E31-Rick Melmer Podcast "The 8 Paradoxes of Great Leadership", Hank Aaron

Rick Melmer Podcast (click on the title)

April 8, 2026

I deeply enjoy listening to Rick Melmer talking about leadership. Some people are able to project such confidence when they speak. Rick is one of those people. You don't question whether he was great at what he did. You can hear it authentically. 

Rick was a teacher, the Superintendent of schools in 3 different states, the Dean of Education for the University of South Dakota, and the Secretary of Education for the State of South Dakota. He is also the founder of Leadership South Dakota. Rick recently did a training with all the Southwest Superintendents in Minnesota and I was an attendee. 

Rick has an incredible ability to make complex elements of leadership and simplify them into easy, actionable concepts. Similar to this, I ended up reading a book from that training, "The 8 Paradoxes of Great Leadership" by Tim Elmore. Today's podcast was about these paradoxes. 

This speaks to so much of what we are trying to do with professional development, evaluation programs and mentoring. To what extent is this individual malleable? Even if they are willing to change, can they change persistently strong characteristics? Do they even want to? These are all leadership philosophies that you need to embrace or contemplate, even if you can't solve a particular problem quickly and cleanly. As Rick would say, we need to "marry the problem, and just date the methods". 

At the end of the presentation, Rick shares a quote from Peter Drucker, "The leader of the past knew how to tell; the leader of the future will know how to ask,"encapsulates a fundamental shift from command-and-control management to a collaborative, knowledge-based approach. [AI] Drucker is a titan that would be worth our time in the future. 

This is a summary of the presentation if you want to use it for your administrative team. It is well-advised as a discussion point for your "cabinet" if you have one. Thanks again to Rick for providing us with his input. 

This Day in History Baseball Fans

As I was typing in this date, I was reminded that...on this day 52 years ago, Hank Aaron passed Babe Ruth on the Home Run list. I was only 9 at the time. My Dad was a track coach and had their first indoor meet of the season at St. John's. As usual, I was tagging along and wondering if I would get back to see if Hank would beat the record that night. Dating me, I remember it was Monday night Baseball. You see, we would only get to see two nationally televised games per week. Monday Night and Saturday Afternoon on NBC (Curt Gowdy, Tony Kubek and Joe Garagiola). 

We got back just in time for me to turn the TV on to the game. We had no idea whether he had done it while we were on the bus. I remember it vividly. Al Downing the pitcher for the Dodgers. Aaron hitting it into the night. Rounding the bases. The two fans that ran out of the stands to pat him on the back. [Imagine what would happen to those individuals today?] Somehow, I knew at age 9 that this was a really big deal. 

Here is the call: 

Here is a followup story on the three Hall of Fame announcers that were on the call that night. It's short, but also makes it more memorable to me. "What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol" Three Hall of Fame Announcers