Transform Recruitment Marketing Conference – June in Boston!

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June 2-4, 2020 the Transform Recruitment Marketing conference will be back in Boston, and I will again be the Emcee for this event! You can use the code “TIMROCKS” for a 10% discount to the conference!

I’ve been a part of Transform from the beginning, I believe this is the fifth Transform. All I know is we started on the Recruitment Marketing bandwagon super early! In those early days, it was all about branding and CRM technology. Since then, we’ve seen the growth of an entire Talent Attraction industry, that includes programmatic job advertising, hyper-personalization for candidates, the rise of video, the evolution of content marketing in candidate attraction and nurturing, and so many other marketing concepts that have found their way into recruiting!

The reality is we went from Employment Branding to Recruitment Marketing in a blink of an eye, and it just keeps growing. Most Fortune 500 organizations now either have a team of Recruitment Marketing pros on staff or use an outside vendor to help them support their recruitment marketing efforts.

Why I love Transform Recruitment Marketing Conference? 

  • It’s not just high-level strategy, but in the weeds, tactics being taught by other corporate recruitment marketing pros who are doing what you’re trying to do!
  • Keynotes that are different. We’re used to a certain type of keynote at HR and Recruiting conferences. Transform always brings in folks I have never heard of that blow me away. In fact, we had Mel Robbins before Mel Robbins was Mel Robbins! Hell, I take credit for Mel Robbins becoming Mel Robbins! (not really, but a little!)
  • We’ve developed a community of corporate Recruitment Marketing Pros and Leaders. This alone, the ability to build your network of like-minded folks, is worth the price of admission!
  • No pitches, just ideas. The conference was built around this idea of how do we raise the game of recruitment marketing, regardless of your tech stack. If we all get smarter, the decision of tech to use will play itself out in the appropriate way.

So, put it on your calendar now and sign up to send your recruitment marketing pro and/or team to Transform!

Click Here to Register and See More Information! 

Navarro Cheer Coach, @MonicaAldama, is the Greatest Leader of our Time!

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If you haven’t watched the series, Cheer, on Netflix yet, you must! It’s great.

Honestly, I wasn’t thrilled to watch a series about cheerleading. Just not something I thought I would be interested in, but it’s so much more than a show about cheerleading. It’s about getting to great performance, about inclusion, about leadership, and about how a great leader with a vision and no-how can take any organization to the next level.

For those who haven’t seen Cheer, I’ll give you the quick rundown. Navarro College is a two-year community college in the middle of nowhere Texas, that has a multi-time national championship cheer team. It’s led by hometown coach, Monica Aldama, who just happens to have a degree in Finance from the Univ. of Texas, Austin, and her MBA, but decided to come back to sleepy Corsicana, TX to get married and raise her family.

She was a cheerleader in high school and decided to take a job as cheer coach at the local college, and her type-A personality, world-class attention to detail, superior drive, business knowledge, lead her to become the greatest cheer coach in the country at any level, where kids from all over the US are looking to come to Navarro College if you want to reach the highest level of cheer.

Why is Monica Aldama the Greatest Leader of our Time? 

– She’s performance-driven at a world-class level. She seeks perfection and understands to get there she has to rely on 20-ish 18 to 21-year-olds who have to be pushed to levels they can’t even imagine.

– She’s a relationship-based leader. To get the highest performance out of someone as a leader, that person must believe and trust 100% that you have their best interest in mind. Their future. That you are helping them become the best version of themselves and nothing else.

– She is a data-driven leader. Early on Monica found out her background in finance and numbers would serve her well in how these competitions were scored and understood beyond her peers what it would really take to win at the highest level.

– Practice, practice, practice. Another thing that most people don’t understand about the show is Navarro Collge, being a two-year college isn’t under NCAA rules for practice time, scholarships, etc. There is an NJCAA governing body, but having a kid who played two years of JUCO baseball, I can tell you there are no real rules! So, Monica being at a two-year school gives her a major advantage over traditional four-year schools bound by NCAA practic rules. Is that fair? Is that too much on these kids? If you want to be the best, and this coach and these kids do, you don’t care. They don’t care!

– Attention to detail is off the charts! The way you practice. The way you look. The way to represent the team and the community. Every single step, movement, she is watching. I find that the greatest leaders I work with have extremely high attention to detail. They see things others don’t, all the time, and then make sure those things are changed for the better.

