Collaborative Culture Quotes

If you first take a minute, an hour or a month to let go of feeling annoyed, frustrated or critical of the person or situation that may be driving you crazy, you set yourself up for much greater leadership and personal success.

The board of directors should foster a culture of collaboration and open communication.

Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable. (Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity)

The human dimension of organizational change is vital. Because ultimately, a company is a collaboration of people.

By encouraging a culture of collaboration, open communication, and constructive debate, boards can harness the collective wisdom of their members and make decisions that drive the company towards long-term success.

Logic and morality made it impossible to accept an illogical and immoral reality; they engendered a rejection of reality which as a rule led the cultivated man rapidly to despair. But the varieties of the man-animal are innumerable, and I saw and have described men of refined culture, especially if young, throw all this overboard, simplify and barbarize themselves, and survive. A simple man, accustomed not to ask questions of himself, was beyond the reach of the useless torment of asking himself why. The harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness, with all its infinite nuances and motivations, to collaborate: terror, ideological seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatsoever… Certainly, the greatest responsibility lies with the system, the very structure of the totalitarian state; the concurrent guilt on the part of individual big and small collaborators is always difficult to evaluate… they are the vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt… the room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to zero

The Five C's of Coaching: 1- Clarity 2- Communication 3- Collaboration 4- Commitment 5- Culture

A lot of business is collaborative, and a lot of business is competitive. And it's important to know when to focus on which.

If you’re alive, you’re a creative person. You and I and everyone you know are descended from tens of thousands of years of makers. Decorators, tinkerers, storytellers, dancers, explorers, fiddlers, drummers, builders, growers, problem-solvers, and embellishers—these are our common ancestors. The guardians of high culture will try to convince you that the arts belong only to a chosen few, but they are wrong and they are also annoying. We are all the chosen few. We are all makers by design. Even if you grew up watching cartoons in a sugar stupor from dawn to dusk, creativity still lurks within you. Your creativity is way older than you are, way older than any of us. Your very body and your very being are perfectly designed to live in collaboration with inspiration, and inspiration is still trying to find you—the same way it hunted down your ancestors.

All businesses could use a garden where Data Scientists plant seeds of possibility and water them with collaboration.

William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

It's really important for our company to have a culture of healthy leadership and also healthy followership. We don't want to over emphasize leadership because it's not the most important thing. Leadership is important, followership is important, and collaboration is important.

I reject the notion that science is by its nature secretive. Its culture and ethos are, and for very good reason, collective, collaborative, and communicative.

If You Respect Their Preparation, You never Drop the Baton

To walk attentively through a forest, even a damaged one, is to be caught by the abundance of life: ancient and new; underfoot and reaching into the light. But how does one tell the life of the forest? We might begin by looking for drama and adventure beyond the activities of humans. Yet we are not used to reading stories without human heroes. This is the puzzle that informs this section of the book. Can I show landscape as the protagonist of an adventure in which humans are only one kind of participant? Over the past few decades many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias. It is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress through modernization. There are other ways of making worlds. Anthropologists have become interested, for example, in how substance hunters recognize other living beings as persons, that is protagonists of stories. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Yet expectations of progress block this insight. Talking animals are for children and primitives. Their voices silent, we imagine wellbeing without them. We trample over them for our advancement. We forget that collaborative survival requires cross-species coordinations. To enlarge what is possible we need other kinds of stories, including adventures of landscapes.

The final two issues of the Englehart/Rogers/Austin collaboration, Detective Comics #475 and #476, are now esteemed alongside the greatest Batman stories ever created and would provide the seed for Tim Burton’s 1989 feature film. In

Womanism is feminism's vulgate. It asserts that women are the oppressed or the victims and never the collaborators in the 'bad' things that men do. It entails a double standard around sexuality where women's sexual self-expression is seen as necessary and even desirable, but men's is seen as dangerous or even disgusting. Womanism is by no means confined to a tiny, politically motivated bunch of man-hating feminists, but is a regular feature of mainstream culture.

The key venue for freewheeling discourse was the Monday morning executive team gathering, which started at 9 and went for three or four hours. The focus was always on the future: What should each product do next? What new things should be developed? Jobs used the meeting to enforce a sense of shared mission at Apple. This served to centralize control, which made the company seem as tightly integrated as a good Apple product, and prevented the struggles between divisions that plagued decentralized companies.

To do exciting, empowering research and leave it in academic journals and university libraries is like manufacturing unaffordable medicines for deadly diseases. We need to share our work in ways that people can assimilate, not in the private languages and forms of scholars...Those who are hungriest for what we dig up don't read scholarly journals and shouldn't have to. As historians we need to either be artists and community educations or find people who are and figure out how to collaborate with them. We can work with community groups to create original public history projects that really involved people. We can see to it that our work gets into at least the local popular culture through theater, murals, historical novels, posters, films, children's books, or a hundred other art forms. We can work with elementary and high school teachers to create curricula. Medicinal history is a form of healing and its purposes are conscious and overt.

Color blindness has become a powerful weapon against progress for people of color, but as a denial mindset, it doesn’t do white people any favors, either. A person who avoids the realities of racism doesn’t build the crucial muscles for navigating cross-cultural tensions or recovering with grace from missteps. That person is less likely to listen deeply to unexpected ideas expressed by people from other cultures or to do the research on her own to learn about her blind spots. When that person then faces the inevitable uncomfortable racial reality—an offended co-worker, a presentation about racial disparity at a PTA meeting, her inadvertent use of a stereotype—she’s caught flat-footed. Denial leaves people ill-prepared to function or thrive in a diverse society. It makes people less effective at collaborating with colleagues, coaching kids’ sports teams, advocating for their neighborhoods, even chatting with acquaintances at social events.

Writing is lonely, it’s an intimate talk with the dead, with the unborn, with the absent, with strangers, with the readers who may never come to be and who even if they read you will do so weeks, years, decades later. An essay, a book, is one statement in a long conversation you could call culture or history; you are answering something or questioning something that may have fallen silent long ago, and the response to your words may come long after you’re gone and never reach your ears, if anyone hears you in the first place.

What ideas have you contributed that have made a difference? How have you collaborated with others to build ideas?

The social cohesion necessary for a thriving, inclusive society is undermined, as racism fosters an "us versus them" mentality, hindering collaboration and collective progress.

Empathy and understanding are the keys to successful business. By putting people first, we can create a culture of respect and collaboration that drives positive change.

Empathy and understanding are the keys to a successful business. Putting people first can create a culture of respect and collaboration that drives positive change.

Let’s look at selling a car, because if any industry seems to offend in collaboration, it’s the car-selling industry.

Culture is the constant constraint that controls creativity, commitment, collaboration, and cohesion.

High Performance Teams create cultures of caring, connection, commitment, collaboration and clear consistent communication

reject the notion that science is by its nature secretive. Its culture and ethos are, and for very good reason, collective, collaborative, and communicative.

transformation is possible for anyone willing to learn and live good values, value people, and collaborate with others to create a positive values culture.

