My friend and coach, Larry Linne, was in town recently. Larry spoke to a group of area employers about brand and reputation risk. We were fortunate enough to get him to spend a few hours with our sales team after the event.

Recently I read a column in Forbes magazine by Rich Karlgaard. It was about legendary Stanford women's basketball Tara VanDerveer. Many may not realize that Vanderveer spent much of her time as a student at Indiana University in the 70s watching, observing, and learning from Coach Bob Knight. She says one of her secrets to success was "hanging around" the best and brightest in her business.

A few weeks ago we put all the lake stuff away for the offseason. As I gazed at the water skis, I couldn’t help but think about what a great summer it had been. My nine year old, unable to get up the summer before, was up on two skisby early June this year. A few weeks later he had me remove the training strings holding the skis together. My eleven year old went from two skis, to dropping one, to becoming a pretty impressive slalom skier by summer’s end.

It was not without a lot of hard work from both of them. I can’t tell you how many times I got the call of “Ready Dad!”, slammed the throttle forward and took off, only to look back and see them take a dive into the lake. Every time, I dutifully circled the ski rope back around them. We would repeat the same process as many times as it took.

With all of the media coverage surrounding the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that we have a real crisis in America with health and health care costs. It’s widely known that obesity and diabetes rates have doubled in the last 15 years and that costs are tracking up along with these trends. Any organization doing a deep dive on their health claims costs realizes that the Pareto Principle is alive and well. It’s likely 20% of their employees or family members are incurring 80% of their costs, and that 80% of those costs are directly related to conditions linked to lifestyle choices.

Several years ago the National Institute of Health put out this comment: “If we could get Americans to do just three things:

1. Stop using tobacco products
2. Stop drinking to excess
3. Not be obese

I was reading a blog post on Harvard Business Review the other day by Vineet Nayar. He is an entrepreneur and author. He was touching on the three ingredients of successful teams - which I translate to having a motivated workforce.

Texas A&M’s electric quarterback Johnny Manziel, will take the field tomorrow for another episode of “Johnny Football”. He might be the most exciting player in all of college football.

His football instincts and ability to make the big play on the biggest of stages has defined him and added to hislegend. On the field, he takes his craft seriously.

Have you read the book or seen the movie Moneyball? It’s really a story of Big Data.

Below is a favorite scene of mine from the movie. In case you don’t know the talent acquisition side of professional baseball, each club has an army of scouts that evaluate new talent forthe upcoming season. Billy Beane, the General Manager and main character, is listening to his scouts make their recommendations for the draft and free agency.

“Tim needs to listen more and stop talking over his classmates. While we appreciate his enthusiasm he needs to give the other kids a chance to participate, too.”

I’m not sure exactly when this started showing up in my report cards but I can certainly remember back to at least the 3rd grade. My hunch is that it’s been there even longer.

Over the summer, I joined the Indiana chapter of Young President’s Organization (YPO). It’s been great for sharing ideas and experiences with the 80 or so other members.

A few weeks ago I attended the annual chapter retreat, held this year at Purdue University. We had a private dinner with former Indiana Governor and current Purdue President Mitch Daniels. The athletic director talked about the business behind NCAA sports. And head men’s basketball coach Matt Painter spent an hour walking us through the life of a “D1” coach, the recruiting process and pressure to perform in big time athletics.