Construction Team Quotes

If we don’t trust one another, then we aren’t going to engage in open, constructive, ideological conflict.

We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful.

Moreover, Lincoln possessed an uncanny understanding of his shifting moods, a profound self-awareness that enabled him to find constructive ways to alleviate sadness and stress. Indeed, when he is compared with his colleagues, it is clear that he possessed the most even-tempered disposition of them all.

If we don’t trust one another, then we aren’t going to engage in open, constructive, ideological conflict. And we’ll just continue to preserve a sense of artificial harmony.

Last week my boss told me to rewrite a twenty-page proposal on engagement benchmarking. I turned it in and he wrote a note on the cover that just said, "No, no. Not this." I had no idea what he wanted, so I just put it off, and then when he came in this morning and told me he needed the final draft in a half-hour I printed out the exact same one as before, but this time on prettier paper. This afternoon he brought the whole team together to tell everyone I was the perfect example of being able to listen to constructive criticism.

a team of Japanese engineers had recently tried to build a 35-feet-high replica of the Great Pyramid (rather smaller than the original, which was 481 feet 5 inches in height). The team started off by limiting itself strictly to techniques proved by archaeology to have been in use during the Fourth Dynasty. However, construction of the replica under these limitations turned out to be impossible and, in due course, modern earth-moving, quarrying and lifting machines were brought to the site. Still no worthwhile progress was made. Ultimately, with some embarrassment, the project had to be abandoned.175

Develop your leaders into a competitive advantage. Reconnect your leader-power to success.

It is an irony of history that the first and greatest success of scientists in persuading governments of the indispensability of modern scientific theory to society was in the war against fascism. It is an even greater and more tragic irony that it was anti-fascist scientists who convinced the American government of the feasibility and necessity of manufacturing nuclear arms, which were then constructed by an international team of largely anti-fascist scientists.

Whether you're the manager of a restaurant, a bar, a school, a construction company, an investment fund or a real estate management firm - leadership is critical to moving the business forward.

Day surfing is the act of filling a day with no money, and no plans, seeing where you wash up: head into town, start at the library, then onto the pet shop, watch the road construction team working, a run in the park, listen to a busker. Day surfing is a much larger challenge at home, where it can often be white knuckle survival.

In high school, I was on the carpentry team, but I got benched. It was awkward sitting on it while my teammates built it.

Limitless Leadership is the secret ingredient that helps common people, create high performance teams, that achieve outstanding and uncommon results.

A Culture of clear consistent communication and connection is the foundation of a high performance team that thrives and flourishes.

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

A High Performance team requires people with High Performance Mindsets, with relevant competence, committed and balanced communication, to a meaningful and challenging goal.

Everyone is achieving at 100% of their potential, limited by beliefs and mindset constraints.

Exceptional leaders transfer their vision and aspirations to their team by the way they project themselves.

You have tension. But there is almost no constructive conflict. Passive, sarcastic comments are not the kind of conflict I’m talking about.

At present there are only two land-based cranes in the world that could lift weights of this magnitude. At the very frontiers of construction technology, these are both vast, industrialized machines, with booms reaching more than 220 feet into the air, which require on-board counterweights of 160 tons to prevent them from tipping over. The preparation-time for a single lift is around six weeks and calls for the skills of specialized teams of up to 20 men.13 In other words, modern builders with all the advantages of high-tech engineering at their disposal, can barely hoist weights of 200 tons. Was it not, therefore, somewhat surprising that the builders at Giza had hoisted such weights on an almost routine basis?

Leaders #1 job is to help their people, teams, leadership, and culture, to be #FutureFit...by supporting People, Planet & Profits, in a Consciously Constructive Revolutionary Workplace... today.

Enter the problem-solution construction. All it is, is this: “Here’s the problem, and the negative consequences of it. Here’s the best solution, and the positive benefits of this.” It’s that simple.

But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas—to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to—then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don’t take people’s moral arguments at face value. They’re mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

I dream of a time when politics, cultures and predispositions stop being a divisive, destructive, evil force, and instead…becomes a positive, unifying force for good; freedom, love, abundance, peace, meaning and joy.

Gavin was lying on his bed watching ESPN. He should have something more constructive to do than watch a replay of a soccer game between two European teams. Why wasn’t he up and dressed, doing something rather than lazing in bed

Today I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality. Having a system architect is the most important single step toward conceptual integrity. These principles are by no means limited to software systems, but to the design of any complex construct, whether a computer, an airplane, a Strategic Defense Initiative, a Global Positioning System. After teaching a software engineering laboratory more than 20 times, I came to insist that student teams as small as four people choose a manager and a separate architect. Defining distinct roles in such small teams may be a little extreme, but I have observed it to work well and to contribute to design success even for small teams.

For six months following the accident, as the Sarcophagus was under construction, a team of courageous scientists from the V. I. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy re-entered Unit 4 as part of an investigation aptly named Complex Expedition.242

In mid-November Fermi reorganized his team into two twelve-hour shifts, a day crew under Walter Zinn (who continued to supervise materials production as well), a night crew under Herbert Anderson. Construction began on Monday morning, November 16, 1942.

When taking actions, wise people apply multiple models like a doctor’s set of diagnostic tests. They use models to rule out some actions and privilege others. Wise people and teams construct a dialogue across models, exploring their overlaps and differences.

