IT Leaders

00;00;00;03 - 00;00;29;01
Steve Reese
So here's going to be the agenda for today. Let's talk a little bit about my background. Who's up here talking to you. Where have I been where I come from. Then I'm going to show you a picture of my dog, but also it's going to be you're going to be a little bit of my, confessional. And that I will confess how real life, fell in on me at the, Phoenix Suns and how we had to recalibrate and really take a lot of the suggestions that Bernie had to heart and begin to reformulate our leadership team and how we led and how we operated.

00;00;29;03 - 00;00;50;14
Steve Reese
Let's then go into personal survival skills. So as a result of some of this trauma that we were facing at work, what happened is that we ended up scratching everything we had as night department. We had to establish how do we live, how do we lead, how do we operate? And then with that, we came up with certain survival skills we have now instituted as part of our leadership group.

00;00;50;16 - 00;01;07;29
Steve Reese
And then next let's talk about addictive leadership. There's a really good story I have in here about Jeff Fisher, a leader who, if he were here today and he said, Steve, leave the Suns. Come with me. Rented a dump truck. You're going to help me empty garbage. I probably would go, this guy had leadership that was addictive.

00;01;07;29 - 00;01;24;22
Steve Reese
And it went beyond just trying to tell people what to do and how to operate. This guy had my back, and and I'm going to bring you also a historical perspective of somebody who I'm I would love to do a poll later and find out if anybody has heard of this person. My opinion, probably one of the most, admired people in Gettysburg.

00;01;24;24 - 00;01;43;14
Steve Reese
And when he led his troops, that had an incredible impact that most of us don't even know about. So with that, let's fire in here to my journey. So, this is my career journey right here. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan. I was the youngest of four brothers, so I was a lucky recipient of getting beat up by three older brothers nonstop.

00;01;43;16 - 00;02;01;11
Steve Reese
Grew up in a in a poor section of Detroit, Greenfield and seven. While if any of you have been familiar with that, it's not a great section of the town. My mother was a Cuban immigrant. My father was really right out of Hillbilly Allergy. He grew up in Morris Hill, North Carolina, joined the Marines. And so what it ended up being is a home that was filled with a lot of domestic violence.

00;02;01;13 - 00;02;18;15
Steve Reese
And so at a very young age, ever since I remember, we had all sorts of things that were going on in the household. And so my medal was being tested all the time over the fact of how do I deal with what's going on. And so it was really me and my three older brothers who had to bond together and try to figure out how do we handle the stress of what was going on.

00;02;18;17 - 00;02;38;10
Steve Reese
We didn't have any role models. We just had to kind of figure it out. And it's like a lot of us, right? We've just had to kind of figure it out on our own. And so what we've done is part of what's occurred in, and with our IT team here is I wanted to bring some of those lessons to light so we could all kind of together, figure it out.

00;02;38;10 - 00;02;57;04
Steve Reese
But what we wanted to do was apply science to that. So I escaped the People's Republic of Michigan back in 19, 19, 80. And so went to University of Houston, where I graduated, hired in with Arthur Andersen. I don't even know if any of you are old enough to remember Arthur Andersen. But it was a public accounting firm.

00;02;57;04 - 00;03;17;27
Steve Reese
From there, I was in, the Houston office, got transferred to Detroit, got transferred back from Detroit to Houston, where I began to work with the Houston Oilers. They had had a complete IT meltdown. As a result, the back in those days, they didn't really have it, folks. They just had somebody who inserted tape, did backups. She kind of forgot to do it for about a year or so.

00;03;18;00 - 00;03;44;29
Steve Reese
The ticketing system went down. We lost all of our customer data. And on top of that, the Cleveland Browns had two IT folks. And this was the beginning of the war of data in sports. They had two white folks who had figured out that every time they blitzed Warren Moon, our quarterback, he turned left. So at the time that I was in hired in in May of 90, I was the sixth or seventh IT person, in professional sports in the world.

00;03;45;01 - 00;04;04;19
Steve Reese
And all of those were in, in the NFL. And there was one who just retired, a guy named, Charles Gore, who retired with the Atlanta Hawks. So I'm the last survivor of the seven. Okay. So from there, helping relocate the team to, Nashville became the Titans. And then after a while, we went to, Super Bowl 34.

00;04;04;19 - 00;04;27;05
Steve Reese
I felt like I had accomplished everything I wanted to there. There was a buddy of mine who is starting an automotive franchise that was only located in the Houston area called Christian Brothers Automotive. They're all over the place now. So he said, hey, we want to learn what's going on with this. So I went from basically from the glamor of the NFL to the grease of doing tire changes and change in oil and doing engine repairs.

00;04;27;08 - 00;04;48;04
Steve Reese
So we started the franchise and bro in Tennessee, if anybody knows that's that just south of Nashville. And, we started the franchise there. That's where I really learned what being scared was about. We were losing close to anywhere between, nine and $15,000 a week for our first year. And then I decided I'm going to do some radio advertising.

