Coach John Scolinos was legendary among college baseball coaches. Over his 45-year career, he was the head baseball coach at Pepperdine University from 1946 to 1960 and at California State Polytechnic University Pomona from 1962 to 1991, compiling a career college baseball record of 1,070 wins, 954 losses and 13 ties. Scolinos was also the head football coach at Pepperdine from 1955 to 1959.

But those numbers aren’t what define him, nor are they what people probably remember him for. Rather, his most memorable moments include quite possibly a speech he delivered that talked about the importance of 17 inches.

In January 1996, the 78-year-old Scolinos addressed 4,000 baseball coaches at the 52nd annual American Baseball Coaches Association convention in Nashville, Tennessee.

Dressed in dark pants and a light blue shirt, his outfit was accessorized by a full-sized, bright white home plate hanging from a string around his neck. He spoke for 25 minutes without acknowledging his unusual attire.

And then, he explained. “You’re probably all wondering why I’m wearing home plate around my neck. Or maybe you think I escaped from Camarillo State Hospital,” he began. “No, I may be old, but I’m not crazy. The reason I stand before you is to share with you baseball people what I’ve learned in my life, what I’ve learned about baseball in 78 years.

“Do you know how wide home plate is in Little League?” he asked the Little League coaches who were there.

“Seventeen inches,” someone replied.

“That’s right,” he said. “How about in Babe Ruth’s day?” Another coach hollered out, “Seventeen inches?”

“And what do they do with a big-league pitcher who can’t throw the ball over 17 inches? They send him to Pocatello (Idaho),” he said.

“What they don’t do is this: They don’t say, Ah, that’s OK, Jimmy. You can’t hit a 17-inch target? We’ll make it 18 inches or 19 inches. We’ll make it 20 inches, so you have a better chance of hitting it. If you can’t hit that, let us know so we can make it wider still, say 25 inches.

“Coaches, what do we do when our best player shows up late to practice?" he challenged the audience. "What if he gets caught drinking ... Do we hold him accountable? Or do we change the rules to fit him? Do we widen home plate?”

Scolinos went on to illustrate his points, drawing on the home plate he wore. He outlined the consequences of bending the rules and not performing up to standard. The spellbound crowd learned so much more than baseball lessons that day.

His message was clear: “Coaches, keep your players -- no matter how good they are -- your own children, your churches, your government and, most of all, keep yourself, ALL, at 17 inches.”

This lesson applies across all disciplines. We all have superstars in our organizations, and if we are lucky, they hold themselves to the standards we have set for all employees. If they haven’t achieved that discipline, it is up to management to hold them accountable. And management must be up to the task.

Every organization has a metric that can be compared to 17 inches. Figure out what it is and insist on that standard for everyone.

Demanding the best from yourself is a perfect place to start. It doesn’t matter whether you are in the mailroom or the corner office. Be an example for all those around you, regardless of your position.

And then watch what happens. Pride of accomplishment, increased productivity, more job satisfaction. When people know they are performing at their best, the entire organization benefits. And customers notice a difference, too. All because you understood the importance of 17 inches.

Coach Scolinos left this world 10 years ago. Perhaps he never knew how many have benefited from his inspired advice. But I know I will never look at home plate the same way again.

Mackay’s Moral: Keeping your standards high is the only way to play the game of life.

I learned many years ago that visualizing or fantasizing is one of the most powerful means of achieving personal goals.

This proved true again at the recent women’s U.S. Open Tennis final, when 19-year-old Canadian Bianca Andreescu defeated Serena Williams. During her post-match press conference, a teary-eyed Andreescu mentioned how for years she would close her eyes and envision herself winning the U.S. Open against Williams, the greatest woman tennis player of her generation.

“I guess these visualizations really, really work,” she said.

Andreescu’s rise has been amazingly swift. She lost in the first qualification round at the last two U.S. Opens and was ranked outside the top 150 women players when the 2019 season began. She won a tournament earlier in the year, but then missed significant time with a torn rotator cuff. Since she returned to the tour in early August, she has beaten Serena Williams twice. Such is the power of active visualization.

Numerous studies have shown that mental practice through visualization can be as effective at improving skills as real practice. You can actually develop and reinforce real skills by visualizing yourself practicing them.

This explains why visualization is part of most world-class athletes' training: because it works! They have future vision. They see things a split second before they happen.

That's what a place-kicker does when he comes on the field to kick a winning field goal. Three seconds left in the game, 80,000 screaming fans, 30 million people watching on TV and the game is still in balance. As the kicker begins his moves, he makes the final adjustments necessary to achieve the mental picture he's formed in his mind so many times -- a picture of himself kicking the winning field goal!

That’s all well and good for athletes, but what about the rest of us whose dreams of success follow other paths?

