Thanks To Harry The K
Harry Kalas died today. He was the broadcast voice of the Philadelphia Phillies, and I’ve been listening to his smooth resonant tones and brilliant game-calling for 38 years. The man was an all-around class act.
In one of the best tributes I can imagine, Dewayne Staats, a broadcaster for the Tampa Bay Rays, said that Harry was the personification of someone taking his gift and doing what he was supposed to do with it.
I invited Harry into my life somewhere around 4000 times so, while not a death in the family, this gets pretty close.
Commitment to Other’s Success
The most effective teams are populated by people who commit to one another’s success. That is not simply an opinion or an observation, but is born out by my own research on teamwork. The research studied twenty-eight factors that were believed to influence team effectiveness. Two of those factors stood out as the most important. The first, commitment to a common purpose, seemed obvious. The second, commitment to one another’s success, was a surprise. When I showed the research to the CEO of a public utility, he asked, “So what am I to do with all the self-centered megalomaniacs in my management hierarchy?” I had no ready answer. Hire a psychotherapist maybe?