00;04;48;04 - 00;05;07;04
Steve Reese
I decided to quit listening to this buddy of mine who started it, and I was going to begin to follow my intuition more. Left brain, right brain. I switched to the right brain, followed my intuition began to do advertising. And at that point, the day we're supposed to launch advertising is when 911 hit. And so lucky me, we had the day 911 hit.

00;05;07;04 - 00;05;28;20
Steve Reese
We lost $32 on an oil change and a couple tire things, and that was all we had that day. Eventually pulled our way out of losing our shorts. I had my last $10,000. I dumped into the advertising. And then, thankfully, by the first of the year, we're beginning to make five, $10,000 a week. And we moved. And then after seven year, thank God we paid off a 15 year loan in seven years.

00;05;28;23 - 00;05;46;20
Steve Reese
So, it's all to say, I really don't know if I'd ever do that again. Then I left from there wanting to get back into sports. Hired in with the Houston Astros as their director of it. Did that for seven, seven years or so. I met my wife there. Wonderful gal. Actually, I met her originally when I was with the Oilers.

00;05;46;20 - 00;06;06;05
Steve Reese
She was my account rep from Digital Equipment sold me boxes and that kind of thing, and then went to the San Diego Padres as the vice president of it, was there for two years. They were going through an ownership change and at that point they had paused all IT projects for the foreseeable future. So I felt a little bit uneasy living in San Diego and have nothing to do.

00;06;06;08 - 00;06;26;29
Steve Reese
So then the sons were looking to, renovate their arena and do a lot of building and whatnot. They had a lot of problems, which is really great for me. Let's come out and fix them. Thus, that leads me to where I'm at today. Okay. Oh let's click on the right okay. So Brady and I.

00;06;27;02 - 00;06;47;13
Steve Reese
We live and work in the land of Oz. So for those of you who remember The Wizard of Oz, this is that final scene where what you have is you end up having, Dorothy and the crew finally meet the wizard, but then they discover it's a little bald headed guy behind the scenes who's cranking the lightning, and he's making the sound and all the stuff is going on.

00;06;47;16 - 00;07;17;21
Steve Reese
That's really our world. So is a quick behind the scenes. When the quarterback headset system was being tested back in 1991, Cleveland and the Oilers were the two that were beginning to work with that. Cleveland had an issue because their taxicab dispatch system in the city would interfere with the quarterback headset system. So in the middle of giving the quarterback what the play ought to be, then there was some taxi delivery person that they're going to be picking up an old lady on first and Main, and that got blown to them.

00;07;17;23 - 00;07;33;24
Steve Reese
We ended up trying to system with Warren Moon that had a low level in the, in the, shoulder pads. And so I remember when the guy came to tell me that this is how this works and what it was as he sits, Warren moon down and he sits me down and he goes, okay, so here's how the system works.

00;07;33;27 - 00;07;50;17
Steve Reese
We don't want you to talk for about 30s back and forth to the head coach. And they also had, microphones in the headphones of the players of the linemen. And so what you're going to do is when you get under center and you bend down, the low level is going to go think and it's going to cut off the microphone system.

00;07;50;17 - 00;08;05;20
Steve Reese
And isn't this brilliant? And I saw Warren Moon have this silly little look on his face. And I was like, dude, this is not going to work. And he the engineer was like, yes, this is going to work and this is how it works, blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he continued on. And so then all of a sudden I see Warren Moon.

00;08;05;20 - 00;08;25;07
Steve Reese
He looks at me and he winks. We get to the very first play of the game, and he begins to walk under center. And what does he do? He puts his foot back and it goes under center like this, so he can continue to give audibles and instruction to all the linemen during that entire game. I'm standing next to the engineer who begins the thrust, keyboard down, and he walks away and he's disgusted.

00;08;25;09 - 00;08;44;05
Steve Reese
Right. So this is the stuff that occurs behind the scenes that many of you don't see. And in some respects, it's kind of the exciting piece that we get to see that the public doesn't get to see. If you go to the, Football Hall of Fame, they have three versions later of what the communication headset is, but I really know the difference.

00;08;44;05 - 00;09;02;02
Steve Reese
So one day I'm going to have to go there and kind of correct the record and here's what we do. And then finally, there's also a Steve Reese rule in place of Greg Williams, who was the later the, head coach for the Buffalo Bills. He was our defensive coordinator of the Oilers and the Titans. The later went on to the defensive coordinator for the, New Orleans Saints.

00;09;02;04 - 00;09;20;20
Steve Reese
Him and I had devised a system my first year there for game analysis, where we started doing predictive game analysis, where based on the formation zone, part of the field that people were in, we could begin to predict what the offense was going to run or what defense was going to get played, and we could make, decisions, coaching decisions on the field interactively with that.

00;09;20;23 - 00;09;45;21
Steve Reese
NFL caught on to that after about four games. And so then that's how all the computers got banned. Thanks to me, for being in the booth. So if those were burning questions you have in your mind, there we go. So after the confessional, okay. This is my dog, Houston. That's why she's in the picture. About nine months ago, nine months ago.

00;09;45;23 - 00;10;08;00
Steve Reese
Kind of the temperature within our IT department, was building. Our attitudes are getting short with each other. How we supervised everybody else, we were not leading by example. Many of the things that Brady talked about, about living above and below the line, I would say we were below the line, we were focusing on outcomes.

