WARNING to my Saints friends: This post will include references to the Los Angeles Rams. Please feel free to substitute Philadelphia Eagles, Dallas Cowboys, or the team of your choice when I reference the team.


My husband, the Sports Dude, is a Rams “super fan.” I didn’t dub him that, our local news channel did in a story that ran earlier this week. Being a sports fan led him to becoming a sports reporter. Eric a fan of the the Dodgers, Lakers, Kings, and Clippers, but the Rams, they have his heart.

How does a kid born in Paris, who emigrated here with his parents and brother speaking no English, become an American sports fanatic?

Simply put, it was the team: from the owner to the coaches to the players. They taught him the game, and he learned how to love it and them in return.

The clothes made the fan

Original 1970s sketch by Henri Geller for Carroll Rosenbloomy father-in-law, 

My father-in-law, Henri Geller, was a men’s clothing designer back in the day, and he designed clothes for the Rams’ owner Carroll Rosenbloom and many of the coaches and players. My husband tells vivid stories of the players and Mr. Rosenbloom in his father’s design studio. They gave my husband his first tickets to an NFL game, which he still has in his memorabilia collection, and a fan was born, so to speak.

The Rams don’t know it, but they just created a Super Fan in Josh Garcia, the son of the team’s custodian. Watch for great things to happen for that boy.

Can law firms create Super Fans?

Continue Reading Creating a Super Fan

Keith Wewe and I are participating in the SmithBucklin Leadership Institute lead by Henry Givray. It’s a six month program with five in-person sessions, and a lot of reading. We’ve had three in-person sessions so far, and I am just starting to notice how much I have absorbed, so expect several posts over the next few months on the lessons I have learned, and how I am applying them to my life today. One of our recent homework assignments was on time v. energy, and included reading the Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal (learn more at The Energy Project). The authors had me at their first principle:

Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.”

Continue Reading Leadership’s Lessons: Energy Replenishment

Game Day – Photo via www.thejetsblog.com

The whole Ines Sainz fiasco, incident, scandal, brouhaha has been taking up too much space in my head this week. It has moved off the sports page and is being debated by the mainstream press and blogs.

The Sports Dude and I “debated” the issue. We talked earlier this week about writing a “He Said/She Said” piece, but it’s more of a “He Said/She Agreed” piece … from different vantage points. His is from the field and the locker room, mine is from the administrative offices.

I get that Ines Sainz is beautiful and hot. How could anyone not. But, she’s completely out of line, and the reaction of the NFL, to force “sensitivity training” on the players is completely wrong.

“I believe this is the most constructive approach,” [NFL commissioner Roger] Goodell said. “There is no debate about the longstanding equal access rule of our media policy. The issue for us, like all organizations, is proper conduct in the workplace, whether it is dealing with the media, co-workers, fans or others. It is our responsibility to provide a professional setting for members of the news media and other business associates that work with our teams and the league. We appreciate Woody Johnson stepping up promptly to properly manage the situation at his team and agreeing to underwrite this new initiative for all clubs.”

I’m going to argue that it is also the responsibility of the WORKERS to bring their professional selves to the workplace, whether your workplace is the football field on Sunday afternoons, or the 47th Floor of the U.S. Bank Tower in downtown Los Angeles.Continue Reading Why the Ines Sainz “incident” matters to ALL professional women