His goal was to be vigilant against " the bozo explosion" that leads to a company's being larded with second rate talent: For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that, A players. People said they wouldn't get along, they'd hate working with each other. But I realized that A players like to work with A players, they just didn't like working with C players. At Pixar, it was a whole company of A players. When I got back to Apple, that's what I decided to try to do. You need to have a collaborative hiring process. When we hire someone, even if they're going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers. My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn't nearly as good as he was, but that's what I aspired to do.

While group collaboration can certainly be a source of collective intelligence, it can also get you to jump off a cliff or drive too fast. And that’s probably why some form of continued connection to the adults and their adult perspectives still exists in traditional cultures, and even in our animal cousins. Without adults around, young adolescents can literally go wild.

Cities, Barber notes, “collect garbage and collect art rather than collecting votes or collecting allies. They put up buildings and run buses rather than putting up flags and running political parties. They secure the flow of water rather than the flow of arms. They foster education and culture in place of national defense and patriotism. They promote collaboration, not exceptionalism.”24

I began looking for these four: Smart. It doesn’t mean high IQ (although that’s great), it means disposed toward learning. If there’s a best practice anywhere, adopt it. We want to turn as much as possible into a routine so we can focus on the few things that require human intelligence and creativity. A good interview question for this is: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better.” Or you might ask a candidate: “What’s something that you’ve automated? What’s a process you’ve had to tear down at a company?” Humble. I don’t mean meek or unambitious, I mean being humble in the way that Steph Curry is humble. If you’re humble, people want you to succeed. If you’re selfish, they want you to fail. It also gives you the capacity for self-awareness, so you can actually learn and be smart. Humility is foundational like that. It is also essential for the kind of collaboration we want at Slack. Hardworking. It does not mean long hours. You can go home and take care of your family, but when you’re here, you’re disciplined, professional, and focused. You should also be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient, and gritty. Take this job as an opportunity to do the best work of your life. Collaborative. It’s not submissive, not deferential—in fact it’s kind of the opposite. In our culture, being collaborative means providing leadership from everywhere. I’m taking responsibility for the health of this meeting. If there’s a lack of trust, I’m going to address that. If the goals are unclear, I’m going to deal with that. We’re all interested in getting better and everyone should take responsibility for that. If everyone’s collaborative in that sense, the responsibility for team performance is shared. Collaborative people know that success is limited by the worst performers, so they are either going to elevate them or have a serious conversation. This one is easy to corroborate with references, and in an interview you can ask, “Tell me about a situation in your last company where something was substandard and you helped to fix it.

The global financial collapse exposed the longstanding myth that commercial exchange is a primary institution. There are no examples in history where people created commercial markets and exchange before creating a culture.

in the scramble to survive, founders often hire to solve immediate needs and simultaneously create long-term problems. This mistake is common enough that Bob Sutton wrote a book, The No-Asshole Rule, to help executives recognize the damage these hires cause to culture.5 No matter how many golden lectures a leader gives imploring people to “Be collaborative” or “Work as a team,” if the people hired have destructive habits, the lecture will lose.

A fast and innovative workplace is made up of what we call “stunning colleagues”—highly talented people, of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, who are exceptionally creative, accomplish significant amounts of important work, and collaborate effectively.

Listening and questioning are the basis for positive classroom interactions that can in turn shape meaningful collaboration, which can then build a culture of thinking. At the heart of these two practices lies a respect for and interest in students' thinking.

Assimilation of the feminine side is indeed a decisive problem in a man's individuation, but it remains his "private affair" since our patriarchal culture not only does not demand individuation but tends actually to reject it in the male. Assimilation of the archetypally masculine animus side of woman's nature, however, is a different matter. In modern times patriarchal culture, which no longer oppresses her and hinders her cultural participation, motivates woman to develop the opposite side of her psyche from childhood onwards. This means that women are forced into a certain degree of Self-estrangement for the sake of conscious development. Initially more is demanded of them than of men. From woman both femininity and masculinity are required, while from him only masculinity. We are speaking here of one of the complications but also one of the opportunities inherent in woman's situation for our culture that has led to there being such a high percentage of women involved in the development of modern psychology, actively through their collaboration and passively through their conflicts.

Leaders with high emotional intelligence create a culture of trust, respect, and collaboration, where everyone feels valued and heard. They build teams that are not just efficient, but also empowered and fulfilled. Emotional intelligence is not just a nice-to-have for leaders, it's a must-have.

You are an integral part of this precious opportunity to take part in the collaboration of a world. Despite the cacophonous cast of characters inside and out, your one true voice continuously rallies you towards self-actualization. The universe or ‘one song’ awaits your note in the collective chorus.

Still allergic to PowerPoints and formal presentations, he insisted that the people around the table hash out issues from various vantages and the perspectives of different departments. Because he believed that Apple's great advantage was its integration of the whole widget- from design to hardware to software to content-he wanted all departments at the company to work together in parallel. The phrases he used were "deep collaboration" and "concurrent engineering." Instead of a development process in which a product would be passed sequentially from engineering to design to manufacturing to marketing and distribution, these various departments collaborated simultaneously. " Our method was to develop integrated products, and that meant our process had to be integrated and collaborative," Jobs said. This approach also applied to key hires. He would have candidates meet the top leaders-Cook, Tevanian, Schiller, Rubinstein, Ive- rather than just the managers of the department where they wanted to work. " Then we all get together without the person and talk about whether they'll fit in," Jobs said.

But in the years to come, as Muslim prestige and learning sank, and Hindu confidence, wealth, education and power increased, Hindus and Muslims would grow gradually apart, as British policies of divide and rule found willing collaborators among the chauvinists of both faiths. The rip in the closely woven fabric of Delhi’s composite culture, opened in 1857, slowly widened into a great gash, and at Partition in 1947 finally broke in two. As the Indian Muslim elite emigrated en masse to Pakistan, the time would soon come when it would be almost impossible to imagine that Hindu sepoys could ever have rallied to the Red Fort and the standard of a Muslim emperor, joining with their Muslim brothers in an attempt to revive the Mughal Empire.

Improve performance through process improvements introduced with minimal resistance. Deliver with high quality. Deliver a predictable lead time by controlling the quantity of work-in-progress. Give team members a better life through an improved work/life balance. Provide slack in the system by balancing demand against throughput. Provide a simple prioritization mechanism that delays commitment and keeps options open. Provide a transparent scheme for seeing improvement opportunities, thereby enabling change to a more collaborative culture that encourages continuous improvement. Strive for a process that enables predictable results, business agility, good governance, and the development of what the Software Engineering Institute calls a high-maturity organization.

instructional conversation, the kind of talk that acts like a mental blender, mixing together new material with existing knowledge in a student’s schema. Using discussion protocols like World Café, Four on a Pencil, and Give One Get One help create variety in the ways students talk to each other in the classroom, offering a chance to both work collaboratively and have their individual voices heard.