00;10;08;00 - 00;10;31;11
Steve Reese
We weren't focusing on the process. We were trying to get to A to B, we didn't care what the human toll was. We just wanted to arrive at that spot. There was just not great stuff going on. If you look back, like, a lot of us, we had been through four years of really difficult time. We first had Covid, and just as Covid went off, we decided to embark on an arena renovation.

00;10;31;14 - 00;10;48;22
Steve Reese
So as everybody else was home, the IT department was all at the arena. Like the day that the NBA shut down. And what was that, March 20th or somewhere there? On the 21st, I was in the arena. There was a wrecking ball smashing the concrete in the middle of the floor, and off we went. We built a new player facility.

00;10;48;23 - 00;11;08;22
Steve Reese
At that point, these guys are gone to Florida, so they're off on their own. And there was a part of us that really missed that, because here it is that were working for a professional sports team. We're not able to watch the game. We don't have the camaraderie. The family is split up. I've got people within my department who's, whose, spouses work in the medical field.

00;11;08;24 - 00;11;26;28
Steve Reese
They're having to come home every day. They're stripping in the garage. They're decontaminating. I mean, so you kind of get the idea. This went on for us. Then we go through an NBA investigation because of certain things that were going on within the organization. Then we go through an ownership change, and then after that, we go through another arena renovation, which we're continuing to go through to this day.

00;11;26;28 - 00;11;48;23
Steve Reese
We build a new headquarters. So we had been through a lot of trauma, and we had just developed a lot of really, bad habits. That was a good tune right there like that. So we had developed a lot of really bad habits. So as part of that, what we had to do is I stopped everything in April of this last year and said, we're going to wipe the slate.

00;11;48;23 - 00;12;05;12
Steve Reese
And as leaders, there's six of us. We're going to get together and we're going to outline what our leadership principles are. We're going to figure out how we're going to act differently, and we're going to put a lot of other pieces in here, or what I'm going to call really survival techniques, personal survival techniques. Oh, here we go.

00;12;05;14 - 00;12;28;01
Steve Reese
Let's go to that one. There we go. In order to help us handle this now, Brady talked about some of the ones I'm going to talk about. I'm going to bring in the science behind what we've done. And here's part of the science is the science tells us that at any point in time, 70% of us are either headed into a crisis, we're in the midst of a crisis, or we're coming out of a crisis.

00;12;28;03 - 00;13;00;17
Steve Reese
It doesn't have to be a huge crisis. It could be, it AJ, he's got, two young daughters who are growing, got issues going on there. We have, you know, somebody who may be going through a divorce. We've got a dog that's sick. I'm taking care of a mother and taking care of a father. I mean, there's all sorts of stuff that kind of comes in a life, and it's amazing to me that the number is as low as 70%, because it seems to me that most of us are pretty psychotic, and that it's not that only 10% of us are on the right track, but 70% of us are going in and out.

00;13;00;17 - 00;13;19;26
Steve Reese
So what I wanted to be able to do is to really go through science based methods that we could look at and figure out how is it that we can incorporate these things, such as gratitude, and let's go to that right now and let's figure out how can we do, how can we incorporate stuff such as gratitude in order to allow us to be better leaders?

00;13;20;03 - 00;13;43;03
Steve Reese
Because at the end of the day, it's a little bit like Meet the Fockers, right? How do we self-soothe? We've all been in the dumpster at periods of time, and, you know, you just can't get out. And I go through these periods. I had a period of this, like back in July. I had some medical issues probably, you know, it came up and I'm trying to figure out how do I get myself out of the dumpster, how do I perform above the line for my team members?

00;13;43;06 - 00;14;01;17
Steve Reese
So here's a glass of water. The story behind that glass of water is being the youngest of four. My brothers beat up on me all the time. Like that was just part of the thing. And what I learned is I learned kind of the, like the terrorist attack where I would hit him in the head with a shoe and run it like that was my approach, but they would find me in kind of powder.

00;14;01;17 - 00;14;22;06
Steve Reese
I mean, do whatever they would do. What would happen is one of my parents at home, and they would beat me up and begin to cry. Then they would begin to kind of somewhat waterboard me and make me drink water. And so the theory behind drinking water is and try it next time you want to cry, drink water, and you won't be able to cry like that's the reality of it.

00;14;22;08 - 00;14;44;07
Steve Reese
And so what you have with gratefulness is when you're grateful what it does, it crowds out fear and anger. And so is a kid growing up in a home with a lot of domestic violence. What happened is the coping mechanisms that I learned and how I got along was through anger. Anger was kind of the friend is how I powered through.

00;14;44;09 - 00;15;06;12
Steve Reese
But as an adult, what I learned is when you supervise people, you're motivated by people you're married to a spouse. Anger and bitterness. So like really, really bad friends. And so what I had to learn is, how do I drink that water in order to stop anger, in fear from pouring into my life? So here's the science that is behind it.

