Excellence is Contagious -- But how did you start the ball rolling?

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by Ian Curtis

Another school of thought that may be more prevalent in FIRST but rarely expressed on CD is that, "Well those teams are just good because Acme Corp sends a crack team of genius engineers and managers and a robot bag filled with money to help them out every year", and I'm sure the majority of teams are some shade of grey in between those extremes.

I got a chuckle out of this. We have a retired air-force pilot, a plumber, a Mechanical Engineer who does the controls.... well, you get the idea.

We've always done passably well with our robots. We never had much success on the business side until we got someone with passion and drive there. It wasn't a matter of how smart the person was. It was trully a result of an incredible drive. This business plan wasn't good enough. Why didn't you attend the fund raiser. So on and so on. That one year that the particular person really headed up business taught many students what it really meant to work hard on the business side. That work ethic was passed onto the students, and we've been improving ever since.

One person, no matter their level of education, can be a game changer. As they say in sports - sometimes it's about the amount of heart a person has.

Find that person for your team. A person who has drive, the will to succeed, and an attitude that doesn't allow for people to let up and take it easy. They don't need to be an expert at what they're going to be doing - they just need to know how to get the most out of the people they'll be doing it with.