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation. Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common—not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to sell them to us at the highest profit.

The transformation of a business-as-usual culture into one focused on innovation and driven by design involves activities, decisions, and attitudes. Workshops help expose people to design thinking as a new approach. Pilot projects help market the benefits of design thinking within the organization. Leadership focuses the program of change and gives people permission to learn and experiment. Assembling interdisciplinary teams ensures that the effort is broadly based. Dedicated spaces such as the P&G Innovation Gym provide a resource for longer-term thinking and ensure that the effort will be sustained. Measurement of impacts, both quantitative and qualitative, helps make the business case and ensures that resources are appropriately allocated. It may make sense to establish incentives for business units to collaborate in new ways so that younger talent sees innovation as a path to success rather than as a career risk.

Yet even in the best of cases, the need to be on call, to spend at least a certain amount of energy looking over one's shoulder, maintaining a false front, never looking too obviously engrossed, the inability to fully collaborate with others —all this lends itself much more to a culture of computer games, YouTube rants, memes, and Twitter controversies than to, say, the rock 'n' roll bands, drug poetry, and experimental theater created under the midcentury welfare state.

Squatters. The dispossessed. The water rats. Denizens of the deep, citizens of the shallows. And a lot of them were interested in trying something different, including which authorities they gave their consent to be governed by. Hegemony had drowned, so in the years after the flooding there was a proliferation of cooperatives, neighborhood associations, communes, squats, barter, alternative currencies, gift economies, solar usufruct, fishing village cultures, mondragons, unions, Davy’s locker freemasonries, anarchist blather, and submarine technoculture, including aeration and aquafarming. Also sky living in skyvillages that used the drowned cities as mooring towers and festival exchange points; containerclippers and townships as floating islands; art-not-work, the city regarded as a giant collaborative artwork; blue greens, amphibiguity, heterogeneticity, horizontalization, deoligarchification; also free open universities, free trade schools, and free art schools.

This state of affairs, which bodes ill for the future, causes Us great distress and anguish. But We cherish this hope: that distrust and selfishness among nations will eventually be overcome by a stronger desire for mutual collaboration and a heightened sense of solidarity. We hope that the developing nations will take advantage of their geographical proximity to one another to organize on a broader territorial base and to pool their efforts for the development of a given region. We hope that they will draw up joint programs, coordinate investment funds wisely, divide production quotas fairly, and exercise management over the marketing of these products. We also hope that multilateral and broad international associations will undertake the necessary work of organization to find ways of helping needy nations, so that these nations may escape from the fetters now binding them; so that they themselves may discover the road to cultural and social progress, while remaining faithful to the native genius of their land.

Understand and influence students’ and teachers’ perceptions, tolerance, knowledge, and empathy about diverse populations to help increase students’ successful integration into American educational settings; Help teachers develop and implement tools and strategies in the classroom that encourage effective communication and understanding of and between members of diverse cultural backgrounds; Build and maintain collaborations between students, families, teachers, and other community members to assist diverse populations.

Digital Native born then could read and write, email (which started around 1993) would have become an inescapable part of life. The important distinction is that Digital Natives know no other way of life other than the culture of Internet, laptop, and mobile. They can be freed from the constraints of local mores and hierarchical authority and, as autonomous citizens of the world, will personalize screen-based activities and services while collaborating with, and contributing to, global social networks and information sources.

Fandom is really fandoms, plural—an always diverse and contentious sphere. Mass media representations of fanfiction and fan culture present it at best as a “wacky world,” or more typically as a bastion of the physically, socially, and literarily inept. Academic accounts of fandom overcompensate, often presenting overly utopian pictures of sisterly collaboration and feminist critique. Utopias and dystopias, though, are not parallel but rather intersecting universes. This is surely one of the great lessons of Star Trek—and of its fandom.

The Romans, by that means, made pagans out of indigenous people. The moral syntax of the Roman word pagan means having the quality of village life and village mindedness. It means living at a distance from the seat of power and the arbiters of orthodox belief and observance, and living at the shadowy edge of a ploughed field. It designated undomesticated, unbroken bush dwellers, those for whom the light of culture of the eastern Mediterranean kind had not yet dawned. It is a powerful distinction to make, with powerful, enforceable criteria. The Romans didn’t invent pagan, but they did make pagans out of the country people they conquered. Though the word at this time meant something like “those on land unbroken,” the change in meaning to the modern European sense of pagan as “enemy of the true religion” tracks the arc from agricultural practice to systematic ethnic cleansing. Through a programme of shame and systematic desecration, they marginalized traditionalists, drove wedges of privilege between families, rewarded collaborators, confounded and demeaned the local languages, compromised indigenous lifeways. They made another kind of war on the indigenous aptitude for living alongside ancestors. Though certainly not the history many of us were taught to emulate or admire, it is there, stones in the sediment of the Europe that founded America. As the Romans went their civil, ruinous way, they made a point of learning from the newly conquered something of the traditional histories, alliances, and enmities of the area. They learned these enmities not to conclude them but to collude with them and deepen them, to further them, prey upon them, employ them, turning the conquered against the not-yet conquered, holding themselves out as the new, powerful ally who would right ancestral wrongs, securing and obliging and forcing the newly conquered to raise the foreign conqueror to the status of a mysteriously benevolent foreign God. Sleeping with the enemy began in earnest. This is a lesson and example relied upon heavily by Hernando Cortes as he made his ruinous way across Mexico early in the sixteenth century, and it made Cortes a dark legend in the old and new worlds.

Tony Williams: You’ve often mentioned that Tales of Hoffmann (1951) has been a major influence on you. George Romero: It was the first film I got completely involved with. An aunt and uncle took me to see it in downtown Manhattan when it first played. And that was an event for me since I was about eleven at the time. The imagery just blew me away completely. I wanted to go and see a Tarzan movie but my aunt and uncle said, “No! Come and see a bit of culture here.” So I thought I was missing out. But I really fell in love with the film. There used to be a television show in New York called Million Dollar Movie. They would show the same film twice a day on weekdays, three times on Saturday, and three-to-four times on Sunday. Tales of Hoffmann appeared on it one week. I missed the first couple of days because I wasn’t aware that it was on. But the moment I found it was on, I watched virtually every telecast. This was before the days of video so, naturally, I couldn’t tape it. Those were the days you had to rent 16mm prints of any film. Most cities of any size had rental services and you could rent a surprising number of films. So once I started to look at Tales of Hoffmann I realized how much stuff Michael Powell did in the camera. Powell was so innovative in his technique. But it was also transparent so I could see how he achieved certain effects such as his use of an overprint in the scene of the ballet dancer on the lily ponds. I was beginning to understand how adept a director can be. But, aside from that, the imagery was superb. Robert Helpmann is the greatest Dracula that ever was. Those eyes were compelling. I was impressed by the way Powell shot Helpmann sweeping around in his cape and craning down over the balcony in the tavern. I felt the film was so unique compared to most of the things we were seeing in American cinema such as the westerns and other dreadful stuff I used to watch. Tales of Hoffmann just took me into another world in terms of its innovative cinematic technique. So it really got me going. Tony Williams: A really beautiful print exists on laserdisc with commentary by Martin Scorsese and others. George Romero: I was invited to collaborate on the commentary by Marty. Pat Buba (Tony’s brother) knew Thelma Schoonmaker and I got to meet Powell in later years. We had a wonderful dinner with him one evening. What an amazing guy! Eventually I got to see more of his movies that I’d never seen before such as I Know Where I’m Going and A Canterbury Tale. Anyway, I couldn’t do the commentary on Tales of Hoffmann with Marty. But, back in the old days in New York, Marty and I were the only two people who would rent a 16mm copy of the film. Every time I found it was out I knew that he had it and each time he wanted it he knew who had it! So that made us buddies.