00;15;06;12 - 00;15;27;12
Steve Reese
And there's some studies here, and I can provide you with that. But what happens is the science bears out. And I've done a bunch of research on this and what I wanted to do with our IT team is let them know when you're in a bad spot. If Aaron's in a bad spot or AJ or Anthony or different people are in a bad spot, sometimes you just have to stop, drop and roll and be a little grateful about something.

00;15;27;14 - 00;15;44;07
Steve Reese
Now is part of the tragedy of growing up in the home that I did. I had a 30 day period where both my stepfather and my brother committed suicide, and the 30 day period I had friends tell me that I didn't smile for a year like, and I'm David knows me. I'm kind of a smiley, laughing sort of guy.

00;15;44;09 - 00;16;03;15
Steve Reese
So when I had to figure out through that, as I began to live almost minute by minute of just little things of gratitude, like, oh man, the water tastes good. I'm wearing some Air Jordans or whatever the case may be. And I had to learn to be grateful for small things, almost minute by minute, and it began to pull me out.

00;16;03;21 - 00;16;23;12
Steve Reese
But the science really goes to show you that when you are grateful, it crowds out fear and anger. It increases teamwork and it lifts everybody's mood. And so with all of that being said, you think it you know, gratefulness is just kind of like, yeah, let's be grateful, let's be happy. But what we've done in our group is let's just pretend that you're in a staff meeting and I compliment you.

00;16;23;12 - 00;16;38;15
Steve Reese
I say, well, that's a great shirt that you're wearing today. And man, you know what? You're like, I'm going to have to really work on my dress code because of what you're wearing. In the past year in our staff meeting somebody say, nah, man, that's all right, man. I love your Jordans. I love your shirt. But we don't allow that anymore.

00;16;38;15 - 00;16;58;28
Steve Reese
What we do is we have to have somebody when we compliment them to say thank you, I receive that right. And so not only is it good to be grateful for yourself, but it's also good to just accept the compliment and say thank you. Because for myself, like, I deflect compliments all the time and I'm like, oh man, you know?

00;16;59;00 - 00;17;20;13
Steve Reese
And so that's one of the instance, one of the things that we've instituted. Let's go to the next one, Random Acts of Kindness. Okay. Let's we're going to talk about pancakes first and we're going to talk about the clock. So we had an incident at my home where there was a fight between my parents, ended up being mother was handcuffed in the banister, going down the stairs.

00;17;20;13 - 00;17;35;24
Steve Reese
We had a very small two bedroom duplex, and this was a very crowded house. My father handcuffed to their blood all over the wall. You kind of get the idea right. It was a very, very messy scene. And so at the end of all this, I remember my father saying, we're getting ready for school the next morning.

00;17;35;24 - 00;17;54;07
Steve Reese
He says, okay, just walk past your mother and just act like you don't see anything. And just think of the absurdity of of this thing. So we walked downstairs. We leave. We go to school. The very next day, my brother Jim says, hey, I want you to get five of your best friends. And we knew who they were.

00;17;54;07 - 00;18;12;19
Steve Reese
Billy Michael, James Vance, let's get them all. We're going to go to the international House. Pancakes. We're going to go to their all their can eat special. Jim was a junior in high school, worked at a popcorn factory, which I never recommend. A popcorn factory, especially if you're making the caramel corn because he had burns all over his IRAs and he goes, I'm going to take you guys there.

00;18;12;19 - 00;18;29;01
Steve Reese
We're going to go eat. So we walk up the street. We go there too. They're all there, can eat special. We started at eight in the morning. They kicked us out of two in the afternoon. So it's not an all you can eat special. There is a limit of what they have. They kicked us out. So I was sitting there figuring, man, this is just like the oddest thing.

00;18;29;01 - 00;18;48;15
Steve Reese
And so I'm like, you know, we're walking back from there and I'm like, man. So like, why don't you do this? And he said, because what I had to do is to offset the bad with something good. Something good. So now we speed forward to 2015 and I'm in a bad place right? I'm at a bad place at work.

00;18;48;22 - 00;19;06;17
Steve Reese
I'm just, you know, things aren't going great. And so all of a sudden, I'm sitting in our, TV room at home, we have a little sports room, and I've got a football while for my football life, and I got a baseball, a basketball, and we're sitting there. But this clock is sitting there, and this belongs to, William Wesley Cheeseman.

00;19;06;17 - 00;19;24;22
Steve Reese
It's a great uncle of my father, law. And so I started recount the pancake story, and he's like, man, let's just start doing random acts of kindness at work. Let's just figure this out. So what I did is under the assumed name of Willie Wesley Cheeseman, I started writing cards to people at work. What a month. I included a $100 gift card in there.

00;19;24;25 - 00;19;42;16
Steve Reese
And so one was like the painter and I wrote to this guy and I, we did the assumed pen name Willie Wesley Cheeseman, and I wrote, You're the Picasso of our building. Every day I walk out, I see where people have carelessly scratched walls. They've bumped equipment and stuff with. The next morning I come in and they're gone.

00;19;42;16 - 00;20;00;13
Steve Reese
You set the mood for all of us when we come to work. Take this, a $100 gift card. Take a coworker out to eat and know that you're being celebrated. And I put that there. And I did the first one. I was like, damn, that just felt really good. Nobody at work knew I had different family members right?

