Schembechler, Bacon and Leadership

I have a leadership video I’d like to share with you. And then I’d like to point out several valuable leadership lessons to be gleaned from this entertaining tale of a fiery confrontation between famed football coach Bo Schembechler and one of his student athletes, as recounted by award-winning raconteur John U. Bacon.

Welcome!

I write as The Practical Utopian because my twin desires are to be:
• Down-to-earth — I try to write short pieces explaining big ideas that will be broadly useful;
• Idealistic — I write with the goal of helping all of us achieve better outcomes, both for ourselves and for those around us.

Preparing Managers to Manage

The time has come to recognize that higher education in management rests on a fatal fallacy. The idea behind the contemporary business school is that preparing future business managers means training them in a discipline called Business Management. After 100 years of fruitless attempts to produce such a discipline, it should be clear that it does not exist. Preparing managers to manage, in fact, is not different from preparing people to live in a civilized world. Managers do not need to be trained; they need to be educated. And for that purpose, although a certain amount of study of business-related subjects may prove useful, the business schools as they are presently constituted are at best superfluous.

— Matthew Stewart, 2009

Train to Birmingham

Southerner Thomas Wolfe, in his book You Can’t Go Home Again, wrote about our inability to travel back in time and return to our origins. John Hiatt seemed to have had much the same sentiments in mind when he penned his song “Train to Birmingham.”

Built with Notenik

Available from the Mac App Store, Notenik can be used for taking, organizing, formatting and publishing notes, with each note consisting of multiple fields, as well as chunks of text of any length. This latest version of The Practical Utopian website has been built using Notenik.