The late Jonathan Rowe, one of the visionaries of the new networked Commons, best explained the idea of what a Commons is all about. He wrote: To say “the commons” is to evoke a puzzled pause. . . . Yet the commons is more basic than both government and market. It is the vast realm that is the shared heritage of all of us that we typically use without toll or price. The atmosphere and oceans, languages and cultures, the stores of human knowledge and wisdom, the informal support systems of community, the peace and quiet that we crave, the genetic building blocks of life—these are all aspects of the commons.41

was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "The Bard"). His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592 he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of the playing company the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1590 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest examples in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime, and in 1623 two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are consistently performed and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world. Source: Wikipedia

Spacewar highlighted three aspects of the hacker culture that became themes of the digital age. First, it was created collaboratively. “We were able to build it together, working as a team, which is how we liked to do things,” Russell said. Second, it was free and open-source software. “People asked for copies of the source code, and of course we gave them out.” Of course—that was in a time and place when software yearned to be free. Third, it was based on the belief that computers should be personal and interactive. “It allowed us to get our hands on a computer and make it respond to us in real time,” said Russell.10

To deconstruct a concept is to analyze it in a way which reveals its construction—both in the temporal sense of its birth and development over time and in a certain cultural and political matrix, and in the sense of its own present structure, its meaning, and its relation to other concepts. One of the most impressive aspects of such an analysis is the revelation of the ‘contingency’ of the concept, i.e. the fact that it is only the accidental collaboration of various historical events and circumstances that brought that concept into being, and the fact that there could be a world of sense without that concept in it (emphasis added).26 In

Power itself is founded largely on disgust. The whole of advertising, the whole of political discourse, is a public insult to the intelligence, to reason - but an insult in which we collaborate, abjectly subscribing to a silent interaction. The day of hidden persuasion is over: those who govern us now resort unapologetically to arm-twisting pure and simple. The prototype here was a banker got up like a vampire, saying, 'I am after you for your money' . A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government's blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity. In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape. The same goes for pornographic and food advertising, which are also powered by shamelessness and lust, by a strategic logic of violation and anxiety. Nowadays you can seduce a woman with the words, 'I am interested in your cunt' . The same kind of crassness has triumphed in the realm of art, whose mounds of trivia may be reduced to a single pronouncement of the type, 'What we want from you is stupidity and bad taste' . And the fact is that we do succumb to this mass extortion, with its subtle infusion of guilt. It is true in a sense that nothing really disgusts us any more. In our eclectic culture, which embraces the debris of all others in a promiscuous confusion, nothing is unacceptable. But for this very reason disgust is nevertheless on the increase - the desire to spew out this promiscuity, this indifference to everything no matter how bad, this viscous adherence of opposites. To the extent that this happens, what is on the increase is disgust over the lack of disgust. An allergic temptation to reject everything en bloc: to refuse all the gentle brainwashing, the soft-sold overfeeding, the tolerance, the pressure to embrace synergy and consensus.

I've always believed that culture is defined and created from the top down, but it comes to life from the bottom up. This meant that I had to build our culture by working with the leadership group (i.e., the owner, general manager, and executives), the coaching staff, and the football team. To strengthen the culture among the leadership group, it was important to reiterate to the owner, team president, and general manager the shared beliefs, values, and expectations that we had discussed in depth when I was interviewing for the head coaching position. It was important to have collaborative conversations on a regular basis to discuss the changes we were making and why we were making them.

In Lisa’s lifetime, a galaxy of artistic stars—Michelangelo, Botticelli, Raphael, Perugino, Filippino Lippi—rivaled the heavens with their brilliance. None outshone the incandescent genius of Leonardo, who emerges from the fog of history as more of a cultural force than a mere human being. ... During Leonardo’s and Lisa’s lifetimes, largerthan-legend characters strutted across the Florentine stage: Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose magnificence rubbed off on everything he touched. The charismatic friar Savonarola, who inflamed souls before meeting his own fiery death. Ruthless Cesare Borgia, who hired Leonardo as his military engineer. Niccolò Machiavelli, who collaborated with the artist on an audacious scheme to change the course of the Arno River.

A beautiful example of a long-term intention was presented by A. T. Ariyaratane, a Buddhist elder, who is considered to be the Gandhi of Sri Lanka. For seventeen years there had been a terrible civil war in Sri Lanka. At one point, the Norwegians were able to broker peace, and once the peace treaty was in effect, Ariyaratane called the followers of his Sarvodaya movement together. Sarvodaya combines Buddhist principles of right livelihood, right action, right understanding, and compassion and has organized citizens in one-third of that nation’s villages to dig wells, build schools, meditate, and collaborate as a form of spiritual practice. Over 650,000 people came to the gathering to hear how he envisioned the future of Sri Lanka. At this gathering he proposed a five-hundred-year peace plan, saying, “The Buddha teaches we must understand causes and conditions. It’s taken us five hundred years to create the suffering that we are in now.” Ari described the effects of four hundred years of colonialism, of five hundred years of struggle between Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists, and of several centuries of economic disparity. He went on, “It will take us five hundred years to change these conditions.” Ariyaratane then offered solutions, proposing a plan to heal the country. The plan begins with five years of cease-fire and ten years of rebuilding roads and schools. Then it goes on for twenty-five years of programs to learn one another’s languages and cultures, and fifty years of work to right economic injustice, and to bring the islanders back together as a whole. And every hundred years there will be a grand council of elders to take stock on how the plan is going. This is a sacred intention, the long-term vision of an elder. In the same way, if we envision the fulfillment of wisdom and compassion in the United States, it becomes clear that the richest nation on earth must provide health care for its children; that the most productive nation on earth must find ways to combine trade with justice; that a creative society must find ways to grow and to protect the environment and plan sustainable development for generations ahead. A nation founded on democracy must bring enfranchisement to all citizens at home and then offer the same spirit of international cooperation and respect globally. We are all in this together.