00;20;00;13 - 00;20;17;25
Steve Reese
The card every month so I could match up the handwriting. And to any of you see, like, the Pets on Parade show, it's the Humane Society show. It's on Saturday. Well, there's a gal named Kelsey Dickerson who is one of the hosts there. So she received a carrot. She was an intern. She had much more potential than what they were giving her.

00;20;18;03 - 00;20;37;17
Steve Reese
And so I wrote, you know, how what a great job she did. What I started finding is over the course of the ten months, people started pinning these cards through module and really looking at the fact of what Willie Wesley Cheeseman, we like, had to name change up all over the place, and they were trying to figure out who the hell is doing this.

00;20;37;20 - 00;20;56;19
Steve Reese
And so it became this game where I went around and started, you know, like take it out of this new persona. And so every week would get together with my father in law, like, who's going to be the next target? We'd all vote on it as a family. That off we go. Here's the science. Right there. So you can see some of the effects.

00;20;56;19 - 00;21;19;09
Steve Reese
The thing that I've noticed is what we've done with our IT team is there is a packet of cards you can get, and it is for random acts of kindness. And they're, like a little scratch off card. And so what we do is once a week, a leader picks a card at random, and they either have to do what's on the card, they scratch it off, and then or he can do a replacement task and we all have to vote on it.

00;21;19;09 - 00;21;37;14
Steve Reese
Do we accept this task or not? One wants to give $100 tip at a restaurant. One was to to, pass out biscuits. The dogs, as you're walking, you know, if you're at a shopping center, another one was to take grocery carts, wrangle them up, and then push them in place so that when the when the grocery cart guy comes out to push all the cards and he's like, what the hell?

00;21;37;16 - 00;22;08;21
Steve Reese
Cars are in place. Like, this is a surprise. So and what we're finding is all these little bitty ways of showing gratefulness and gratitude in these random acts are really beginning to kind of heal people from the inside out. Right? And so and the thing that I've noticed is really the being more jovial, what I'm finding is now people are more jovial, they're coming to work with just a little bit of a higher sense of, pride and just a little bit more happiness, because I think what it does is it takes the focus off of yourself and it puts it on somebody else.

00;22;08;21 - 00;22;33;00
Steve Reese
And that's gratifying. And the science backs all of it up and okay, okay, sleep. I brought some notes up here because there's this one piece I want to read and I need to get Brady's, you know, feedback on this. So sleep. So this was back in about the same time. This would have been back in, 1516 with Aaron Nelson.

00;22;33;03 - 00;22;47;09
Steve Reese
So we have so he was our head athletic trainer at the time. He was, the predecessor to Brady. So what happens is he calls me up and he says, hey, we've just got a bunch of fat players coming in to work, like, what's going on? Like, I've got players who are ten, 15, 20 pounds overweight, what's happened?

00;22;47;09 - 00;23;04;07
Steve Reese
And he goes, so what I need to do is to be able to fix sleep and fix fat. Those were his exact words. And so I there's a correlation. Can we find tech that allows us to kind of look at this. So at him and I did at the time I was sleeping probably close to four and a half, five hours a night.

00;23;04;10 - 00;23;21;06
Steve Reese
He was sleeping four hours a night. I would say in the field, it's probably pretty standard, right, to be sleeping 4 or 5 hours a night. So what we did is we went on this journey to figure out how do we sleep better, how do we restore better, and began to find out how really important this is.

00;23;21;09 - 00;23;39;18
Steve Reese
So these are kind of the numbers. What we began to find out, as was we were trying different things. I worked with the VA to find out what do they do for shock therapy? I use sensory deprivation tanks. I went to a hypnotist. If you want a good hypnotist, your name is Alvaro Paxton. Taught me how to self hypnotize so I could fall asleep faster.

00;23;39;18 - 00;23;58;25
Steve Reese
Like there were tons of methods that we began to look at. But here are the hazards that we looked at. Is that when you are sleeping six or fewer hours a night, that's being chronically sleep deprived, and I would say half America is 50% is seven or fewer hours a night. So America right now the USA is very under slept.

00;23;58;28 - 00;24;22;28
Steve Reese
Your testosterone levels will drop to somebody who is ten years older than what you are. I turned 64 in a couple of days. That puts me in 74 or 80. Working, sleeping, you know, sleeping at that level, the risk of cancer jumps by 70%. The number of calories. When I began to sleep as we went to this program over nine months, my sleep changed from four and a half to five hours a night to over 7.5 hours a night.

00;24;23;01 - 00;24;42;21
Steve Reese
And I will tell you, it's a process. It didn't flip overnight, but I lost 30 pounds doing absolutely nothing but sleeping, which is insane. And so Aaron began to lose weight. And what mostly happened is that I met, Aaron and his wife at one of our team stores, and they're in there and we're buying something, and his wife comes up and gives me a big hug, and she goes, oh my God.

00;24;42;21 - 00;25;08;19
Steve Reese
She was like, the most horrible person to know. I like him a little bit better. He's sleeping more. So, and my wife kind of attest to the same thing. If she were here, she'd be nodding your head, going, yeah, he's he's a nicer person, so sleep in. What you do is leaders is really, really important. And I think not only is important for you but also monitor because there's like I'm not sure how many of you pull an overnight conversion, but like those things are going on all the time.

