A section in the Sunday January 9, 2011 Oregonian covered the BCS National Championship and profiled Chip Kelly, the coach of the Oregon Ducks football team. Kelly shared several thoughts that provide great management insight:
- Staff meetings should redefine brevity – Kelly’s meetings are short and to the point. Ask yourself “Are we meeting just to meet?” Make sure the meeting has a clear objective and get to it.
- Benchmark organizations that do things the way you want to do them. It doesn’t matter if they are similar organizations. Kelly doesn’t look at other football programs; he looks at Google and Yahoo. Kelly says, “I want to go see the best environments where people are having success… and are really happy.”
- Ask “why?” Kelly says, “I am an analytical guy. I’ve always asked the question ‘why’ about everything…I was always trying to figure out, why do we do it that way?”
- “Win the Day” is his mantra.
In only his second year, Chip Kelly took the Ducks to the national championship. Perhaps we could all learn from his management lessons.
© 2011 – Rick Pay – All Rights Reserved