10. What books would you recommend to an aspiring entrepreneur? Some quick favorites: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk! by Al Ries and Jack Trout The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King by Rich Cohen Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism by Matt Mason Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years by Paul B. Carroll and Chunka Mui Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices by Christopher Locke

When we risk being open, vulnerable and honest about our struggles and our joys, the fullness of who we are emerges and connects us to one another at a profound, authentic level. Sharing our stories allows us to take the risk of coming out from behind masks that separate us from one another and from ourselves. Experience has taught me that the pattern of hiding behind masks and disconnecting from authentically engaging in life is at the root of some of our greatest struggles in the times in which we live. We are experiencing an epidemic of loneliness rooted in the destructive powers of judgment, shame, blame and guilt. We are experiencing a culture that is numb to some of the deepest travesties of human history as we sooth ourselves with over-consumption of things, addictive substances and repeated mindless patterns. Too often, we are cut off from the roots of meaning at the core of our being as we strive to survive by fulfilling shallow expectations, rather than allowing ourselves to be nourished by the rich of wisdom and the vision of collaboration that is deep within us. Sharing our stories connects us at the deep level of our profound longing for community, creativity, compassion and acceptance.

Literacy was to be developed in a socially constructed environment so that new ideas and information learned from texts could be shared and spread among one another and those in the community. Members of all ages and experiences with reading would assemble to teach one another. Although individual literacy was valued, these societies were highly collaborative and prompted social responsibility to share knowledge gained from acts of literacy rather than keep education to one’s self. This collaboration for literacy learning built the foundation of the “chain letter of instruction” model, which embodied a shared accountability for knowledge (Fisher, 2004). If one person, for example, acquired knowledge, it was then his or her responsibility to pass it on to others to create a flame-like effect. To keep knowledge to one’s self was seen as a selfish act, and each person therefore was responsible to elevate others through education in the immediate and larger community. This ideal of collectivism is in direct conflict with schools today, as schools are largely grounded in competition and individualism. This is perhaps one major reason why students of color often do not reach their full potential in schools—because schools are in disharmony with their histories and identities.

Eurêka. Poe attachait une grande importance à cette œuvre, à la fois cosmogonie et poème, qui commence par un discours de la méthode et se termine par une métaphysique. L’influence des idées de Poe, qui se répandent en Europe à partir de 1845, est si considérable, et se fait sentir avec une telle intensité sur certains écrivains (tels que Baudelaire ou Dostoïevski) que l’on peut dire qu’il donne un sens nouveau à la littérature. Poe joignait en lui des éléments de culture assez hétérogènes ; d’une part, élève de l’École polytechnique de Baltimore (où passa aussi Whistler), il avait une formation scientifique ; de l’autre, ses lectures l’avaient mis en contact avec le romantisme allemand des Lumières, et avec tout le XVIIIe siècle français, représenté souvent par des ouvrages oubliés aujourd’hui, tels que conteurs, poètes mineurs, etc. Ne pas négliger chez Poe l’élément cabaliste (de même que chez Goethe), la magie, telle qu’elle devait hanter, en France, l’esprit d’un Nerval, en Allemagne, Hoffmann, et bien d’autres. Enfin, l’influence de la poésie anglaise (Milton, Shelley, etc.). Poe avait lu tout jeune les deux ouvrages les plus répandus de Laplace qui l’avaient beaucoup frappé. Le calcul des probabilités intervient constamment chez lui. Dans Eurêka, il développe l’idée de la nébuleuse (de Kant), que reprendra plus tard Henri Poincaré. Poe introduit dans la littérature l’esprit d’analyse. À ce propos, il convient de répéter que pensée réfléchie et pensée intuitive peuvent et doivent coexister et se coordonner. Le travail littéraire pouvant se décomposer en plusieurs « temps », on doit faire collaborer ces deux états de l’esprit, l’état de veille où la précision, la netteté sont portées à leur point le plus haut, et une autre phase, plus confuse, où peuvent naître spontanément des éléments mélodiques ou poétiques. Du reste, quand un poème est long (cf., dans « La Genèse d’un poème », le passage ayant trait à la « dimension »), ce « bonheur de l’instant » ne saura se soutenir pendant toute sa durée. Il faut donc toujours aller d’une forme de création à l’autre, et elles ne s’opposent pas.

Loth as one is to agree with CP Snow about almost anything, there are two cultures; and this is rather a problem. (Looking at who pass for public men in these days, one suspects there are now three cultures, in fact, as the professional politician appears to possess neither humane learning nor scientific training. They couldn’t possibly commit the manifold and manifest sins against logic that are their stock in trade, were they possessed of either quality.) … Bereft of a liberal education – ‘liberal’ in the true sense: befitting free men and training men to freedom – our Ever So Eminent Scientists nowadays are most of ’em simply technicians. Very skilled ones, commonly, yet technicians nonetheless. And technicians do get things wrong sometimes: a point that need hardly be laboured in the centenary year of the loss of RMS Titanic. Worse far is what the century of totalitarianism just past makes evident: technicians are fatefully and fatally easily led to totalitarian mindsets and totalitarian collaboration. … Aristotle was only the first of many to observe that men do not become dictators to keep warm: that there is a level at which power, influence, is interchangeable with money. Have enough of the one and you don’t want the other; indeed, you will find that you have the other. And of course, in a world of Eminent Scientists who are mere Technicians at heart, pig-ignorant of liberal (in the Classical sense) ideas, ideals, and even instincts, there is exerted upon them a forceful temptation towards totalitarianism – for the good of the rest of us, poor benighted, unwashed laymen as we are. The fact is that, just as original sin, as GKC noted, is the one Christian doctrine that can be confirmed as true by looking at any newspaper, the shading of one’s conclusions to fit one’s pay-packet, grants, politics, and peer pressure is precisely what anyone familiar with public choice economics should expect. And, as [James] Delingpole exhaustively demonstrates, is precisely what has occurred in the ‘Green’ movement and its scientific – or scientistic – auxiliary. They are watermelons: Green without and Red within. (A similar point was made of the SA by Willi Münzenberg, who referred to that shower as beefsteaks, Red within and Brown without.)

Company Team Buildingis a tool that can help inside inspiring a team for that satisfaction associated with organizational objectives. Today?azines multi-cultural society calls for working in a harmonious relationship with assorted personas, particularly in global as well as multi-location companies. Business team building events strategies is a way by which team members tend to be met towards the requirements of the firm. They help achieve objectives together instead of working on their particular. Which are the benefits of company team building events? Team building events methods enhance conversation among co-workers. The huge benefits include improved upon morality as well as management skills, capacity to handle difficulties, and much better understanding of work environment. Additional positive aspects would be the improvements inside conversation, concentration, decision making, party problem-solving, and also reducing stress. What are the usual signs that reveal the need for team building? The common signs consist of discord or even hostility between people, elevated competitors organizations between staff, lack of function involvement, poor decision making abilities, lowered efficiency, as well as poor quality associated with customer care. Describe different methods of business team development? Company team development experts as well as person programs on ?working collaboratively? can supply different ways of business team building. An important method of business team building is actually enjoyment routines that want communication between the members. The favored activities are fly-fishing, sailing regattas, highway rallies, snow boarding, interactive workshops, polls, puzzle game titles, and so forth. Each one of these routines would help workers be competitive and hone their own side considering abilities. Just what services are offered by the team building events trainers? The majority of the coaches offer you enjoyable functions, coming from accommodation to be able to dishes and much more. The actual packages include holiday packages, rope courses, on-going business office video games, and also ice-breakers. Coaching fees would depend on location, number of downline, classes, and sophistication periods. Special discounts are available for long-term deals of course, if the quantity of associates will be higher. Name some well-known corporate team development event providers within the U.Utes. Several well-liked companies are Accel-Team, Encounter Based Studying Inc, Performance Supervision Organization, Team development Productions, The education Haven Incorporated, Enterprise Upwards, Group Contractors In addition, and Team development USA.If you want to find out more details, make sure you Clicking Here