Get a notebook and carve out some alone time for yourself. Give yourself a little space to think about what things you really want in life. Make a list of everything you want and everything you want to do during your lifetime -- no matter how crazy it sounds.

If you want to drink champagne in the south of France, write it down. If you want to ride a camel in the desert, write it down. If you want to own a Ferrari, write it down. Nothing is too big or too small. Search every corner of your mind for whatever you want and commit it to paper. Then put the list where you can look at it whenever you wish.

Before I wrote my first book, “Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive,” I had put a Post-it note on my bathroom mirror that read, “Be a New York Times best-selling author.” It worked for me, and it can work for you.

The late writer and visualization expert Shakti Gawain encouraged her readers to go further; she urged them to cut out pictures of those material things they want from magazines and other sources and hang them up. I’ve used that method too.

It’s important to remember not to expect all of these desires to be fulfilled immediately or at all. But when you take action, like making a list of what you want or cutting out an image of a car you want to own, you open up a pathway to possibility that was not present before. Give the process time and have faith, and it’s likely that you will be surprised by how many things on your list actually start appearing in your life.

Olympic pentathlete Marilyn King said, “If you can't imagine it, you can't ever do it. In my experience, the image always precedes the reality.” And she provides a very moving example of the power of visualization.

When King was preparing for the 1980 Olympic trials, she suffered a severe back injury and was confined to bed just nine months before the trials. Determined not to let this injury keep her from performing, she spent the next four months doing nothing but watching films of the best performers in the pentathlon events and visualizing herself going through the same events.

King placed second at the Olympic trials despite her lack of physical preparation. She stated that it was her psychological state, not her physical condition that gained her success.

Mackay’s Moral: Whatever a person does, he or she must first do in their mind.

It seems like artificial intelligence is taking over the world, leaving many of us non-techies feeling terrified.

Yet when you stop to think about it, we all use artificial intelligence (AI) every day. When we Google something, use Siri on our smartphones or ask Alexa a question, we are using AI.

Hollywood has certainly featured AI in many movies from “The Terminator” series to “Robocop” and “I, Robot.” In “Minority Report,” algorithms predict who is going to commit a crime, and the person is arrested before the crime can be committed.

What we want to consider is not a fictional near future of robots taking over the world but a more pressing issue of jobs. According to a McKinsey report, 400 million to 800 million jobs worldwide could be displaced by 2030 as a result of machines.

“The bigger concern with AI is that those who do not adapt and learn how to work alongside machines might be seen as obsolete in certain sectors,” said Susan Sly, co-CEO and co-founder of RadiusAI, which was just named a top 10 start-up in the highly competitive Phoenix tech market.

AI is big business. Microsoft recently agreed to invest $1 billion in a partnership with the research group OpenAI, co-founded by Elon Musk and other wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. According to Bloomberg News, OpenAI will use Microsoft’s Azure cloud services to train and run the group’s AI software, and the two will jointly develop supercomputing technology.

Those are big players in any industry, to be sure, but how will AI benefit the rest of the business world?

According to the Harvard Business Review, 36% of executives say that their primary goal for incorporating AI is to optimize internal business operations. Eighty-four percent of global business organizations believe that AI will give them a competitive advantage.

A whopping 72% of execs believe that AI will be the most significant business advantage of the future, according to a survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Gartner, a global research and advisory firm, says by the end of this year, startups will surpass the leading giants like Google, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon in driving the AI economy. By 2020, it is expected that AI will become a more integral part of the sales process for up to 30% of companies around the world.

Artificial intelligence will transform the relationship between people and technology. Our skills and creativity will be challenged and enhanced. Real and sustainable benefits to business transformation will be the end result.

Rather than fear these bold changes, consider this: The share of jobs requiring AI has increased by 450% since 2013, according to Adobe. Investment into AI startups by venture capitalists has soared six-fold since 2000. The number of AI startups since 2000 has increased 14 times, said an article in Forbes.

AI has enormous potential to affect the profitability of companies that find appropriate ways to use it.

The statistics website Statista projects that global revenues from AI for enterprise applications are forecasted to grow from $1.6 billion in 2018 to $31.2 billion in 2025, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 52.6% in this seven-year period.

Global retail spending on AI will grow to $7.3 billion a year by 2022, up from $2 billion in 2018, according to Juniper Research. This is because companies will invest heavily in AI tools that will help them differentiate and improve the services they offer customers.

And here’s a statistic that merits your attention: Approximately 61% of companies with an innovation strategy are using AI to identify opportunities in data that they would have otherwise missed, according to Narrative Science.

That’s a lot of data to absorb, but I think it’s a roadmap to the future. If all those numbers haven’t convinced you that artificial intelligence is a trend to be embraced rather than feared, you might be on the road to nowhere.

Mackay’s Moral: Businesses with the brightest futures are "AI" -- All In -- on AI.