00;25;08;21 - 00;25;27;05
Steve Reese
And so with all being said, what we had to do is begin to monitor the sleep of our our leaders. First, put the mask on you before you can assist somebody else. And then we began to put the mask on everybody else and assist them on how they could sleep better. So here's a study that was based on Andre Iguodala who played with the Golden State Warriors.

00;25;27;08 - 00;25;48;15
Steve Reese
They did a sleep study with him. Got a rattle these off. Whenever he would get more than eight hours of sleep. He had a 12% increase of minutes played, 29% increase in points per minute, 2% increase in three point percentage, which is astronomical. 9% increase in free throw percentage and a 30% increase in motor skill learning.

00;25;48;17 - 00;26;12;26
Steve Reese
Okay, so you look at the bottom two there. And this is more on your emotional, your strong emotion increase in, emotional breaking when you're getting six or fewer hours of sleep a night, your amygdala, your fight or flight center is 60% more reactive. Steve Reese does not need to be 60% more hyper than I am in fight or flight, but it higher at 60%.

00;26;12;26 - 00;26;38;15
Steve Reese
Your ability to apply the brakes and not be a complete jackass is reduced by 70%. So if you want to change culture like and you throw gratefulness out, you throw random acts of kindness out. Sleep, I would vote is the number one right there. You want to change culture. And so what we did based on this study is we ran two sleep boot camps at work where we had a total of, close to 80 people that sign up for these boot camps.

00;26;38;15 - 00;26;58;03
Steve Reese
We brought in a neurologist, sleep scientist, and we kind of walk them through. How can they sleep better? What do we do? We've got a really weird schedule at the arena between the event staff, instead of late at night for a concert and then a game, and then there's nothing. I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on, but if you want to change the culture within your department, you want to just change the culture within your home or among your friends.

00;26;58;05 - 00;27;23;29
Steve Reese
I would say sleep. Sleep is like the easiest one. Okay. Okay. One interesting thing in the, Eagle study, this is another one is that when you slept less than eight hours, he had a 30%, a 37% increase in turnovers and a 45% increase in files committed. Like, tell me that his amygdala wasn't firing off when he got less sleep.

00;27;24;01 - 00;27;51;02
Steve Reese
And that's why his prefrontal cortex wasn't stopping them from getting a fight with somebody else. Interesting. So what happens on the court is just a reflection of what we do in real life. Okay, I okay, final thing, that I've done with our team is, demanding that they form a personal board of directors. I don't know about you, but I've got about five people on my personal board of directors who I call based on certain situations.

00;27;51;04 - 00;28;11;12
Steve Reese
If I've got kid problems, grandkid problems, marital problems, issues at work, it problems. And so what I've done is part of it is as part of my leadership team is I'm, really pushing them to make sure that they've got five advisors. They don't have to tell me who they are. And none of my advisors know they're part of my board.

00;28;11;15 - 00;28;37;02
Steve Reese
They're just part of my board. They don't know this. One of them is a guy named Bill Sly, who's of the San Francisco Giants. I think he would resign from my board if he knew I was on my board. But there's a number of people that are on my board who don't know it. What I would say is just make sure as far as your as far as you, as leaders, as far as the people who you're managing, I would say having a really good peer network so you can go ahead and bounce ideas off and just have some affirmation with is a wonderful idea.

00;28;37;04 - 00;28;59;19
Steve Reese
Okay, okay, let's talk about addictive leadership. So addictive leadership in my opinion, is the leaders who I've run into are the ones who really help me to feel internally, to feel their leadership. I feel they're they've got my back. I want to learn more. I want to fight more. So let's give you two examples of what this looks like.

00;28;59;21 - 00;29;20;16
Steve Reese
So has anybody heard of and I think I spelled Gettysburg wrong. I know that late last night. Sorry I sent the slides off already. Has anybody heard of Joshua Chamberlain? Okay. One, two. There we go. Three. There we go. Great. So Joshua Chamberlain was the colonel who was over the 20th main on the far right flank in Gettysburg.

00;29;20;23 - 00;29;38;16
Steve Reese
And it was a little place called Little Round Top. And so if you look from Little Round Top, there is a ridge. There's a wall that runs about 100. It's like a brick wall. It runs like 150 yards to to the to the right. As you look down there is almost a 100 yard, decline going off this mountain.

00;29;38;16 - 00;30;00;25
Steve Reese
And that's where the 15th and 47th main gathered is part of this battle. On July 2nd, Ballard started really July 1st. July 2nd was the very next day. And if you kind of figure this to just set the table, there are close to about 170,000 men who are there to fight 70,000 of Confederate side. The rest are on the on the Union side, and they're flanked all the way from there.

00;30;00;25 - 00;30;22;19
Steve Reese
All the way down to Gettysburg itself. And they had been fighting the day, the casualties within that battle were close to 50,000 people over the course of those three days. And so you can imagine the Joshua's group, the 20th Maine, is hearing the battle raging. They're anticipating the fact that this is going to be them. And what they were told was, is to hold that left flank at all cost.