Over the past quarter century, the leaders of both the Democratic and the Republican political parties have perfected a remarkable system for remaining in power while serving the new economic oligarchy. Both parties take in huge amounts of money, in many forms — campaign contributions, lobbying, revolving-door hiring, favours, and special access of various kinds. Politicians in both parties enrich themselves and betray the interests of the nation, including most of the people who vote for them. Yet both parties are still able to mobilize support because they skilfully exploit America’s cultural polarization. Republicans warn social conservatives about the dangers of secularism, taxes, abortion, welfare, gay marriage, gun control, and liberals. Democrats warn social liberals about the dangers of guns, pollution, global warming, making abortion illegal, and conservatives. Both parties make a public show of how bitter their conflicts are, and how dangerous it would be for the other party to achieve power, while both prostitute themselves to the financial sector, powerful industries, and the wealthy. Thus, the very intensity of the two parties’ differences on “values” issues enables them to collaborate when it comes to money.

Brian Chesky sends to all Airbnb employees is a powerful one. “You have to continue to repeat things” Brian told our class at Stanford. “Culture is about repeating, over and over again, the things that really matter for your company.” Airbnb reinforces these verbal messages with visual impact as well. Brian hired an artist from Pixar to create a storyboard of the entire experience of an Airbnb guest, from start to finish, emphasizing the customer-centered design thinking that is a hallmark of its culture. Even Airbnb conference rooms tell a story; each one is a replica of a room that’s available for rent on the service. Every time Airbnb team members hold a meeting in one of those rooms, they are reminded of how guests feel when they stay there. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously bans PowerPoint decks and insists on written memos, which are read in silence at the beginning of each meeting. This memo policy is one of the ways that Amazon encourages a culture of truth telling. Memos have to be specific and comprehensive, and those who read the memos have to respond in kind rather than simply sit through some broad bullet points on a PowerPoint deck and nod vague agreement. Bezos believes that memos encourage smarter questions and deeper thinking. Plus, because they’re self-contained (rather than requiring a person to present a deck), they are more easily distributed and consumed by a wider population within Amazon. The late Steve Jobs used architecture as a core part of his deliberate communications strategy at Pixar. He designed Pixar headquarters so that the front doors, main stairs, main theater, and screening rooms all led to the atrium, which contained the café and mailboxes, ensuring that employees from all departments and specialties would see people from other groups on a regular basis, thus reinforcing Pixar’s collaborative, inclusive culture.

Another way in which values can be expressed is in how different teams are treated throughout the organization. As also mentioned in Part III, it is common in startups for engineering teams, especially web and mobile development ones, to be valued more than other, nonengineering teams. While this usually is not explicitly stated, it becomes apparent through behaviors such as allowing more flexible schedules or remote opportunities for engineers; giving them a higher budget for swag, training, and travel; and giving them more recognition for their accomplishments.

Another harmful myth is “I’m not technical.” In an industry that increasingly glorifies engineers, people in disciplines outside of engineering can stop believing in the value of their own skills and discount their contributions in the workplace. Engineers should not be put on pedestals at the expense of other employees, as it takes more than just engineering skills to grow and maintain a successful business.

Competing in a 100-pushup challenge in the office This is another example of an activity that can be a way to facilitate group bonding but isn’t necessarily inclusive of people with different levels of physical ability. Especially in startups with a younger median age, team activities can tend to skew toward those enjoyed by a very specific subset of the population. Things like fantasy sports teams; foosball, ping-pong, or pool tables; and fitness challenges can give off a “tech bro” kind of vibe. This isn’t to say that they shouldn’t be allowed, and it might not be possible to find an activity that every single person will love, but it’s important to pay attention to the type and variety of activities and rituals and who they might be unintentionally favoring or excluding.

a single manuscript, across a related family of manuscripts, and across members of different manuscript families. It also had to be transferable to interactions between canonical texts and chronicle manuscripts. At the same time, the model had to be specific enough to provide a solid basis of comparison in all these areas. A long search through literary theory, narratology, and cybertheory provided some valuable insights but no completely adequate models. Cybertheory, working as it does with multivocal, nonlinear, and collaborative texts, has much to offer manuscript study, but it has not yet formed a coherent vocabulary for its own sphere. Recombinant genetics, on the other hand, has long had a model to discuss the lateral production of related but unique genomes. Just as the dispersive replication of DNA strands creates a set of replicants, each bearing

It is known that people who let go of negativity, calm themselves, listen carefully, and pay attention to their emotional, physical and spiritual health are more likely to have flashes of inspiration.

Cultural competence is the ability to understand, appreciate, and interact with people from cultures or belief systems different from one's own; it is the ability to navigate cross-cultural differences in order to do something—be that teach students, collaborate with colleagues, or socialize with friends.

The practice that molded me at Intel and saved me at Sun—that still inspires me today—is called OKRs. Short for Objectives and Key Results. It is a collaborative goal-setting protocol for companies, teams, and individuals. Now, OKRs are not a silver bullet. They cannot substitute for sound judgment, strong leadership, or a creative workplace culture. But if those fundamentals are in place, OKRs can guide you to the mountaintop.

Standardization of tools and practices between teams makes it easier for new people to get up to speed regardless of what team they are joining, but every team also has the flexibility to customize as they see fit.

Every day, soldiers must make quick decisions about other people, whether they are embedded in a unit during wartime, on a peacekeeping mission, negotiating in a cross-cultural setting, or collaborating with unit members on a stateside base. These quick judgments are extremely difficult to negotiate, especially in such high-stakes, high-arousal settings where errors are often made at the expense of someone’s life.48

The very strongest linkage develops when a leader with a collaborative mind-set spontaneously recognizes the connections between his or her group and the rest of the organization and acts to bring people together to tighten these bonds. In many ways the organization’s cultural values determine how much linking happens naturally and informally. An enterprise with a network of leaders who habitually reach out to each other to coordinate and collaborate may not need many formal linking mechanisms.

