“It’s unfortunate, that’s all I can say,” Knowles said. “It’s unfortunate for the young lady. But you’ve got to teach the kids that rules are rules.”

I learned about this issue when listening to Mike and Mike on ESPN radio last week. Here is the full SI artcle. I was surprised initially that ESPN radio was covering a SoCal High School Track Meet, and then I realized that the sport itself was just the setting for one of those lessons of sport are the lessons of life moments. I’ll preface this by reminding my readers that I loathe policy without purpose and have never been one to support the creation and enforcement of rules, favoring applying the combination of guiding principles and wisdom instead. What happened to Robin Laird of South Pasadena High School is a perfect example of why.

Mike Golic of ESPN radio repeated a radio-friendly version of the phrase “chicken shit” over and over again, and I was incredibly impressed by his declaration that if his child was on the Monrovia team, he would never let her play for Mike Knowles ever again.

The articles and media attention that has followed has attempted to balance the story on the one hand stating how important it is that High School athletes learn the importance of following rules, while cries for sportsmanship and the emptiness of winning by losing are carried by others.

I on the other hand will not be so subtle. Mike Knowles, get your head out of your ass! I’ve coached undefeated league championship teams at the High School level too so I know how important it is to win and also know that it so much more important to be a role model. Given my experiences, I feel quite confident in my ability to make that claim along with the strong suggestion that you do some serious soul searching about your priorities.

The rule is there to protect the athletes from injury. That’s it. It does not protect against an unfair performance advantage and you know it, I know it and everyone else who’d heard of this story knows it. Her bracelet had NOTHING to do with her making that excellent vault and leading her team to victory. If I had such a lapse of judgment, I would expect, no I would demand that my players, my family and my AD remind me to get my head out of my ass.

Thumbing through the numerous online reactions to this situation, I have yet to find anyone who actually provides a compelling argument supporting Mike Knowles actions. Why? Because there is no positive spin on this story. Here’s a few of my favorite recommended responses:

“Yup, it’s all about you Mr. Knowles. You’ve sure taught those kids a lesson to win at all costs. Be self absorbed and only worry about yourself.”

“And I LOVE the idea about sending him friendship bracelets!! Address below…

Monrovia High School
845 West Colorado Boulevard
Monrovia, CA 91016″

and my personal favorite:

“Rules are rules. Time for the building inspector to check out his house. Have the DMV inspect his vehicle. IRS audit the past 7 years of taxes…..After all, rules are rules.”

It’s time to take a lesson from John McEnroe. You know the one where his opponent makes an incredible play which is then overturned due to a ticky-tack bullshit rule imposed by the chair umpire or line judge? And just to show that they really have no real power, Johnny Mac would hit his next shot 20 rows into the upper deck to purposely lose the point and give his opponent his just due. It’s about doing what’s right.

You and your players should do the same. There’s nothing more that I would love to see than you and your own players either publicly or quietly giving back the championship to the team that actually won this contest. And don’t you dare give me excuses about league rules or things that can’t be overturned. You have the patches. You have the trophies. Bundle them up, pile them and your team into your van, take the South Pasadena High School team out for dinner and give them a true mea culpa. You can still do the right thing, and if you can’t, your players certainly can. And in that action, they too will be truly champions.

Even those of you not familiar with social media, may indeed have heard of Twitter. Whenever I speak to people who actually live their lives in the physical world, I get one of two responses when someone brings up Twitter. The first includes rolling of the eyes, a head lean and the slight pursing of the lips as if to say, “Why would you waste your time with that ridiculous time suck?”. The second is an almost embarrassed look-away glance, a widening of the eyes accompanied by a pressing of the lips and an involuntary widening of the cheeks, usually associated with hearing something naughty and not quite wanting to admit it.

Twittering, after all, may have a completely different meaning in other social circles.

In reality, Twitter is definitely a time suck and, as my cousin says related to Facebook, can make the most organized and productive person feel completely wasteful and feckless. That said, I find that the most valuable moment of Twittering, or any other social network, is when the Twitter world meets the physical world in the form of a Tweet-up.

A Tweet-up is as it sounds an opportunity for Twitterers to meet in person without the need for hash tags (#hashtags) to follow along with the conversation, although at many Tweet-ups twitterers will physically be engaged in a live conversation while simultaneously texting what they are saying and hearing to online Twitterers who couldn’t be present. Yes, it’s one of the very bizarre features of microblogging that if you can’t attend a meeting or an event, there will undoubtedly be people there who will take and publish notes for you live that you can follow from the comfort of your house while watching the season finale of Dexter.

This past weekend, we had a running Tweet-up in Sleepy Hollow, NY about 30 miles north of Manhattan along the Hudson River. Now follow along with me. It was started by @jackievny who lives in the area letting us know she and her husband – a non-Twitter user – Drew (come on, can I please anoint you with @drew?) were planning on running 20 miles and asked if anyone wanted to keep them company for some or all of the run. @coachadam (that’ me) responded, “sure”, followed shortly by @jg_65, @philliplavoie, and lastly by @billrisch (who later flaked out because, well, because he’s @billrisch). We were after all, planning on running at Rockefeller Park (not to be confused with @rockefellerpark or @rockies) which is the absolute best place to run in the Metro New York area.