00;30;22;21 - 00;30;47;22
Steve Reese
If the Confederates of the 15th and 47th Maine had breached that left flank, they would then have the high ground. They would then have the high ground be able to attack the Union from behind. And many historians have kind of countered that had Joshua not held that left flank and that particular day, that we would probably have, the Union would have most likely lost a civil war, lost that battle, and most likely the war would have ended that summer.

00;30;47;29 - 00;31;14;26
Steve Reese
And right now, what we see is the United States would most likely end up being probably 9 to 13 independent different countries like Europe, and that's going to have a huge impact later. If you kind of think about the action of this one guy, because when World War Two broke out, the U.S. had enough resources and people and money to fight a world war on two fronts between the Pacific and in, Europe itself, with Hitler and Hirohito.

00;31;14;28 - 00;31;31;11
Steve Reese
Okay. But on this particular day, this is what Joshua thought of himself. What he was is when he joined, a couple of years earlier, he was a professor of rhetoric. He was basically a speech and an English teacher at Bowdoin College. I don't know if any of you been to Bowdoin College, but it's like this little bitty small school.

00;31;31;11 - 00;31;48;25
Steve Reese
The tuition is outrageous. I think it's like 120,000 a year, and it's a small little place. And so he he joined because, in his words, he was born. But when he sat there on the left flank of Little Round Top, this is his opinion right there is that he really didn't know anything about warfare. He was just a stubborn guy.

00;31;48;25 - 00;32;08;14
Steve Reese
And he had within him the inability to do nothing. I think that's a double negative. He was like, damn it, I'm going to do something like, this is my time and I'm not going to let this happen. So what happened is within that period, and here's a picture of a little round top right here. This is the side looking down.

00;32;08;22 - 00;32;25;09
Steve Reese
And you can see down there. So you're about 100 yards down. And now this is the piece looking up. So that's a hike going up and down a little round top. And so at 235 in the afternoon when the sun was going to be set, more to the west and looking into the eyes of the Union soldiers, that's from the 15th and 47th.

00;32;25;09 - 00;32;45;03
Steve Reese
Alabama decided they're going to do their first rush up the hill. They had close to 800 men, and they just hoofed it up that hill, while 300 men from the 20th made our shooting down. And so this went for a first full charge. And if you can kind of think the battle continues to rage over to the right of him.

00;32;45;06 - 00;33;01;13
Steve Reese
And there was at that point already two generals and two, colonels who have already gotten killed. And so this went on for one charge. It went on for two hours. And just kind of imagine that every time a to take place, the rebel yell is going out. So they're screaming, they go three charges, they go four charges.

00;33;01;13 - 00;33;28;12
Steve Reese
In the fourth charge, Joshua Chamberlain was shot and the belt buckle. It knocks him down miraculously, is not wounded. They continue to fight. And on that fourth charges, hand-to-hand combat is occurring at the top of the hill. They somehow push the 47th and the 15th main back down the hill, and now they prepare for a fifth charge. At that point, the Confederate troops have been reduced to 400 men, and at that point Chamberlain's crew was reduced to 80 men.

00;33;28;14 - 00;33;47;07
Steve Reese
So kind of figure that now you've got this battlefield where you've got these sweaty people all over the place, there's dead bodies all over the place. And Chamberlain is sitting there thinking, what the hell do we do? Do we just give this up and we just run? What do we do? And many of his men were convincing, trying to convince him that we need to just leave and let's just get the hell out of here and save ourselves.

00;33;47;10 - 00;34;10;07
Steve Reese
And so at that point, Joshua became a little bit unresponsive. And so he wasn't talking to people. The bugle boy is up in the thing he says are preparing again. Joshua gives a command to fix bayonets. And then what he does is give the silliest command in all of military history to execute a great right wheel, which that's not a military command.

00;34;10;07 - 00;34;29;14
Steve Reese
And nobody knew what the hell he was talking about. But from that ridge he jumped down. He fixed bayonet. He put a sword in his hand. He gives a command that nobody understands. He begins to charge down the hill and everybody else looks at him. And they said, well, we have no idea what he means. I think he means charge.

00;34;29;17 - 00;34;46;24
Steve Reese
So on this fifth charge, they met the 47th to the 15th, they met to the middle. But because of how fast they were charging, because Chamberlain is just screaming. And what he really felt was is Chamberlain's attitude was this. And that was he felt I knew that I may die, but I knew that I wouldn't die with a bullet.

00;34;46;24 - 00;35;13;02
Steve Reese
My back like I am all in. I'm pushing the chips and this is how I'm going to die. This is the end of it. But everybody else follow them, which is crazy. What was it about his leadership that caused 79 other people? And they only had 160 bullets among the 80 of them. That's all they had. They had two rounds of ammunition, two bullets per person as they charged on that hill in the 15th and the 47th.

00;35;13;02 - 00;35;35;22
Steve Reese
Alabama is these charges on that hill were so shocked by how fast they came down. They surrender. There were 400 people, 300 people that surrender to 80 men. And there was one story of a single private with a single round in his rifle, guarding the number of people in this room holding a prisoner. And what would cause somebody to do that like that is called addictive leadership.