There’s a strong impulse in our culture to run away from these little corners. We’re told that society’s winners will be the thinkers who network, collaborate, create, and strategize in concert with others. Our kids are taught to study in groups, to execute projects as teams. Our workplaces have been stripped of walls so that the organization functions as a unit. The big tech companies also propel us to join the crowd—they provide us with the trending topics and their algorithms suggest that we read the same articles, tweets, and posts as the rest of the world. There’s no doubting the creative power of conversation, the intellectual potential of humbly learning from our peers, the necessity of groups working together to solve problems. Yet none of this should replace contemplation, moments of isolation, where the mind can follow its own course to its own conclusions. We read in our little corners, our beds and tubs and dens, because we have a sense that these are the places where we can think best. I have spent my life searching for an alternative. I will read in the café and on the subway, making a diligent, wholehearted effort to focus the mind. But it never entirely works. My mind can’t shake its awareness of the humans in the room.

Innovation (and enjoyment) flourishes when teachers collaborate to learn and practice new strategies. Isolation is often the enemy of innovation.

*THE COMMONS, which are creative - so unleash their potential* The commons are shareable resources of society or nature that people choose to use and govern through self-organising, instead of relying on the state or market for doing so. Think of how a village community might manage its only freshwater well and its nearby forest, or how Internet users worldwide collaboratively curate Wikipedia. Natural commons have traditionally emerged in communities seeking to steward Earth's 'common pool' resources, such as grazing land, fisheries, watersheds and forests. Cultural commons serve to keep alive a community's language, heritage and rituals, myths and music, traditional knowledge and practice. And the fast-growing digital commons are stewarded collaboratively online, co-creating open-source software, social networks, information and knowledge. ...In the 1970s, the little-known political scientist Elinor Ostrom started seeking out real-life examples of natural commons to find out what made them work - and she went on to win a Nobel-Memorial prize for what she discovered. Rather than being left 'open access', those successful commons were governed by clearly defined communities with collectively agreed rules and punitive sanctions for those who broke them...she realised, the commons can turn out to be a triumph, outperforming both state and market in sustainably stewarding and equitably harvesting Earth's resources... The triumph of the commons is certainly evident in the digital commons, which are fast turning into one of the most dynamic areas of the global economy. (p.82-3)

But for this, we need a new development model. We have designed an economic system that sees no value in any human or natural resource unless it is exploited. A river is unproductive until its catchment is appropriated by some industry or its waters are captured by a dam. An open field and its natural bounty are useless until they are fenced. A community of people have no value unless their life is commercialised, their needs are turned into consumer goods, and their aspirations are driven by competition. In this approach, development equals manipulation. By contrast, we need to understand development as something totally different: development is care. It is through a caring relationship with our natural wealth that we can create value, not through its destruction. It is thanks to a cooperative human-to-human interaction that we can achieve the ultimate objective of development, that is, wellbeing. In this new economy, people will be productive by performing activities that enhance the quality of life of their peers and the natural ecosystems in which they live. If not for moral reasons, they should do so for genuine self-interest: there is nothing more rewarding than creating wellbeing for oneself and society. This is the real utility, the real consumer surplus, not the shortsighted and self-defeating behaviour promoted by the growth ideology. The wellbeing economy is a vision for all countries. There are cultural traces of such a vision in the southern African notion of ‘ubuntu’, which literally means ‘I am because you are’, reminding us that there is no prosperity in isolation and that everything is connected. In Indonesia we find the notion of ‘gotong royong’, a conception of development founded on collaboration and consensus, or the vision of ‘sufficiency economy’ in Thailand, Bhutan and most of Buddhist Asia, which indicates the need for balance, like the Swedish term ‘lagom’, which means ‘just the right amount’. Native Alaskans refer to ‘Nuka’ as the interconnectedness of humans to their ecosystems, while in South America, there has been much debate about the concept of ‘buen vivir’, that is, living well in harmony with others and with nature.

Nevertheless, these relationships are core to your job. They determine whether you can fulfill your three responsibilities as a manager: 1) to create a culture of guidance (praise and criticism) that will keep everyone moving in the right direction; 2) to understand what motivates each person on your team well enough to avoid burnout or boredom and keep the team cohesive; and 3) to drive results collaboratively.

A strong product culture means that the team understands the importance of continuous and rapid testing and learning. They understand that they need to make mistakes in order to learn, but they need to make them quickly and mitigate the risks. They understand the need for continuous innovation. They know that great products are the result of true collaboration. They respect and value their designers and engineers. They understand the power of a motivated product team. A strong VP product will understand the importance of a strong product culture, be able to give real examples of her own experiences with product culture, and have concrete plans for instilling this culture in your company.

Smart decisions reflect diverse opinions across disciplines, experiences, and outcomes. In today's collaborative mindset culture, teams strive to optimize each of these inputs. We listen to everyone's input and respond to it. We seek to bring everyone along. Everyone is treated as having an equal voice in the decision. Agility is compromised when people believe they need to make decisions together. In the end, the process is exhausting, and the decision is vanilla.

Identifying Cultural Norms The following domains are areas in which cultural norms may vary significantly from company to company. Transitioning leaders should use this checklist to help them figure out how things really work in the organizations they’re joining. Influence. How do people get support for critical initiatives? Is it more important to have the support of a patron within the senior team, or affirmation from your peers and direct reports that your idea is a good one? Meetings. Are meetings filled with dialogue on hard issues, or are they simply forums for publicly ratifying agreements that have been reached in private? Execution. When it comes time to get things done, which matters more—a deep understanding of processes or knowing the right people? Conflict. Can people talk openly about difficult issues without fear of retribution? Or do they avoid conflict—or, even worse, push it to lower levels, where it can wreak havoc? Recognition. Does the company promote stars, rewarding those who visibly and vocally drive business initiatives? Or does it encourage team players, rewarding those who lead authoritatively but quietly and collaboratively? Ends versus means. Are there any restrictions on how you achieve results? Does the organization have a well-defined, well-communicated set of values that is reinforced through positive and negative incentives?

The 5C structure is generic—useful to product, marketing, and more—whereas the way we presented the sections in this chapter is very focused on product management. It’s good to know what the “C”s stand for because you’ll likely hear 5C mentioned. Plus if you need to do a situational analysis on your feet in a meeting or interview, it’s relatively easy to remember. Company: This refers to the company’s experience, technology, culture, goals, and more. It’s similar to the material we covered in the “Why Does the Company Exist?,” “How Do We Know If Our Product’s Good?,” and “What Else Has Been, Is Being, and Will Be Built?” sections. Customers: Who are the people buying this product? What are the market segments? How big are they? What are people’s goals with buying this product? How do they make buying decisions? Where do they buy this type or product? This is similar to what we covered in the “Customers and Personas” and “Use Cases” sections. Collaborators: Who are the external people who make the product possible, including distributors, suppliers, logistical operators, groundwork support personnel, and so on? Competitors: Who is competing for your customers’ money? This includes actual and potential competitors. You should look at how they position their product, the market size they address, their strengths and weaknesses, and more. Climate: These are the macro-environmental factors, like cultural, regulatory, or technological trends and innovations.