When the high-speed chases and mandatory shoot-outs become too repetitive, I head over to the revival houses and watch gentler movies, in which the couples sleep in separate beds and everyone wears a hat. As my ticket is ripped, I briefly consider all the constructive things I could be doing. I think of the parks and the restaurants, or the pleasantries I'll never use on the friends I am failing to make. I think of the great city teaming on the other side of that curtain, and then the lights go down, and I love Paris.

Loyalties of professional sports teams mystified him; they were rotating groups of paid professionals, usually with no ties other than their employment contract to the local area. One might as well feel loyalty to and cheer on the construction crew repairing the state highway nearest one's town

To thrive in the post COVID19 context leaders will be forced to become more conscious and considerate in their human element situations. Greeders will opt for digital first strategies, and less humans. REAL leaders will take ownership of making their business a force-for-good, supporting People, Planet AND Profits.

Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you'll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you. But if you think about moral reasoning as a skill we humans evolved to further our social agendas - to justify our own actions and to defend the teams we belong to - then things will make a lot more sense. Keep your eye on the intuitions, and don't take people's moral arguments at face value. They're mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.

try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Aggressive confrontation is the enemy of constructive negotiation.         ■    Avoid questions that can be answered with “Yes” or tiny pieces of information. These require little thought and inspire the human need for reciprocity; you will be expected to give something back.         ■    Ask calibrated questions that start with the words “How” or “What.” By implicitly asking the other party for help, these questions will give your counterpart an illusion of control and will inspire them to speak at length, revealing important information.         ■    Don’t ask questions that start with “Why” unless you want your counterpart to defend a goal that serves you. “Why” is always an accusation, in any language.         ■    Calibrate your questions to point your counterpart toward solving your problem. This will encourage them to expend their energy on devising a solution.         ■    Bite your tongue. When you’re attacked in a negotiation, pause and avoid angry emotional reactions. Instead, ask your counterpart a calibrated question.         ■    There is always a team on the other side. If you are not influencing those behind the table, you are vulnerable.

Places like this always have to pin their hopes for the future on young people. They're the ones who don't remember that things actually used to be better. That can be a blessing. So they've coached their junior team with the same values their forebears used to construct their community: work hard, take the knocks, don't complain, keep your mouth shut and show the bastards in the big cities where we're from.

Hedgehogs who have lots of information construct stories—stories that are neater and tidier than the real world, with protagonists and villains, winners and losers, climaxes and dénouements—and, usually, a happy ending for the home team. The candidate who is down ten points in the polls is going to win, goddamnit, because I know the candidate and I know the voters in her state, and maybe I heard something from her press secretary about how the polls are tightening—and have you seen her latest commercial?

They constructed a short film of two teams passing basketballs, one team wearing white shirts, the other wearing black. The viewers of the film are instructed to count the number of passes made by the white team, ignoring the black players. This task is difficult and completely absorbing. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a gorilla suit appears, crosses the court, thumps her chest, and moves on. The gorilla is in view for 9 seconds. Many thousands of people have seen the video, and about half of them do not notice anything unusual.

The attack was designed as a show of overwhelming strength for which the audience was not the already conquered people of Bukhara, but the still distant army and people of Samarkand, the next city on his march. The Mongol invaders rolled up their newly constructed siege engines—catapults, trebuchets, and mangonels that hurled not only stones and fire, as besieging armies had done for centuries, but also pots of burning liquids, exploding devices, and incendiary materials. They maneuvered immense crossbows mounted on wheels, and great teams of men pushed in portable towers with retractable ladders from which they could shoot down at the defenders of the walls. At the same time that they attacked through the air, miners went to work digging into the earth to undermine the walls by sapping. During this awesome display of technological prowess in the air, on the land, and beneath the earth, Genghis Khan heightened the psychological tension by forcing prisoners, in some cases the captured comrades of the men still in the citadel, to rush forward until their bodies filled the moat and made live ramparts over which other prisoners pushed the engines of war.

Instead of asking them to seek feedback, we had randomly assigned those managers to share their past experiences with receiving feedback and their future development goals. We advised them to tell their teams about a time when they benefited from constructive criticism and to identify the areas that they were working to improve now. By admitting some of their imperfections out loud, managers demonstrated that they could take it—and made a public commitment to remain open to feedback. They normalized vulnerability, making their teams more comfortable opening up about their own struggles.

By the early twenty-second century, the technology for self-replicating robots should be perfected, and we may be able to entrust machines with the task of constructing solar arrays and laser batteries on the moon, Mars, and beyond. We would ship over an initial team of automatons, some of which would mine the regolith and others of which would build a factory. Another set of robots would oversee the sorting, milling, and smelting of raw materials in the factory to separate and obtain various metals. These purified metals could then be used to assemble laser launch stations—and a new batch of self-replicating robots. We might eventually have a bustling network of relay stations throughout the solar system, perhaps stretching from the moon all the way to the Oort Cloud. Because the comets in the Oort Cloud extend roughly halfway to Alpha Centauri and are largely stationary, they may be ideal locations for laser banks that could provide an extra boost to nanoships on their journey to our neighboring star system. As each nanoship passed by one of these relay stations, its lasers would fire automatically and give the ship an added push to the stars. Self-replicating robots could build these distant outposts by using fusion instead of sunlight as the basic source of energy.