Now you might think that tweeting and running have nothing in common, with one being performed by introverted face-made-for-podcasting techno-geeks and the other by lean, athletic and health conscious folks who crave being outside and disconnected from THE MACHINE. @steverunner uses the term couch of doom, but I’m fairly confident that the machine of doom is a much more realistic threat to our health and waist size. Just ask @fitnessrocks.

Cycling and triathlon, on the other hand, are much more inclined to twitterers. Why? Because you have a stem onto which you can mount your crackberry and you can tweet or group tweet with a single hand during those long tedious multi-hour base building rides.

Still not convinced? Not ready to join the tweeting masses who daily and mindlessly provide answers to the question “What are you doing?” Well then perhaps there’s one person who can help you to change your mind. The next time you find yourself tickling the keys to your laptop in contemplation of being drawn to the dark side, pop on long enough to send a DM or an @tweet to @lancearmstrong. Seriously, even @texafornia’s wife Emily is provided with 140 full characters there to profess her undying love.

But I digress…

The two most important things I can do as a consultant are to listen and to ask questions. As I do in other facets of my life, I try to take a Zen approach to my consulting. What that means is that I acknowledge that the clients with whom I work know their business far better than I ever will and my primary purpose is helping them to surface solutions that they in most cases already know but for a variety of reasons have either not accepted or have buried beneath layers of bureaucracy, political power struggles or corporate noise – the naysayers, and the “it’s always been done this way” mantra that is so pervasive in corporate America today.

Never was this made more apparent than during the conversations that I had this Thanksgiving weekend in the heartland of the automotive crisis with family and friends who have worked for GM directly (some for more than thirty years), third party suppliers and even a local steel mill where the hinges are made for their car and truck doors.

I love going back there because it provides a healthy dose of reality and diversity from the Los Angeles and Manhattan experience that has become my daily life. It’s always eye opening when you speak to intelligent people who live and breathe what I only read about or see through the lens of the national media. Now, I did grow up in a union friendly town, but the Screen Actors Guild, the DGA and the WGA never really seemed like real unions to me, you know the kinds with supposed mafia ties and bent nosed organizers. I mean seriously, my classmate Melissa Gilbert was the president of SAG, and I hardly can see little Laura Ingalls in the same light as Jimmy Hoffa. In truth I actually was a union member myself at one point when I worked at a local grocery store during college. Again, I didn’t have a full appreciation for the impact of that union; all I remember is that they called taxes dues and the triple time I got for working on Christmas and New Years never seemed to offset the regular hits to my meager bi-weekly paycheck.

Ohio in contrast is the real deal. People bleed for the unions out there. These are down to earth, uncomplicated steel workers, auto workers, and food workers. You name it and there’s a union to support it out there. It took me a good many years to shed the stereotyped image that I had been brought up with of these types of union workers – entitled, inflexible, overpaid and lazy.

Given the current financial climate, I couldn’t have picked a better time to be held in the bosom of the UAW. The first thing I noticed was that these members aren’t at all like those stereotypes, they aren’t digging in their heels about what they’re entitled to and they do in fact have a terrific handle on the current realities of the automotive crisis. Two evenings spent with them provided me with more relevant and valuable insight than all of the recent Face the Nation and WSJ reports.

Again as a consultant, our clients want us to bring relevant experience across multiple dimensions and different circumstances facing their industry. The people whom I spoke with this weekend have all of that and more, as these folks have lived lives not exclusively based on the current climate or even the recent past. They saw Chrysler go into and out of bankruptcy and they saw how and why it was successful. They lived through the 1979 union concessions as well as the negotiations and deals with GM management where promises were made but never delivered. Now I’m not naïve enough to think that any of our current auto industry problems are because of a single constituency but I have to tell you that the issues they identified and the solutions they suggested made a whole lot of sense to me and I’ll add that nothing that they talked about included unilateral actions without a shared responsibility by all parties. They really do understand that they are all in this together, management, unions, shareholders, suppliers and car owners. Not once did I ever see them point fingers except to say that none of what they were saying seemed to be heard. This is where a consultant can come in real handy because often an out of town expert with the briefcase is able to communicate the same message in a slightly different way to have it more readily heard and acted upon. That said, what I’m suggesting is that if this group is representative of the quality of GM workers and stakeholders, you already have an army of intelligent and insightful consultants to choose from.

Change is an interesting animal in that most everyone agrees to it in concept, but history, biases, motives and a lack of trust can create incredible resistance to doing anything meaningful to improve performance. Denial and hubris can be incredibly powerful forces and extremely difficult to overcome. Such is the case with GM. Why else would you fly to Congress to ask them for financial support without a plan and on a corporate jet. Who was advising these folks? Having had experience positioning our own firm’s leadership for prior Congressional hearings facing our industry, I can tell you that there is nothing more offensive than the non verbal cues associated with denial and hubris. True change begins with the willingness to have an honest dialogue with those who matter most, your customers and your people. I wonder if GM will ever take this incredibly important step. If they did, I bet that they’d find that their own people have all of the answers they need to address the two paramount objectives for this industry, increasing consumer demand for their cars, and sustainable cost reduction.

As one worker told me so eloquently, “when your own people don’t want to buy your products, you really have a problem”.