When you define your culture by attributes (humility, curiosity, collaboration…), you create a lens for determining cultural fit beyond someone “feeling” right. You allow candidates who don’t look or sound like you to identify with your culture and feel a sense of belonging; and you help your hiring managers to identify those candidates with a lens that circumvents their implicit bias. And that actively prevents a monoculture from taking hold.

The Ticklish Subject shows how today, in spite of the decline of the paternal metaphor and the inefficacy of ethical-political principles, global capitalist relations of production actually structure an ever more prohibitive and homogenized social reality: The true horror lies not in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital but, rather, in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course; that there is in fact no particular Secret Agent animating it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today’s world. (Ticklish, p. 218) Multiculturalism – as well as postmodern efforts to reduce truth to “narratives” or “solidarity of belief” – simply further the interests of global capital. Žižek notes wryly that liberal pseudo-leftists really know all of this, but the problem is that they want to maintain their relatively comfortable lifestyles (bought at the expense of suffering in the Third World), and meanwhile to maintain the pose of revolutionary “beautiful souls.” Postmodern “post-politics” replaces the recognition of global ideological divisions with an emphasis on the collaboration of enlightened experts, technocrats, and specialists who negotiate to reach compromises. Such pragmatic “administration of social matters” accepts in advance the very global capitalist framework that determines the profitability of the compromise (Ticklish, p. 199). This suspension of the space for authentic politics leads to what Žižek calls “postmodern racism,” which ignores the universal rights of the political subject, proliferates divisions along cultural lines, and prevents the working class from politicizing its predicament. Even more seriously, according to Žižek, post-politics no longer merely represses the political, but forecloses it. Thus instead of violence as the neurotic “return of the repressed,” we see signs of a new kind of irrational and excessive violence. This new manifestation of violence results from the (psychotic) foreclosure of the Name of the Father that leads to a “return in the Real.” This violence is thus akin to the psychotic passage a l’acte: “a cruelty whose manifestations range from ‘fundamentalist’ racist and/or religious slaughter to the ‘senseless’ outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reason” (Ticklish, p. 198). Where then, is the power to combat such foreclosure? The Ticklish Subject shows that the subversive power of subjectivity arises only when the subject annuls himself as subject: the acknowledgment of the integral division or gap in subjectivity allows the move from subjection to subjective destitution. Insofar as the subject concedes to the inherent failure of symbolic practices, he no longer presupposes himself as a unified subject. He acknowledges the nonexistence of the symbolic big Other and the monstrosity of the Real. Such acceptance involves the full assertion – rather than the effacement – of the gap between the Real and its symbolization. In contrast to the artificial object character of the imaginary capitalist ego, The Ticklish Subject discloses the “empty place” of the subject as a purely structural function, and shows that this functioning emerges only as the withdrawal from one’s substantial identity, as the disintegration of the “self” that is situated and defined within a communal universe of meaning.

Those who were exceptionally creative, did great work, and collaborated well with others went immediately into the “keepers” pile.

In 2002, with a new understanding of what makes a great place to work, Patty and I made a commitment. Our number one goal, moving forward, would be to do everything we could to retain the post-layoff talent density and all the great things that came with it. We would hire the very best employees and pay at the top of the market. We would coach our managers to have the courage and discipline to get rid of any employees who were displaying undesirable behaviors or weren’t performing at exemplary levels. I became laser-focused on making sure Netflix was staffed, from the receptionist to the top executive team, with the highest-performing, most collaborative employees on the market.

The modern urban-industrial society is based on a series of radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth. At each of these points of disconnection the collaboration of corporation, government, and expert sets up a profit-making enterprise that results in the further dismemberment and impoverishment of the Creation. Together, these disconnections add up to a condition of critical ill health, which we suffer in common -- not just with each other, but with all other creatures. Our economy is based upon this disease. Its aim is to separate us as far as possible from the sources of life (material, social, and spiritual), to put these sources under the control of corporations and specialized professionals, and to see them to us at the highest profit. It fragments the Creation and sets the fragments into conflict with one another. For the relief of the suffering that comes of this fragmentation and conflict, our economy proposes, not health, but vast "cures" that further centralize power and increase profits... Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health -- and create profitable diseases and dependencies -- by failing to see the direction connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight. And such a solution, unlike the typical industrial solution, does not cause new problems.

HR is not just about policies and processes; it is about unlocking the potential within individuals and fostering a culture of growth and collaboration.

On a high-performing team, collaboration and trust work well because all the members are exceptionally skilled both at what they do and at working well with others. For an individual to be deemed excellent she can’t just be amazing at the game; she has to be selfless and put the team before her own ego. She has to know when to pass the ball, how to help her teammates thrive, and recognize that the only way to win is for the team to win together. This is exactly the type of culture we were going for at Netflix.

Untainted by overbearing nationalistic pride of any trace of racial discrimination, experts should learn how to work in collaboration with everyone else. They must realize technical knowledge does not give them superiority in every sphere of life. Their own culture does contain certain universal human elements, but it cannot be regarded as the only culture, nor can it regard other cultures with a haughty disdain.

Grind culture is a collaboration between white supremacy and capitalism. It views our divine bodies as machines. Our worth is not connected to how much we produce. Another way is possible.

Life would be more straightforward if we knew what we needed to find out, if we were told at birth exactly what we need to know to be happy. But in a complex world, it’s impossible to know what might be useful in the future. It’s important, therefore, to spread our cognitive bets. Curious people take risks, try things out, allow themselves to become productively distracted. They know that something they learn by chance today may well come in useful tomorrow or spark a new way of thinking about an entirely different problem. The more unpredictable the environment, the more important a seemingly unnecessary breadth and depth of knowledge become. Humans have always had to deal with complexity; felling a woolly mammoth is not simple. But now that we live in larger, more varied, faster-changing societies than ever before, curiosity is more important—and more rewarding—than it has ever been. This applies to who we need to know, as well as what. Another striking thing about Leonardo’s list is how many house visits he will have to make. His curiosity makes him highly sociable. Montaigne wrote of how travel to different regions and countries allows us to “rub and polish our brains” against others, and Leonardo seems keen to polish his brain against as many others as possible. Out of the fifteen tasks in the complete list, at least eight involve consultations with other people, and two involve other people’s books. It is easy to imagine Leonardo eagerly approaching each expert, intent on drawing out their knowledge, beginning each conversation with “Dimmi. . . .” People who are deeply curious are more likely to be good at collaboration. They seek out new acquaintances and allies in the process of building their stock of cultural knowledge. In the next chapter we’ll look more closely at the curiosity of babies and children and at why some of them are more likely than others to grow into adults who share Leonardo’s passionate curiosity. * Perceptual curiosity, which diversive curiosity encompasses, refers specifically to the seeking out of physical experience—it is what drives people up mountains and down rivers, just to see what’s there. * Of course, one obvious way to reduce the danger of firearms is to restrict their availability, but that debate is beyond the scope of this book. I use guns here simply as an extreme example of the power of diversive curiosity.