On Thursday, Oct. 21, Jay Harris, an ESPN on-air journalist, visited ETSU’s campus in the D. P. Culp Student Center. He gave a talk titled “The Top Ten Things I Know About Leadership.”
The room was completely filled. I estimate there were 200-300 people in attendance. Jay Harris is known for his SportsCenter recaps of Top Ten, where clips of incredible plays in sports are recapped and numbered, starting from ten down to one.
He is just as charismatic in person as he is on television. He began his talk with an anecdote about the time Michael Jordan dunked on him. He also began to talk to the audience about humiliation, and the goals of what it is to be a leader. Some of them for example:
“8. Lead with Grace
7. Leaders lead by example
6. Leaders never stop learning
3. Leaders want the people around them to surpass them.”
I have chosen to list the most memorable here, since hearing Jay Harris do this talk in person is an experience, and simply listing what he said here would be an injustice. He interlaced each number on the countdown with an anecdote. He also began to speak to the crowd, joking with them about Jordans.
Ultimately, Jay Harris wanted to leave the crowd with a true sense of what it meant to be a leader, so, he left the number one slot empty, believing, “There is no number one in leadership because it involves putting all the others together.”
