
Conversely, those who have excellent service will benefit greatly from the reviews. Think about it. If you experience good service somewhere, do you go tell 10 friends? No. You may tell one or two, but we all know that word of mouth is the best form of publicity for small businesses.
Up until now, we have rewarded good service by returning to the establishment in the future. Now, however, with social-mapping, we can support local businesses by telling the world they exist and they have great service. That type of social marketing is free publicity that most small business could never afford to pay for on their own.
Or could they?!?! This led me to another thought. What if an entrepreneurial minded person, created a company that provided a service for these businesses that monitored these reviews written by patrons? That entrepreneur could charge these businesses to provide weekly reports about what their customers are saying. That type of information and reports would be priceless. What business gets that kind of feedback every week from its customers? The entrepreneur could even charge extra from cleaning up some of the negative feedback from the establishment’s customers through follow-up, incentives, and customer relations.
So business and restaurant owners, you better get on the ball. No longer will patrons be willing to take second rate customer service as an acceptable behavior. Your patrons will expect excellence and quality from the moment they walk in the door. Make sure your business is thriving on a spirit of excellence. Your future may depend on it!