– She embraces diversity and inclusion. Monica was raised and lives in a very conservative area. Many of her athletes, especially on the male side, are gay. Many are people of color. Many come from disadvantage homelives. She embraces it all and helps these kids grow into adults.

– She has high rational compassion. What’s that? She cares about everyone on her team as an individual, but she isn’t willing to hurt the overall team, for the sake of one individual. You are injured. You were on the performing team. If we keep you, you might not perform to the level we need to win. You are now off the performing team, and we’ve replaced you with an alternate. The team needs this, and you need to support it, as you are still a part of this team, and you having drama right now hurts our team.

Here’s what I know. You could put Monica into the CEO role of any Fortune 500 company, today, and she would succeed. She has all of the DNA needed to be great at leading people, leading an organization, reaching extremely high performance.

Set a goal. Have the vision. Do the work. Hold people accountable. Care for each other.

Don’t @ me trolls! Monica Aldama is the greatest leader of our generation and you can’t convince me otherwise!

The 3 Rules for Kissing Your Boss on Valentine’s Day!

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May 20, 2013, I published a silly little post on my blog called “The Rules About Hugging at Work”. The post might have taken me twenty minutes to write. It was just an idea I got, like thousands of others, I thought it was funny, so I wrote about it. To date, it’s been read over 1 Million times. Huff Post picked it up, it went viral on LinkedIn (I got over 1300 comments), I’ve been interviewed and called, “The World’s Foremost Expert on Workplace Hugging”.

Twenty minutes of writing, a throwaway idea.

Months later I posted the exact same post on LinkedIn’s publishing platform. This was before everyone could publish (remember that), you had to be invited. I got a call from the LinkedIn chief editor offering me access. I didn’t know if it was really anything so I just threw up old posts I had already written but added a few new pieces.

On the Hugging post, I added at the bottom my next post would be: The 3 Rules About Kissing Your Boss! as a joke. I never wrote it. Until five years later I got a message last week from someone who found the hugging post for the first time asking how they could find the kissing post! I didn’t even know what they were talking about!

So, here’s the kissing post! 

It would be easy to dismiss the notion of kissing your boss as something that would never happen. When I say ‘never’ I mean never. I mean honestly do any of us ever feel it would be appropriate to kiss your boss!?

This one is hard for me. I come from a family of huggers and kissers! My father is 73 and he still kisses me on the lips when I greet him or say goodbye. Some folks would find that super weird. Different cultures do different things.

My son went overseas visiting friends in Belgium and it was quite common for new people he met to give him that traditional kiss on the cheek, but he said those same people would not give you a hug or a handshake. This kiss on the cheek greeting is very common in many parts of the world (I wonder if this is changing with Coronavirus!?!).

In America, you would probably get punched in the face if you tried kissing someone on the cheek you were meeting for the first time! I mean, look, if I don’t know you, I certainly don’t want your germs all over my face! Most Europeans I meet for business purposes in the states who come here often have gotten used to handshakes, rarely do I see one of them do the cheek kiss greeting.

All of this is way different, though, then kissing your boss! Kissing your boss would have to be a special circumstance or special occasion. I’m guessing if you’re kissing your boss one of a few things probably hasn’t happened in that relationship. You’ve probably become very good friends, some once in a lifetime event is happening, or you’ve become romantically involved, in which case, not really your boss any longer!

So, if we can see a time in which you might kiss your boss, the great HR pro in me says we better put some pen to policy and make some rules! Here are my three rules for kissing your boss:

1. No kissing on the lips. Kissing on the lips is a slippery slope you can’t put back in the bag! Wants that happens you might as well just get undressed, stuff just got real! We’re going to assume this kiss is not romantic in nature, completely as professional as kissing your boss can be professional!

2. Do not leave moisture on your boss’s cheek. Okay, somehow we got down this rabbit hole to a point where I’m kissing my boss on his or her cheek, let’s not make this super awkward by leaving a nice big wet spot on the side of their face. If you’re so excited to be kissing your boss’s cheek that you leave it wet, you should be checked into a mental ward.

3. Do not have bad breath. First impressions are critical and even though your boss knows you, your boss doesn’t know the kissing you. Do not go in for that first boss kiss with bad breath! I love Ice Breakers Mints and I have some close by almost always. Why? I can’t stand bad breath. Coffee breath is the worst and I know a lot of you are major coffee drinkers! Guess what? Diet Mt Dew breath smells like a flower garden! Think about that next time you go for a fill-up at the coffee station at work!