Jane Grenville in her scholarly and definitive work Medieval Housing provides an arresting pair of illustrations showing how two archaeological teams, using the same information, envisioned the appearance of a long-house at Wharram Percy, a lost medieval village in Yorkshire. One illustration shows a strikingly plain, basic dwelling, with walls made of mud or clunch (a composite of mud and dung) and a roof of grass or sod. The other shows a much sturdier and more sophisticated cruck-framed construction in which hefty beams have been fitted together with skill and care. The simple fact is that archaeological evidence shows mostly how buildings met the ground, not how they looked.

The scientific project starts by rejecting the fantasy of infallibility and proceeding to construct an information network that takes error to be inescapable. Sure, there is much talk about the genius of Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein, but none of them is considered faultless. They all made mistakes, and even the most celebrated scientific tracts are sure to contain errors and lacunae. Since even geniuses suffer from confirmation bias, you cannot trust them to correct their own errors. Science is a team effort, relying on institutional collaboration rather than on individual scientists or, say, a single infallible book. Of course, institutions too are prone to error. Scientific institutions are nevertheless different from religious institutions, inasmuch as they reward skepticism and innovation rather than conformity. Scientific institutions are also different from conspiracy theories, inasmuch as they reward self-skepticism. Conspiracy theorists tend to be extremely skeptical regarding the existing consensus, but when it comes to their own beliefs, they lose all their skepticism and fall prey to confirmation bias. The trademark of science is not merely skepticism but self-skepticism, and at the heart of every scientific institution we find a strong self-correcting mechanism. Scientific institutions do reach a broad consensus about the accuracy of certain theories—such as quantum mechanics or the theory of evolution—but only because these theories have managed to survive intense efforts to disprove them, launched not only by outsiders but by members of the institution itself.

Build, Build, Build has been the target of fake news, trolls, and critics. They have tried to redefine it far from its scope — and in their “proud, most credible voice” — report it as truth. Are they confused or just simply cunning? During the upcoming elections, many will try to discredit the accomplishments of 6.5 million construction workers. They will say that what we have completed is not enough, that there could have been many things that we could have done still, or that we never really worked at all. Allow me to say — if you are reading this, and you’re part of the Build, Build, Build team - without you, we wouldn’t have been able to build 29,264 kilometers of roads, 5,950 bridges, 11,340 flood control projects, 222 evacuation centers, 150,149 classrooms, 214 airport projects, and 451 seaport projects.

stimuli that normally attract attention. The most dramatic demonstration was offered by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in their book The Invisible Gorilla. They constructed a short film of two teams passing basketballs, one team wearing white shirts, the other wearing black. The viewers of the film are instructed to count the number of passes made by the white team, ignoring the black players. This task is difficult and completely absorbing. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a gorilla suit appears, crosses the court, thumps her chest, and moves on. The gorilla is in view for 9 seconds. Many thousands of people have seen the video, and about half of them do not notice anything unusual. It is the counting task—and especially the instruction to ignore one of the teams—that causes the blindness. No one who watches the video without that task would miss the gorilla. Seeing and orienting are automatic

The second of the dimensions that Hofstede's team added to their original four was long-term–short-term orientation, based on the Chinese Values Survey. In addition, Michael Minkov identified a similar dimension using the World Values Survey. While the precise nature of the constructs varies, African nations tend to score strongly toward the short-term end of the spectrum in all of them. For example, Ghana is the second most short-term oriented society out of 93 countries in the World Values Survey; Nigeria the fifth most and, out of the bottom 20 countries, 6 are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the Chinese Values Survey construct of long-term orientation, the only two Sub-Saharan countries out of 23 studied were Zimbabwe and Nigeria, which respectively scored fifth and second from bottom. Although a different construct, African societies also score very low on the Globe measure of future orientation.9 Experimental

If the interest of a scientific expositor ought to be measured by the importance of the subject, I shall be applauded for my choice. In fact, there are few questions which touch more closely the very existence of man than that of animated motors—those docile helps whose power or speed he uses at his pleasure, which enjoy to some extent his intimacy, and accompany him in his labors and his pleasures. The species of animal whose coöperation we borrow are numerous, and vary according to latitude and climate. But whether we employ the horse, the ass, the camel, or the reindeer, the same problem is always presented: to get from the animal as much work as possible, sparing him, as far as we can, fatigue and suffering. This identity of standpoint will much simplify my task, as it will enable me to confine the study of animated motors to a single species: I have chosen the horse as the most interesting type. Even with this restriction the subject is still very vast, as all know who are occupied with the different questions connected therewith. In studying the force of traction of the horse, and the best methods of utilizing it, we encounter all the problems connected with teams and the construction of vehicles. But, on a subject which has engaged the attention of humanity for thousands of years, it seems difficult to find anything new to say. If in the employment of the horse we consider its speed and the means of increasing it, the subject does not appear less exhausted. Since the chariot-races, of which Greek and Roman antiquity were passionately fond, to our modern horse-races, men have never ceased to pursue with a lively interest the problem of rapid locomotion. What tests and comparisons have not been made to discover what race has most speed, what other most bottom, what crossings, what training give reason to expect still more speed?