00;35;35;24 - 00;35;57;00
Steve Reese
Because what it is, at the end of the day, what they understood is they didn't understand his words. A lot of your folks are maybe going to get confusing commands. They may not totally understand what you're saying, but what they're going to understand is your actions. They're going to understand the kind of person you are. They're going to understand, like, do you care for them at the end of the day?

00;35;57;00 - 00;36;23;27
Steve Reese
Like, do you have their back? Do you care for them as a person, not just an employee. Now, let me give you a personal example. Let's talk about Jeff Fisher. Okay. So there we go. There was the day September 26th. So the week before, my soon to be wife was we were running a project. It was a net conversion.

00;36;24;04 - 00;36;49;24
Steve Reese
It was Novell Network. Thank you. Messing with a digital vacs network I don't recommend this. And what happened? There are 15 conditions that have to be met in order for everything to go to hell. And that day it did on Monday, which was the 20th. And so this was a basically an order from our owner. You got to charge forward with this for the middle of the season.

00;36;49;26 - 00;37;16;06
Steve Reese
By Monday afternoon, we had lost every bit of data in our entire system. Counting system was shut. Our football game analysis system was down. We were playing, Cincinnati Bengals out next week. Icky woods. Everything was totally, totally down. It's the one and only time that I have melted our entire corporate network and nobody could do a thing.

00;37;16;06 - 00;37;38;06
Steve Reese
We sent everybody home on Tuesday. They didn't show back up until the following Monday. It was dead. Ironically, during that project, there was a gal who was part of the project. She, I don't know, somehow decided that she came out as a witch that day. I don't know why that was just so crazy. Like, we have this, and then that's happened, like, all these crazy things were going on.

00;37;38;08 - 00;37;55;18
Steve Reese
So what happened is, in the following Monday, Jeff Fisher comes up. First coach that would talk to me because the coaches were so mad, like they wouldn't even talk to me. And so he comes in, Monday comes our computer room. And so he begins to walk away. I'm like, coach, man, I am so sorry. Can I explain?

00;37;55;21 - 00;38;11;22
Steve Reese
And Jeff's like, no, no, no, no, no. He says, man, I'm, I'm a IT executive. I know about this stuff. And he's kind of joking with me and taps you out of chess. And you go, Steve, here's the thing that I know when you walked in last Monday, you didn't have the idea. I'm going to totally screw the network.

00;38;11;25 - 00;38;29;26
Steve Reese
Like, that's not who you are. Like, you came in with the best intentions. You made three backups, everything's got restored. We're back. All I ask is that if you're doing anything crazy this week, we're playing Pittsburgh. Can you just kind of hold off until after Sunday? US play Pittsburgh. We need to win this game, which ironically, we lost.

00;38;29;26 - 00;38;46;27
Steve Reese
We beat Cincinnati. That's how we're going to be. He gets ready to leave the room and I go to shake his hand. He knocks my hand out of the way, and he gives me this big hug and refuses to let me go for what felt like 30s. And I swear to God, he was trying to make me cry.

00;38;46;29 - 00;39;10;24
Steve Reese
And so he wanted to let me know it wasn't about the disaster that occurred. He wanted to let me know it was about slapping me in the ass and getting me back in the saddle and get me moving again right now, let me tell you that right there is what I consider. Let me go back to this other slide, what I consider addictive leadership.

00;39;10;27 - 00;39;32;23
Steve Reese
Because at the end of the day, what he inspired me to do is that if my mother had come in that room and Jeff would have said, take her out. Sorry, mom, you're gone. But I think with what all of you do, it's about bringing your best self. And whether you get there through grateful list or random acts of kindness or better sleep.

00;39;32;25 - 00;39;50;18
Steve Reese
There's a lot of people that rely on you and that you've got to be your best self before they can be. And Jeff, in that moment for me was his best self. In order that I could be the best person I am. So anyway, with all that being said and know that you've got so much sympathy.

00;39;50;20 - 00;40;08;27
Steve Reese
And compassion for me, with what all of you have to do, because it's not an easy job. I mean, it's a tough one, and somebody has got to be the adult in the room and somebody has got to care. And, you know, for a lot of these kids who work for me, many of them come from dysfunctional homes, and they don't even get that right, parenting from their parents.

00;40;08;29 - 00;40;28;13
Steve Reese
And so in some respects, we're kind of who that is. So my, you know, encouragement to you is be that Jeff Fisher guy, in many respects, hug your people every day. And just let him know. And you care for him. You love him. Because like I said before, Jeff Walker's in the store. I'll tell you what, I.

00;40;28;13 - 00;40;46;00
Steve Reese
I seriously would move heaven and earth for this guy. And so every day that I work at the Suns, I try to be generous to somebody else. And when you feel the compassion in your soul, that's when you know how to become a leader. And the people who work for you will feel when they feel that love, that compassion coming from you.

00;40;46;02 - 00;40;52;23
Steve Reese
That's when they're going to understand what addictive leadership is. So anyway, with all that being said, I will turn the floor back over thanks to.