See? That’s how you do it. That’s how the World’s Foremost Expert in Workplace Hugging becomes the World’s Foremost Expert on Boss Kissing. You can’t be a one-trick pony in this world folks, we all need to keep striving on reinventing ourselves. Watch out this season’s conference circuit! If you see Sackett coming, I might have just raised the game!

So, hit me in the comments. What are your rules for kissing your boss!?

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Talkpush #HRTech

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This week on The Weekly Dose I revisit a recruiting technology called Talkpush that I originally took a look 5 years ago! Guess what? Quite a few things changed in five years!

Talkpush, now, is the Recruitment Automation Platform that makes hiring conversations happen faster and more naturally. Talkpush is also a tool for high volume hiring, so if you’re not hiring at least 1,000 hires per year, this is something that probably doesn’t make sense for you to have. If you’re hiring 1,000 and over, then you have to check it out!

Five years ago, Talkpush was basically a voice screening solution and a good one. Since then, Talkpush has moved with technology to include screening over messaging apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, career sites, micro-sites for hiring events, and live chat between recruiters and candidates.

Talkpush figured out early on great candidate experience and your ability to hire at volume meant you needed to automate as much of the up-front recruitment process as necessary. Candidate applies to a job or shows interest on a messaging app, and the AI-driven chat technology takes over and engages each candidate, until a point where it’s far enough down the process that a real-live recruiter needs to jump in.

What do I like about Talkpush’s technology? 

– It gives you the ability to communicate with candidates in the way they want to communicate. We all have our preferences. You might prefer someone contacts via text message, or Facebook Messanger, or a phone call, or email, or WhatsApp. No judgment, we all have our favorites, and if you’re a global organization, it changes drastically depending on what country you’re trying to hire in!

– Truly global hiring technology. Eight+ languages and variations of those languages. The majority of their mass hiring clients are actually out of the U.S. So, if you’re hiring global, they know the ins and outs of what a global workforce is demanding in terms of candidate communication.

– It’s a hybrid technology model and brings in a real-life recruiter at just the right time. So, it’s not about automating the entire journey, but putting in as much automation as possible until it’s time for a real candidate and a real recruiter/screener/hiring manager to connect. Then they make that happen in real-time, seamlessly.

– Post jobs, capture candidate video, make a phone call all from the Talkpush dashboard. In five years, they’ve turned their technology into a full end-to-end recruitment automation that hires at volume. From the first click as a candidate to the first day of hire, your hiring team can live within Talkpush.

– Their funnel analytics and data are way ahead of the competition. And with how they measure and collect data across your hiring process, their insights are substantial. Plus, I think most leaders want a component of visual data and Talkpush’s “arts and charts” are far and away the best I’ve seen in the market.

I’m a huge advocate for text messaging in recruitment. But I’m also naive to global recruiting in so many aspects. The reality is text messaging in many parts of the world, outside the US, is expensive and unreliable, as a form of candidate communication. But technology like Facebook Messanger and WhatsApp are the go-to technology in many other countries when it comes to contacting candidates.

If you are currently, or preparing, to do mass hiring in the US or globally, Talkpush is one of those technologies you really need to demo! It’s one of the most economical mass hiring solutions I’ve seen. Check them out!

HR Famous! The Podcast is now Live! Episode 1

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I’ve personally been on nearly 100 different podcasts as a guest! I get asked, and I’m like, yeah! Let’s do this! I mean who doesn’t want to hear me on a podcast!?

For years, I’ve been told by folks, “you should start a podcast!” But, like every great HR Pro, I wanted to wait to make sure this podcast thing was really going to be a thing! So, I checked my iPhone 5s and it says that podcasts are now a thing!

I’m super excited to launch our weekly podcast – HR Famous!

Want to know what “HR Famous” means? Go listen to the podcast! That’s how it works. I don’t write it and tell you, you listen!

HR Famous is a weekly podcast by me and two of my great friends, Kris Dunn and Jessica Lee. The three of us have had a decade long friendship and all that time we would catch up on calls and text chats, and we felt, people would love listening to these conversations! At least, we had fun on these conversations!

Go have a listen and let me know what you think!

HR Famous on iTunes

HR Famous on Spotify

Show Highlights:

1:35 – JLee comes over the top to correct Kris for his pronunciation of Marriott, even though the way he says it is how the rest of the world says it.