Did dinosaurs sing? Was there a teeming, singing wilderness with all the species thumping around, tuning up for the next millennia? Of course, dinosaurs sang, I thought. They are the ancestors of the singing birds and cousins to the roaring crocodiles…turns out, no. Turns out the syrinx, the organ that produces birdsong and the larynx, the organ that produces operatic arias, didn’t evolve until after the dinosaur extinction event…Some dinosaurs blew air into their closed mouths and through nasal cavities into resonance chambers, which we see in fossils as bony crests. They made the forest echo with clear, ominous tones, eerily like a cello. I have heard it in recordings scientists made of the sound they produced when they blew air through crests constructed to mimic lambeosaurus’s. Some dinosaurs cooed to their mates like doves…turns out that even if dinosaurs didn’t sing, they danced. There is evidence in vigorous scrape marks found in 100-million year old Colorado sandstone. From the courting behavior of ostriches and grouse, scientists envision the dinosaur males coming together on courting grounds, bobbing and scratching, flaring their brilliant feathers and cooing. Imagine: huge animals, each weighing more than a dozen football teams, shaking the Earth for a chance at love. What the story of the dinosaurs tells me is that if the earth didn’t have music, it would waste no time inventing it. In birds, tantalizing evidence of birdsong is found in 67-million-year old fossils, marking the first know appearance of the syrinx. Now the whole Earth can chime, from deep in the sea to high in the atmosphere with the sounds of snapping shrimp, singing mice, roaring whales, moaning bears, clattering dragonflies, and a fish calling like a foghorn. Who could catalog the astonishing oeuvre of the Earth? And more songs are being created every year.

I spent my afternoons forming a government. A new administration brings less turnover than most people imagine: Of the more than three million people, civilian and military, employed by the federal government, only a few thousand are so-called political appointees, serving at the pleasure of the president. Of those, he or she has regular, meaningful contact with fewer than a hundred senior officials and personal aides. As president, I would be able to articulate a vision and set a direction for the country; promote a healthy organizational culture and establish clear lines of responsibility and measures of accountability. I would be the one who made the final decisions on issues that rose to my attention and who explained those decisions to the country at large. But to do all this, I would be dependent on the handful of people serving as my eyes, ears, hands, and feet—those who would become my managers, executors, facilitators, analysts, organizers, team leaders, amplifiers, conciliators, problem solvers, flak catchers, honest brokers, sounding boards, constructive critics, and loyal soldiers.

There was nothing pretty or elegant about their robot. Compared to the gleaming machines other teams had constructed, Stinky was a study in simplicity. The PVC, the balloon, the tape measure—in each case they had chosen the most straightforward solution to a problem. It was an approach that grew naturally out of watching family members fix cars, manufacture mattresses, and lay irrigation piping. To a large swath of the population, driveway mechanics, box-frame builders, and gardeners did not represent the cutting edge of engineering know-how. They were low-skilled laborers who didn’t have access to real technology. Stinky represented this low-tech approach to engineering. But that was exactly what had impressed the judges. Lisa Spence, the NASA judge, believed that there was no reason to come up with a complex solution when an elementary one would suffice. She felt that Carl Hayden’s robot was “conceptually similar” to the machines she encountered at NASA. The guys were in shock. They marched back up to the stage and looked out at the audience with dazed smiles. Lorenzo felt a rush of emotion. The judges’ Special Prize wasn’t a consolation award. These people were giving them real recognition.

Louis van Gaal is generally considered the creator of a football system or machine. It might be more accurate to describe him as the originator of a new process for playing the game. His underlying tactical principles were much as those of Michels and Cruyff: relentless attack; pressing and squeezing space to make the pitch small in order to win the ball; spreading play and expanding the field in possession. By the 1990s, though, footballers had become stronger, faster and better organised than ever before. Van Gaal saw the need for a new dimension. ‘With space so congested, the most important thing is ball circulation,’ he declared. ‘The team that plays the quickest football is the best.’ His team aimed for total control of the game, maintaining the ball ‘in construction’, as he calls it, and passing and running constantly with speed and precision. Totaalvoetbal-style position switching was out, but players still had to be flexible and adaptable. Opponents were not seen as foes to be fought and beaten in battle; rather as posing a problem that had to be solved. Ajax players were required to be flexible and smart – as they ‘circulated’ the ball, the space on the field was constantly reorganised until gaps opened in the opponents’ defence.

focusing on a task can make people effectively blind, even to stimuli that normally attract attention. The most dramatic demonstration was offered by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in their book The Invisible Gorilla. They constructed a short film of two teams passing basketballs, one team wearing white shirts, the other wearing black. The viewers of the film are instructed to count the number of passes made by the white team, ignoring the black players. This task is difficult and completely absorbing. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a gorilla suit appears, crosses the court, thumps her chest, and moves on. The gorilla is in view for 9 seconds. Many thousands of people have seen the video, and about half of them do not notice anything unusual. It is the counting task—and especially the instruction to ignore one of the teams—that causes the blindness. No one who watches the video without that task would miss the gorilla. Seeing and orienting are automatic functions of System 1, but they depend on the allocation of some attention to the relevant stimulus. The authors note that the most remarkable observation of their study is that people find its results very surprising. Indeed, the viewers who fail to see the gorilla are initially sure

