Category: Reality Bytes

High School Basketball Sportsmanship

Steve Hartman has found this wonderful story of sportsmanship for CBS Evening News. It is always great to start the day by reading one of these stories – its heartening, inspires you to do the right thing (no matter what others think) & gives hope for a better tomorrow. These are the kind of acts Good Guys are made up of.

Mitchell MarcusTeam Manager Mitchell Marcus

Coach Peter Morales of the Coronado High School Thunderbirds in El Paso, Texas, makes no qualms about it: he has a favorite on this team – Mitchell Marcus. Team manager Mitchell Marcus has a developmental disability, but he far surpasses everyone here when it comes to love of the game. And because basketball is that important to him, on the last game of the regular season, the coach told Mitchell to suit up. Just wearing a jersey was enough for Mitchell, but the coach had other plans – to play him at the end, no matter what the score.

Coach Peter MoralesCoach Peter Morales

With a minute-and-a-half left — Coronado leading, but only by 10 — Coach Morales put in his Mitchell. Although his teammates did everything they could to get Mitchell a basket, each time they passed him the ball, he either missed the shot, or, like on their last possession, booted it out of bounds, turning the ball over to the other team with just seconds left.

Jonathon MontanezJonathon Montanez

But no one imagined what was to happen next. It happened on the inbound. The guy with the ball was a senior at Franklin High School, Jonathon Montanez. Jonathon yelled out Mitchell’s name, then threw the ball right to him — one of the most memorable turnovers of all time. It wasn’t a game-winning shot, Coronado had 15 more points than Franklin. But Jonathon’s assist and Mitchell’s basket did change the outcome decidedly.

Jonathan explains – “I was raised to treat others how you want to be treated. I just thought Mitchell deserved his chance, deserved his opportunity.”

Play any game with this much sportsmanship and both teams win.

Watch the full video from CBS ..

First Day With iOS6

As usual, the download of the new version was initiated the minute I got to know it was available. The download & the install went through without a glitch. Everything working as expected.

Clock: Finally the iPad gets a native clock app. No more of trying out different apps to find the right one. Alarm, world clock – check.

Facebook: You like it or not, FB is spreading its tentacles. Integration into the iOS is just another validation of the fact that it is indeed taking over. But why are there two separate entry points to make Twitter & FB status updates? Why no option (like in Hootsuite) to update both at once? I think they’ve missed a trick here.

Camera: The panorama feature in the Camera app is welcome & eliminates another third party app from the device. Apple cleverly leaves it to app ecosystem to find user needs & fill them with apps. And within a few months include the much used features into its own applications as yet another of the 200+ features of the new version. In the process, it also pushes the ecosystem to identify new user needs all the time. Outsourcing of innovation at its best.

Maps: Just not there for India! Folks at Apple clearly weren’t thinking about its customers in certain places. Painful miss!!

What becomes important in classroom education?

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“The free course touched off an intense debate behind the scenes at Stanford, where annual tuition is $40,050. Ultimately, the 22,000 students who finished the course received “certificates of completion” rather than Stanford credit.”

Online education continues to make inroads in education. Ventures like these & even TED, have democratized access to the biggest thinkers & academicians of our times. Course content is rampantly being shared by educational institutions. When content becomes so easily accessible, what do class room offerings bank on to attract its clientele? What is it that is offered in a physical classroom that is not in the virtual world?

  • In a classroom, there is greater control in minimizing distractions
  • Personalization (especially wrt instructors inputs) & mass virtual platforms cannot co-exist
  • How do we enhance the real time learning that happens from physically sharing a learning platform?

It is not only the educational institutions, but even the corporate training offerings that need to focus on differentiating their offerings. 

What do you make of EQ in the online world?

Over the last decade, email has become the cornerstone of business communication across industries & geographies. They are good at handling the transactional communication that most of our business roles involve. But they suck in communicating emotions or feelings. I routinely check myself against reading the emotions of the email sender and actively profess against it to anyone who cares to listen.

Over the same period, Emotional Quotient as a business competence has grown in stature & importance. Reading any content about EQ, you find out that that the ability to actively respond to others feelings & emotions in our interactions (business or otherwise) is a key requirement.

So if emails are bad in communicating emotions & EQ is critical to building positive relationships, where has the email era left us wrt positive relationships in business?

Taking this further, if email-like communication is taking over our personal lives too (via social networking sites), what is in store for personal relationships?

Thankfully, Facebook is already thinking on these lines & is taking steps to address such needs. Read more about this initiative here.

[Picture courtesy: flickr | aaipodpics]