3:00 – KD, JLee and Tim discuss each other’s backgrounds, starting to write and speak on all things HR and the impact all of it has had on them.

7:59 – The gang discusses their nicknames and JLee breaks the news that if she would have taken her husband’s last name, future projects inside the team could have been named “Chun and Dunn.”

10:05 – Tim breaks down the inside joke and self-deprecation of the name of the podcast, “HR Famous.”

13:40 – Jessica, Tim and Kris discuss their top HR famous moments, which is enough to be recognized occasionally but quickly followed by something that returns them to reality. Highlights include bosses not realizing they write/speak, being asked to take selfies of other people after they speak, occasionally being recognized on airport walkways before boarding in coach, their likeness being broadcast on a book and friends/colleagues seeking to protect their rights, and being awful with names.

27:50 – KD Shares the origin story of how the gang met when he onboarded Jessica and Tim at Fistful of Talent.

Resources:

Jessica Lee on LinkedIn

Tim Sackett on Linkedin

Kris Dunn on LinkedIn

HRU Tech

The Tim Sackett Project

The HR Capitalist

Fistful of Talent

Kinetix

Boss Leadership Training Series

 

Compromise Kills Innovation!

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The most innovative leaders of our time were mostly assholes. Why? They refused to budge on their idea. Everything in their body told them what needed to be done to make their idea happen, and they refused to compromise on even the smallest details. This is how greatness happens.

True change only happens when someone is unwilling to listen to their critics.

This is also the exact way more careers are killed than any others. It’s all or nothing. Greatness happens at the edges, not in the middle.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t fit well in most corporate environments. Most MBA programs don’t teach you to be a tyrant. Leadership development, in today’s corporate world, is about bringing everyone to the middle. Finding ways that we can all get along. Even suppressing those who push the envelope too far.

We want everyone to line up nice and pretty. To play the role they were hired to play. To be the poster children for compromise.

It’s important for leaders to understand this concept if your job as a leader is to drive innovation and change. You don’t drive this through compromise and you need some renegades on your team, that quite frankly you might not even enjoy being around.

It took me so long to learn this because I was a renegade as an employee. I couldn’t understand why my leaders kept pushing me to compromise when I knew the right way to do something, the better way to do something, the new way to do something.

Once I became a leader I acted the exact same way towards those who were like me. Get back in line. Run the play. Do what the others do. That was the leadership I was taught. I didn’t value those who seemed to be fighting me, just as I use to fight. New leaders struggle with this because we take it personally.

We feel like those renegade employees are actually fighting us. When in reality they’re fighting everything. It’s our job as leaders to understand that the fight they have is super valuable if directed at the right target! To get them to understand they don’t need to fight everyone and everything but pick some fights that help us all and then support that fight.

This isn’t everyone you lead. It’s actually a really tiny number, but it seems bigger because they take up a lot of time and cause a lot of commotion amongst the drones who want to stay in their box. But, this is how change and innovation are born. By one person who is unwilling to compromise because they know a better way and they’re willing to fight to make it a reality.

This isn’t to say it will always work. Most ideas fail, but those who are willing to make an uncompromising stand for their idea, stand a better chance of seeing that idea succeed.

Here’s where I struggle. If we believe the above premise is true, it seems exclusionary. So, can we be innovative and inclusive of thought all at the same time? I’m arguing above that you can’t. What do you think? Hit me in the comments.

The Top 5 Gifts to Get that Special Someone at the Office for Valentine’s Day!

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Let’s get creepy today!

Remember back when you were in elementary school and your mom or dad would take you to the store and you would pick out your box of Valentine’s to give out at school? You had to make one of those little ‘mailboxes’ out of shoebox so everyone in your class could drop off one, and then you would go home after school and analyze each one like the Zapruder film!

Did Amber make me her ‘special’ Valentine or did she use a generic message card on me!?! Why did Jill put a ‘heart’ on top of her “i” to me? Why did Billy give me the card with kittens? Oh, the humanity of trying to figure out who loved you through the meaning of store-bought valentine cards!

Talk about stress! I’m not sure a kid goes through something more stressful than getting down to those last two or three cards and having to decide which crappy card you have left to give to the school bully so you don’t get beat up!