In teaching an honors writing class, I juxtaposed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, an electronic hypertext fiction written in proprietary Storyspace software. Since these were honors students, many of them had already read Frankenstein and were, moreover, practiced in close reading and literary analysis. When it came to digital reading, however, they were accustomed to the scanning and fast skimming typical of hyper reading; they therefore expected that it might take them, oh, half an hour to go through Jackson’s text. They were shocked when I told them a reasonable time to spend with Jackson’s text was about the time it would take them to read Frankenstein, say, ten hours or so. I divided them into teams and assigned a section of Jackson’s text to each team, telling them that I wanted them to discover all the lexias (i.e., blocks of digital text) in their section and warning them that the Storyspace software allows certain lexias to be hidden until others are read. Finally, I asked them to diagram interrelations between lexias, drawing on all three views that the Storyspace software enables. As a consequence, the students were not only required to read closely but also to analyze the narrative strategies Jackson uses to construct her text.

Congress displayed contempt for the city's residents, yet it retained a fondness for buildings and parks. In 1900, the centennial of the federal government's move to Washington, many congressmen expressed frustration that the proud nation did not have a capital to rival London, Paris, and Berlin. The following year, Senator James McMillan of Michigan, chairman of the Senate District Committee, recruited architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to propose a park system. The team, thereafter known as the McMillan Commission, emerged with a bold proposal in the City Beautiful tradition, based on the White City of Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition. Their plan reaffirmed L'Enfant's avenues as the best guide for the city's growth and emphasized the majesty of government by calling for symmetrical compositions of horizontal, neoclassical buildings of marble and white granite sitting amid wide lawns and reflecting pools. Eventually, the plan resulted in the remaking of the Mall as an open lawn, the construction of the Lincoln Memorial and Memorial Bridge across the Potomac, and the building of Burnham's Union Station. Commissioned in 1903, when the state of the art in automobiles and airplanes was represented by the curved-dash Olds and the Wright Flyer, the station served as a vast and gorgeous granite monument to rail transportation.

The truth is, the vanity of protective parents that I cited to the court goes beyond look-at-us-we’re-such-responsible-guardians. Our prohibitions also bulwark our self-importance. They fortify the construct that we adults are all initiates. By conceit, we have earned access to an unwritten Talmud whose soul-shattering content we are sworn to conceal from “innocents” for their own good. By pandering to this myth of the naïf, we service our own legend. Presumably we have looked the horror in the face, like staring into the naked eye of the sun, blistering into turbulent, corrupted creatures, enigmas even to ourselves. Gross with revelation, we would turn back the clock if we could, but there is no unknowing of this awful canon, no return to the blissfully insipid world of childhood, no choice but to shoulder this weighty black sagacity, whose finest purpose is to shelter our air-headed midgets from a glimpse of the abyss. The sacrifice is flatteringly tragic. The last thing we want to admit is that the forbidden fruit on which we have been gnawing since reaching the magic age of twenty-one is the same mealy Golden Delicious that we stuff into our children’s lunch boxes. The last thing we want to admit is that the bickering of the playground perfectly presages the machinations of the boardroom, that our social hierarchies are merely an extension of who got picked first for the kickball team, and that grown-ups still get divided into bullies and fatties and crybabies. What’s a kid to find out? Presumably we lord over them an exclusive deed to sex, but this pretense flies so fantastically in the face of fact that it must result from some conspiratorial group amnesia. To this day, some of my most intense sexual memories date back to before I was ten, as I have confided to you under the sheets in better days. No, they have sex, too. In truth, we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. That is what we really wish to keep from our kids, and its suppression is the true collusion of adulthood, the pact we make, the Talmud we protect.

Our team’s vision for the facility was a cross between a shooting range and a country club for special forces personnel. Clients would be able to schedule all manner of training courses in advance, and the gear and support personnel would be waiting when they arrived. There’d be seven shooting ranges with high gravel berms to cut down noise and absorb bullets, and we’d carve a grass airstrip, and have a special driving track to practice high-speed chases and real “defensive driving”—the stuff that happens when your convoy is ambushed. There would be a bunkhouse to sleep seventy. And nearby, the main headquarters would have the feel of a hunting lodge, with timber framing and high stone walls, with a large central fireplace where people could gather after a day on the ranges. This was the community I enjoyed; we never intended to send anyone oversees. This chunk of the Tar Heel State was my “Field of Dreams.” I bought thirty-one hundred acres—roughly five square miles of land, plenty of territory to catch even the most wayward bullets—for $900,000. We broke ground in June 1997, and immediately began learning about do-it-yourself entrepreneurship. That land was ugly: Logging the previous year had left a moonscape of tree stumps and tangled roots lorded over by mosquitoes and poisonous creatures. I killed a snake the first twelve times I went to the property. The heat was miserable. While a local construction company carved the shooting ranges and the lake, our small team installed the culverts and forged new roads and planted the Southern pine utility poles to support the electrical wiring. The basic site work was done in about ninety days—and then we had to figure out what to call the place. The leading contender, “Hampton Roads Tactical Shooting Center,” was professional, but pretty uptight. “Tidewater Institute for Tactical Shooting” had legs, but the acronym wouldn’t have helped us much. But then, as we slogged across the property and excavated ditches, an incessant charcoal mud covered our boots and machinery, and we watched as each new hole was swallowed by that relentless peat-stained black water. Blackwater, we agreed, was a name. Meanwhile, within days of being installed, the Southern pine poles had been slashed by massive black bears marking their territory, as the animals had done there since long before the Europeans settled the New World. We were part of this land now, and from that heritage we took our original logo: a bear paw surrounded by the stylized crosshairs of a rifle scope.

