SAN ANTONIO — Information and technology are important to thesuccess of the credit union enterprise but a strong, empoweredservice culture cannot be created by unhappy, scared employees.

Tim Sanders, former chief solutions officer (and crisis manager)for Yahoo! and now an author working on a new startup, made thatpoint during his keynote address Monday morning to the CUNAOperations & Service Council/CUNA Technology Council combined conference.

Sanders was hired by Mark Cuban at Broadcast.com and moved withhim to Yahoo!, where he helped handle some of the company's worstcrises – expulsion from China, was one example, and spent up to 300days on the road and in the air a year.

He compared the fear that he said hampers creativity andprogress for credit unions today with the spirit of accomplishmentthat marked recovery from the Great Depression.

A native of West Texas, Sanders spoke about the fear of povertythat his grandmother shared with him as she struggled through thosetimes, and explained in detail how mood states have a chemical andworkplace effect on people. That includes creating a scarcitymentality that prevents people from sharing with each other,including time, effort and ideas, as well as goods.

That point can get lost in the numbers of modern business, aspeople see market plummets and follow the recession blow by blow,and that reaction drives how they do their jobs, Sanders said.

“People are highly emotional creatures. Metrics are people, butpeople are just as crazy as horses. Business is a horse race andpeople can only be as effective as their moods,” he said.

Sanders connected his core message to his own experience withcredit unions. “Our job is to manage the mood state, the spirit ofour collective roots, to reconnect ourselves with 1932 and 1908, toSt. Mary's Bank in New England and CUNA in Colorado and thebeginnings of the credit union movement and the courage it took tomake this happen,” he said.

Sanders said he got his own start in entrepreneurship from acredit union, a $4,000 loan to start a musical instrumentconsignment business after he finished grad school at theUniversity of Arizona. The CU manager taught him several valuablelessons – including to have a business plan with a premise and notshow up in shorts while asking for a loan – and to take risks whereothers, in this case, banks, wouldn't.

He said the same happened for his boss, Cuban, who also got aloan to open a bar that failed while he was a student at theUniversity of Indiana. Those businesses failed, but lessons werelearned, he said.

Entrepreneurship is not just for startups, he said. “Ask Kodakand Greyhound why entrepreneurship still matters,” pointing to thesuccess those companies found in reinventing and repositioningtheir products and markets.