Thankfully, we are now all adults! Now we just have some weird or creepy person at work who believes they are in love with us and also believing that Valentine’s Day is the day they should profess this love! I’m going to make it easy for you, weird, creepy peeps! I’ve been there. I’ve been in love and struggled for the right gift! No worries, I got your back:

1. Their favorite work-appropriate drink. That special someone likes Starbucks double-shot, low-fat caramel mocha whatever, get them one! If you don’t know their drink order, you aren’t even trying to be a proper crush! This says, hey, I like you, but I’m not a completely insane stalker. Drop it off and be casual, and just say, “I got you your drink, wanted you to have a good start to your valentine’s day”, then walk away, don’t make it awkward!

2. Something sweet. Candy, cookie, cupcake. It’s traditional. It’s thoughtful. It doesn’t have to be consumed immediately. You can drop it off when they are at their work station or when they aren’t with a little note. Don’t be weird and make some creepy note (“I got you something sweet because I bet you taste sweet!” Vomit!)

3. Flowers from Anonymous. If you really want to win the day. Send that special someone flowers, but make it anonymous, and keep it anonymous! The great thing about the anonymous flowers is that person will talk about it all day, if not longer. The downfall is they might assume they came from the person they are really attracted to and that person might not be you! This doesn’t work if you’re already “kind of talking” to this person.

4. Jewelry! Kidding, don’t ever give jewelry to a co-worker that you are not romantically involved with! This is super creepy! Plus, it’s poor taste to do that level of gift at work. Only give jewelry to that special someone when you’re alone. Those idiots who propose to their special someone in a public place should be shot.

5. An invitation. You don’t know until you know…The reality is we all want to be wanted, but they might not want you, or they might. An email that says, Happy Valentine’s Day! I would love to take you out for a drink or dinner or a coffee. Let me know. Big risk, big payoff or big rejection. But, it allows the person in their own space to make a decision. If you don’t push the issue, you can survive this in the workplace. Pro tip: if you get rejected on this attempt, never do it again with this person and never mention it, ever, to anyone. Lock it away! The most creepy people in the world will turn this into a public thing at the office. Don’t do that!

So, you’ve got your one-week warning! Next Friday is Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day on a Friday is like the holy grail of Valentine’s Day. Crazy stuff happens because you have the weekend to fall in love or recover from your heartbreak! Are you ready!?!

Just Do Your Damn Job, Timmy!

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It seems like frustration is at an all-time high. On a daily basis people are coming unglued over things they have no control over, and never will.

We are told to be more empathetic. We are told our employees need us to be “X”. You fill in the “X” because it changes pretty much article to article, generation to generation, leader to leader. One day I’m just supposed to care more. Then the next day I need to listen more. The next day I need to understand more. Today, I need to be more flexible.

Somehow we’ve gone from running businesses to managing a daycare.

I’ve stopped listening to people who don’t do the job I do. To the people who haven’t done the job in the past decade. To the people who claim to be experts but haven’t worked in my field, ever. 

Instead, I’m going out and talking to my employees. The young ones, the old ones, the ones in between that we’re not supposed to pay attention to anymore because they don’t matter because they’re not young or old, or female, or a minority, or gay. I’m going out and talking to them all equally. Since I need them ‘all’ to move my organization forward.

It doesn’t matter what my employees are telling me. That’s for me, to help them. The thing that will help my employees, most likely won’t help your employees. You work in a different culture, location, industry, climate, etc. No one is a better expert on my employees than I am. 

Just like you will be the expert of your employees, your team, your department, your organization.

 But, here’s what I think you’ll find out:

 – Your employees are all individuals with very specific problems, concerns, and desires.

– Their problems start close to them and then move outward. Sure it sucks Trump is making massive change and they want to help America and the World, but first, they have an issue with daycare and paying student loans, and a health scare. Those problems are bigger than the world problems you keep shoving down their throat. Help them solve the problems close first, then solve the world.

– Your millennials employees became adults, and you keep treating them like they just left college and are still kids.

– Your ‘new’ youngest employees are much different than millennials, and they’re not. They’re still young people with young people’s problems and passions.

– Your employees want to be successful. Across the board, it’s a driving and motivating force. You helping them become successful is the most important thing you can do as a leader. What’s successful? That is also very individualized. Your challenge, as a leader, is to find a way to tie their success to the organization’s success. It’s hard to do, and you have to figure it out for your employees.

