• Why Nick Saban eats lettuce for lunch
  University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban eats the exact same salad -- lettuce, tomatoes and turkey slices topped with honey Dijon -- for lunch every day in a bid to avoid frittering away time staring at menus. He brings a similar efficiency to his management of his championship-winning team. "When you have a system, you kind of get in a routine of what's important," he explains. "And then you spend a lot more time on thinking of things that would make it better." CNNMoney/Fortune (9/24)      

• Hope is for the hopeless, says Thrillist CEO
  Bosses should make "don't hope" their motto, says Ben Lerer, a founder and CEO of the Thrillist Media Group. Hope leads people to wait for things to fall into their laps rather than simply getting on with the task at hand, Lerer explains. "Don't rely on luck. You have to make your own luck. The only thing you can do is try your absolute best to do the right thing," he says. The New York Times (tiered subscription model) (9/8)      

• Marketers have faith in godless shoppers
  Religiosity is on the decline in the U.S., and marketers are working to pitch products and services to America's 15 million "convinced atheists." The aim is to create a niche similar to that enjoyed by brands catering to evangelical Christians, an industry worth $4.63 billion a year. "This is a subculture that really is hungry and has money to play with," says D.J. Grothe of the James Randi Educational Foundation. Bloomberg Businessweek (9/7)      

• Free shipping? Don't be so sure
  Many online retailers offer free shipping, but those that do tend to charge correspondingly higher base prices, a study reports. Other e-retail strategies include inflating the likely time a product will take to reach consumers if sent using free shipping, which encourages shoppers to spring for quicker and more expensive delivery options. Strategy+Business online (free registration) (9/7)      

• How Warner Bros. learned to hack
  Warner Bros. is going high tech to spur innovation, staging Facebook-style "hackathons" and winning patents for data-compression and anti-piracy technologies. That's a sign of the changing nature and increased complexity of the modern movie business, officials say. "We're trying to function as a startup ... while still recognizing the impact of our work across so many different businesses," says Chief Technology Officer Darcy Antonellis. Los Angeles Times/Movies Now blog (tiered subscription model) (9/9)      

Top five news stories selected by SmartBrief on Leadership readers in the past week.

• How to deliver a speech like Bill Clinton (Fast Company online)

• Man documents the aging process with daily photos (YouTube)

• Meet Europe's weirdest animal (BBC)

• 10 traits of highly successful entrepreneurs (Gallup Business Journal)

• Your waiter is quietly judging you (The New York Times (tiered subscription model))

• Results based on number of times each story was clicked by readers.

• African nations succeed where EU failed
  Five countries in eastern Africa have made "astoundingly rapid" progress since joining in an European-style economic and political union. The success of the East African Community -- Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda -- suggests that while integration might not be working out so well for Europe, it's still an effective strategy in some circumstances, write Blair Glencorse and Charles Landow. ForeignPolicy.com (9/7)      

• How good oral hygiene saved the International Space Station
  Astronauts aboard the International Space Station ran into trouble last week after part of the orbiting contraption's solar-energy system broke down. The flight crew embarked on lengthy spacewalks to inspect damaged parts, culminating in success only by scrubbing away debris using a spare toothbrush. "It's been like living on the set of 'Apollo 13' the past few days," one astronaut said. TheAtlantic.com (9/6)      

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I know this might sound like a contradiction, but I want to be able to micromanage without micromanaging." --Ben Lerer, co-founder and CEO of Thrillist Media Group, as quoted in the New York Times