Ordinarily, people hope a keynote speaker will have something important to say, waiting for a magic moment that will change their lives, or at least brighten up the overcast day outside. At GTC in Austin this morning, they were not disappointed.

Ken Carter
The Convention Center ballroom was packed to the walls. Evidently a lot of Texans saw "Coach Carter" the movie in which Samuel L. Jackson played Ken Carter. Then the music started -- dramatic with a hard beat, and Carter arrived, blowing his whistle in time to the beat, high-fiving members of the audience. He jumped up onto the stage and launched into his presentation.

"We are spiritual beings having a human experience," he began. Carter has had more experience than most. "Richmond, Calif.," he said, "is the most dangerous city in California, where half the students don't graduate from high school, and have an eighty times better chance of going to jail than to college."

When Carter took over as coach, he took over a losing team. "They were losers," he said, "they even looked like losers." There were no basketballs, no shoes, and "luckily the showers didn't work, because there were no towels." His two leading scorers walked out. But Carter did something unexpected.

Carter had each player sign a contract. The parents, coach, and grandparents also signed it. The players agreed to keep their grades up, among other things. He took those kids, made them into a team and made them winners.

Then, in the middle of a 16-game winning streak -- headed for the championship, his players becoming community heroes -- Carter locked them out of the gym for skipping school. They broke their contracts. "The parents wanted to hang me," he said.

Punishment lasts for a few minutes, he said, but discipline lasts a lifetime. "I have a simple rule," he said, "The only way you miss my practice is if you die. There is no wiggle room. You live by your standards." One student -- assigned 20,000 pushups as discipline -- got 100 students to do them for him with Carter's approval. "I wanted to build great leaders," he explained, and that student went out and built a team. "He will probably be a millionaire by the end of the year."

"My players have a 100 percent graduation rate," he said. The community became a winner as well. The players became heroes, and 10 absent fathers came home to their families. His former players are now in business, in college, and three play professional ball.

Carter interspersed his story as a coach, with the principles that make him who he is. "You gotta get bold," he said, "you can't just say let someone else do it, you must step up. Do more than expected, and invest in the rest in the future. We do not get paid by the hour, we get paid for the value we bring to the hour.

"A lot of you are told knowledge is power," he said. "It isn't. The use of knowledge is power. Move the commitment from your head to your heart and it shows up in the work you do. Look for teammates that want to take one for the team. How much energy," he asked the audience, "do you bring to your job, community, career?"