If you’re in a fraternity or have a kid that’s in one, ask them why. What’s the purpose? There’s so much pressure about whether you are or not getting into a house. It’s unfortunate because a lot of kids have gotten confused these days about why they should go Greek in college.
Kids think its just about having an outlet for parties, drugs, hazing. You can go to school and do all that without a house…you don’t need all the organized insanity.
The purpose of fraternities and sororities is to give you life lessons.
Rush and pledging = talent acquisition, one of the essential tools towards building a successful business. How do you get the best kids in your house? How do you get the best employees in your company?
Robert’s Rules of Order = working the room, understanding the dynamics of differentiating opinions and utilizing a process to work through decisions.
Community service = elevating your sense of purpose and going good for others.
Anything that’s valuable in business is dependent on how well people can collaborate…same thing you do in a fraternity or sorority.
The thing that I never get is, everybody wants to have the best house. And, everybody knows what it takes to be the best house. Yet, so few houses are doing what they need to do to get there (or at least that’s what we see in the news).
When I was in a fraternity, we wanted to have the best girls hanging with us, sure! But what did we do? We made the girls our biggest fans. We turned our customers into our best sales people.
I was speaking at a few fraternity houses recently at Texas and Syracuse. But what do they do and so many other houses all across the country? The opposite. They do everything they shouldn’t do.
Colleges across the board need to have a reset about what Fraternity and Sorority life is all about. What’s beautiful is that the relationships you develop- those people will be friends for life- same thing that goes for your relationships in business. We don’t want to lose that with the way the Greek system is headed.
I plead to all schools, parents and kids- focus on the important stuff. It’s not about how many kegs you can get for that party (and I like to keep this blog PG). What scares me is that you continue to hear about all this hazing, the kids dying…we need to sit down and reset; get the record straight about why these houses even exist.
Get the attitude in your house right by treating people correctly and doing things the right way…the lessons are all there for the taking.