We keep letting other people tell us how to do our jobs. Have fun with that. I’m going to do the job I was hired to do, the way I know it needs to be done because no one knows how to do this job, better than me.

The 1 Factor You Must Have to be an F500 CEO!

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It’s not what you think.

Right now you’re sitting there reading this thinking, “I need to know what this is so I can see if I have it or can get it because it’s in my life plan to be an F500 CEO!” You probably are thinking it must something like grit, determination, maybe smarts, attractive looks, or maybe it’s Tim talking about this it’s probably height because he’s a short motherf@cker!

Something truly, statistically interesting has happened over the last 14 years to CEOs of the Fortune 500. It really defies logic.

In 2005 the average age of an F500 CEO was 46 years old. Feels about right. 46 feels like young enough but also old enough all at the same time. The perfect combination of youth and wisdom.

In 2019, do you know what the average age of an F500 CEO was? You would think in 14 years that line would probably stay about the same. Maybe because of all the Baby Boomers leaving the workforce we would see it fall, but probably not too much. If a few Boomers were hanging on, we might see it rise a little, but again, it’s hard to move the average all that much.

In 2019 the average age of an F500 CEO was 59! Basically, over 14 years, the average age went up one year every year! It’s hard to even imagine that could be the case!

So, what’ the one factor you need to be an F500 CEO? 

You need to be a Baby Boomer!

That’s right. Stop going to that Ivy league college and working on your MBA. Don’t worry if you’re ugly or short or fat or female or black or white or a dude. The only thing you really need to be is OLD!

Turns out, big giant companies like Old folks running their company!

Why?

If you are running a multi-billion dollar company, maybe even closing in on a trillion (Trillion is the new Billion!) you don’t want some kid at the wheel. You want someone with seasoning who will tend to be less reactive to major events. They’ll be a bit slower in how they move the company, a bit more conservative in how they manage the assets and resources.

Also, think about what’s happened over the past 15 years. We came out of the great recession. We had this young 45-ish CEO taking the lead in turning us around and putting us back on top. It actually worked! We’ve had this great decade of prosperity! Do you know what companies do when things are going really well? They don’t change anything! Including their CEO!

In fact, many times if the CEO wants to retire, and they trade that CEO in for a younger one, and 12 months in the company is slightly underperforming to expectations, they’ll fire that CEO quickly and bring back the old one to right the ship!

So, 37-year-old Millennial who is chomping at the bit to take over. Calm down and wait until you’re old! You really only have about twenty more years to wait until it’s ‘your time’. That isn’t that long, just 25% or so of your life. You’ll get there, be patient!

Kobe on Leadership and Life!

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It seems like the entire world is talking about Kobe. The tragic accident that cost nine people their lives, including Kobe and his daughter.

I’m a Kobe fan.

It’s complicated, being a Kobe fan.

He has been accused of something horrible in his past. Like most rich people in the world, he got it to go away without any of us truly knowing the truth, but suspecting a whole bunch.

Kobe is one of the best basketball players ever. I loved watching him compete. I love watching him yell at teammates and seemingly not care if he was liked or disliked because he wanted to win more than anyone else on the planet. I love watching him with his daughters. Maybe the worst thing in his past, made him even a better father and husband (I don’t know).

Kobe is not like you or I. He was a true genius. He was better than 99.999999% of people who have ever played basketball. Most of us aren’t in the top ten percent of anything we do in life. Genius is extremely rare. Most people can’t understand genius. It’s a bit scary and completely uncomfortable from what we are used to.

As I said, it’s complicated being a Kobe fan.

In 2012, Kobe posted this on Facebook about leadership-

So, let’s breakdown the brilliance of what Kobe is saying about being a great leader:

1. Are you willing to make those around you uncomfortable to make them better?

2. Are you willing to push those around so much they might actually hate you at the time?

3. Success is more important, in the end, than being liked. 

4. Don’t tolerate victims.

5. We all have a leadership style that will get us to our highest level, it’s not all the same. 

I mourn the loss of a great basketball player and parent you died tragically with his daughter in a helicopter crash, as he was taking her to play the game he loved. I can’t imagine the heartache of those they left behind. As a father that has done that thousands of times, my own heart aches.

We are a totality of what we do in the world. That’s hard for me to reconcile. Humans can do the most wonderful, uplifting things we can ever imagine, and the most awful, and be the same person. Like I said, life is complicated and I tend to actually like how Kobe viewed leadership.