Taking the leap is just the first step. Then you must cross the desert. And make no mistake — that journey will be hell.” “Will it be worth it?” he asked. “You tell me,” the old man responded. “How worthy is your goal? And how big is your why?” “I can’t imagine anything better,” he affirmed. “Then yes, it will be worth it. You see, everyone who stands at the edge of this cliff sees something different on the other side. What you see on the other side is your particular goal, and that is unique to you. “But there’s a reason why you have not achieved that goal yet — you are not worthy of it. You have not become who you need to become to deserve it. “As you cross the desert to your promised land, you will endure tests and trials specific to you and your goal. If you persist, those test and trials will transform you into who you need to be to be worthy of your goal. “You can’t achieve your highest, noblest goals as the same person you are today. To get from where you are to where you want to be you have to change who you are. “And that is why no one can escape that journey — it is what transforms you into a person worthy of your goal. The bad news is that that journey is hell. The good news is that you get to pick your hell.” “Pick my hell?” he asked. “What do you mean?” “Because of your natural gifts and interests, your inborn passion and purpose, there are some hells that are more tolerable to you than others. “For example, some men can endure hard physical labor because their purpose lies in such fields as construction or mechanics, while other men could not even dream of enduring that hell. “I’ve met people who knew they were born to be writers. Their desert to cross, their hell to endure was writing every day for years without being paid or being recognized and appreciated. But in spite of their hell, they were happy because they were writing. Though they still had to earn their way to the valley of their ultimate goal, they were doing what they were born to do. “Ever read the book Getting Rich Your Own Way by Scrully Blotnick?” He shook his head. “That book reveals the results on a two-decade study performed by Mr. Blotnick and his team of researchers on 1,500 people representing a cross-section of middle-class America. Throughout the study, they lost almost a third of participants due to deaths, moves, or other factors. “Of the 1,057 that remained, 83 had become millionaires. They interviewed each millionaire to identify the common threads they shared. They found five specific commonalities, including that 1) they were persistent, 2), they were patient, and 3) they were willing to handle both the ‘nobler and the pettier’ aspects of their job. “In other words, they were able to endure their particular hell because they were in the right field, they had chosen the right career that coincided with their gifts, passions, and purpose. “Here is the inescapable reality: No matter what you pick as your greatest goal, achieving it will stretch you in ways you can’t imagine right now. You will have to get out of your comfort zone. You will have to become a different person than you are right now to become worthy of your goal. You must cross that hellacious desert to get to your awe-inspiring goal. “But I get to pick my hell?” he asked. “You get to pick your hell.

How Google Works (Schmidt, Eric) - Your Highlight on Location 3124-3150 | Added on Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:35:40 AM In late 1999, John Doerr gave a presentation at Google that changed the company, because it created a simple tool that let the founders institutionalize their “think big” ethos. John sat on our board, and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had recently invested in the company. The topic was a form of management by objectives called OKRs (to which we referred in the previous chapter), which John had learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove.173 There are several characteristics that set OKRs apart from their typical underpromise-and-overdeliver corporate-objective brethren. First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better … improve team morale … get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent … raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent … run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.) There is no ambiguity with this OKR; it is very easy to measure whether or not it is accomplished. Other OKRs will call for rolling out a product across a specific number of countries, or set objectives for usage (e.g., one of the Google+ team’s recent OKRs was about the daily number of messages users would post in hangouts) or performance (e.g., median watch latency on YouTube videos). Second—and here is where thinking big comes in—a good OKR should be a stretch to achieve, and hitting 100 percent on all OKRs should be practically unattainable. If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough. The best OKRs are aggressive, but realistic. Under this strange arithmetic, a score of 70 percent on a well-constructed OKR is often better than 100 percent on a lesser one. Third, most everyone does them. Remember, you need everyone thinking in your venture, regardless of their position. Fourth, they are scored, but this scoring isn’t used for anything and isn’t even tracked. This lets people judge their performance honestly. Fifth, OKRs are not comprehensive; they are reserved for areas that need special focus and objectives that won’t be reached without some extra oomph. Business-as-usual stuff doesn’t need OKRs. As your venture grows, the most important OKRs shift from individuals to teams. In a small company, an individual can achieve incredible things on her own, but as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates. This doesn’t mean that individuals should stop doing OKRs, but rather that team OKRs become the more important means to maintain focus on the big tasks. And there’s one final benefit of an OKR-driven culture: It helps keep people from chasing competitors. Competitors are everywhere in the Internet Century, and chasing them (as we noted earlier) is the fastest path to mediocrity. If employees are focused on a well-conceived set of OKRs, then this isn’t a problem. They know where they need to go and don’t have time to worry about the competition. ==========

All the many successes and extraordinary accomplishments of the Gemini still left NASA’s leadership in a quandary. The question voiced in various expressions cut to the heart of the problem: “How can we send men to the moon, no matter how well they fly their ships, if they’re pretty helpless when they get there? We’ve racked up rendezvous, docking, double-teaming the spacecraft, starting, stopping, and restarting engines; we’ve done all that. But these guys simply cannot work outside their ships without exhausting themselves and risking both their lives and their mission. We’ve got to come up with a solution, and quick!” One manned Gemini mission remained on the flight schedule. Veteran Jim Lovell would command the Gemini 12, and his space-walking pilot would be Buzz Aldrin, who built on the experience of the others to address all problems with incredible depth and finesse. He took along with him on his mission special devices like a wrist tether and a tether constructed in the same fashion as one that window washers use to keep from falling off ledges. The ruby slippers of Dorothy of Oz couldn’t compare with the “golden slippers” Aldrin wore in space—foot restraints, resembling wooden Dutch shoes, that he could bolt to a work station in the Gemini equipment bay. One of his neatest tricks was to bring along portable handholds he could slap onto either the Gemini or the Agena to keep his body under control. A variety of space tools went into his pressure suit to go along with him once he exited the cabin. On November 11, 1966, the Gemini 12, the last of its breed, left earth and captured its Agena quarry. Then Buzz Aldrin, once and for all, banished the gremlins of spacewalking. He proved so much a master at it that he seemed more to be taking a leisurely stroll through space than attacking the problems that had frustrated, endangered, and maddened three previous astronauts and brought grave doubts to NASA leadership about the possible success of the manned lunar program. Aldrin moved down the nose of the Gemini to the Agena like a weightless swimmer, working his way almost effortlessly along a six-foot rail he had locked into place once he was outside. Next came looping the end of a hundred-foot line from the Agena to the Gemini for a later experiment, the job that had left Dick Gordon in a sweatbox of exhaustion. Aldrin didn’t show even a hint of heavy breathing, perspiration, or an increased heartbeat. When he spoke, his voice was crisp, sharp, clear. What he did seemed incredibly easy, but it was the direct result of his incisive study of the problems and the equipment he’d brought from earth. He also made sure to move in carefully timed periods, resting between major tasks, and keeping his physical exertion to a minimum. When he reached the workstation in the rear of the Gemini, he mounted his feet and secured his body to the ship with the waist tether. He hooked different equipment to the ship, dismounted other equipment, shifted them about, and reattached them. He used a unique “space wrench” to loosen and tighten bolts with effortless skill. He snipped wires, reconnected wires, and connected a series of tubes. Mission Control hung on every word exchanged between the two astronauts high above earth. “Buzz, how do those slippers work?” Aldrin’s enthusiastic voice came back like music. “They’re great. Great! I don’t have any trouble positioning my body at all.” And so it went, a monumental achievement right at the end of the Gemini program. Project planners had reached all the way to the last inch with one crucial problem still unsolved, and the man named Aldrin had whipped it in spectacular fashion on the final flight. Project Gemini was

Don’t try to force your opponent to admit that you are right. Aggressive confrontation is the enemy of constructive negotiation. ■​Avoid questions that can be answered with “Yes” or tiny pieces of information. These require little thought and inspire the human need for reciprocity; you will be expected to give something back. ■​Ask calibrated questions that start with the words “How” or “What.” By implicitly asking the other party for help, these questions will give your counterpart an illusion of control and will inspire them to speak at length, revealing important information. ■​Don’t ask questions that start with “Why” unless you want your counterpart to defend a goal that serves you. “Why” is always an accusation, in any language. ■​Calibrate your questions to point your counterpart toward solving your problem. This will encourage them to expend their energy on devising a solution. ■​Bite your tongue. When you’re attacked in a negotiation, pause and avoid angry emotional reactions. Instead, ask your counterpart a calibrated question. ■​There is always a team on the other side. If you are not influencing those behind the table, you are vulnerable.

That realization helped Moesta and his team begin to understand the struggle these potential home buyers faced. “I went in thinking we were in the business of new home construction,” recalls Moesta. “But I realized we were instead in the business of moving lives.” With this understanding of the Job to Be Done, dozens of small, but important, changes were made to the offering. For example, the architect managed to create space in the units for a classic dining room table by reducing the size of the second bedroom by 20 percent. The company also focused on helping buyers with the anxiety of the move itself, which included providing moving services, two years of storage, and a sorting room space on the premises where new owners could take their time making decisions about what to keep and what to discard without the pressure of a looming move. Instead of thirty pages of customized choices, which actually overwhelmed buyers, the company offered three variations of finished units—a move that quickly reduced the “cold feet” contract cancellations from five or six a month to one. And so on. Everything was designed to signal to buyers: we get you. We understand the progress you’re trying to make and the struggle to get there. Understanding the job enabled the company to get to the causal mechanism of why its customers might pull this solution into their lives. It was complex, but not complicated. That, in turn, allowed the housing company to differentiate its offering in ways competitors weren’t likely to copy—or even understand. A jobs perspective changed everything. The company actually raised $ 3,500 (profitably), which included covering the cost of moving and storage. By 2007, when sales in the industry were off by 49 percent and the market all around them was plummeting, the developers had actually grown the business 25 percent.

Help people realize that when they fail to provide peers with constructive feedback they are letting them down personally. By holding back, we are hurting not only the team, but also our teammates themselves.

The best leaders checked their egos, accepted blame, sought out constructive criticism, and took detailed notes for improvement. They exhibited Extreme Ownership, and as a result, their SEAL platoons and task units dominated. When a bad SEAL leader walked into a debrief and blamed everyone else, that attitude was picked up by subordinates and team members, who then followed suit. They all blamed everyone else,

If, as I believe, the conceptual structures we construct today are too complicated to be accurately specified in advance, and too complex to be built faultlessly, then we must take a radically different approach. Let us turn to nature and study complexity in living things, instead of just the dead works of man. Here we find constructs whose complexities thrill us with awe. The brain alone is intricate beyond mapping, powerful beyond imitation, rich in diversity, self-protecting, and self-renewing. The secret is that it is grown, not built. So it must be with our software systems. Some years ago Harlan Mills proposed that any software system should be grown by incremental development.[11] That is, the system should first be made to run, even though it does nothing useful except call the proper set of dummy subprograms. Then, bit by bit it is fleshed out, with the subprograms in turn being developed into actions or calls to empty stubs in the level below. I have seen the most dramatic results since I began urging this technique on the project builders in my software engineering laboratory class. Nothing in the past decade has so radically changed my own practice, or its effectiveness. The approach necessitates top-down design, for it is a top-down growing of the software. It allows easy backtracking. It lends itself to early prototypes. Each added function and new provision for more complex data or circumstances grows organically out of what is already there. The morale effects are startling. Enthusiasm jumps when there is a running system, even a simple one. Efforts redouble when the first picture from a new graphics software system appears on the screen, even if it is only a rectangle. One always has, at every stage in the process, a working system. I find that teams can grow much more complex entities in four months than they can build.

Pinned to the left-hand wall opposite the construction schedule was another butcher-block-size sheet almost identical in form, except this one, O’Sullivan said, was called a “submittal schedule.” It was also a checklist, but it didn’t specify construction tasks; it specified communication tasks. For the way the project managers dealt with the unexpected and the uncertain was by making sure the experts spoke to one another—on X date regarding Y process. The experts could make their individual judgments, but they had to do so as part of a team that took one another’s concerns into account, discussed unplanned developments, and agreed on the way forward. While no one could anticipate all the problems, they could foresee where and when they might occur. The checklist therefore detailed who had to talk to whom, by which date, and about what aspect of construction—who had to share (or “submit”) particular kinds of information before the next steps could proceed.

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By late January 2014, Tesla had completed the construction of a cross-country Supercharger corridor that would allow Model S drivers to get from Los Angeles to New York without having to spend a penny on energy. The electric highway took a northern route through Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Illinois, before approaching New York from Delaware. The path it cut was similar to a trip taken by Musk and his brother, Kimbal, in a beat-up 1970s BMW 320i in 1994. Within days of the route’s completion, Tesla staged a cross-country rally to show that the Model S could easily handle long-distance driving, even in the dead of winter. Two hot-pepper-red Model S’s, driven by members of the Supercharging team, left Tesla’s Los Angeles–based design studio just after midnight on Thursday, January 30. Tesla planned to finish the trip at New York’s City Hall on the night of February 1, the day before Super Bowl XLVIII, which would take place at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, just across the state line. Along the way, the cars would drive through some of the snowiest and most frigid places in the country, in one of the coldest weeks of the year. The trip took a little longer than expected. The rally encountered a wild snowstorm in the Rocky Mountains that temporarily closed the road over Vail Pass and then provided an icy entrance to Wyoming. Somewhere in South Dakota, one of the rally’s diesel support vans broke down, forcing its occupants to catch a flight from Sioux Falls to rejoin the rest of the crew in Chicago. And in Ohio, the cars powered through torrential rains as the fatigued crew pressed on for the final stretch. It was 7:30 A.M. on Sunday, February 2, when the Teslas rolled up to New York’s City Hall on a bright, mild morning. The 3,427-mile journey had taken 76 hours and 5 minutes—just over three days. The cars had spent a total of 15 hours and 57 seconds charging along the way,

Create ways to foster alternative view and constructive criticism. Assign people to play the devils advocate, taking opposing viewpoints so you can see the holes in your position. Get people to wage debates that argue different sides of the issue. Have an anonymous suggestion box that employees must contribute to as part of the decision-making proces. Remember, people can be independent thinkers and team players at the same time, help them fill both roles.

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Let's say a dozen hearts, perhaps 500 smiles, a few thousand faces, voices. Out of the whole, not so easy to fit the whole world in one. Thankfully, we're not alone in this X.

The problem of an efficient group structure alone is enough to absorb anyone's interest. An organization of a committee of scientists or a panel of script writers is far from what it could be. But we lack control in the world at large to investigate more efficient structures. Here, on the contrary, here we begin to understand and build the Superorganism. We can construct groups of artists and scientists who will act as smoothly and efficiently as champion football teams.

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Organisational Culture is the generalised mindset that guides your people to live out the company purpose. It strongly influences how your people deliver on your brand promise to internal and external customers. Because of this impact, a clear understanding of your corporate culture is vital, as it's your performance booster, or limiter, in servicing your clients.

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By early August, Knackstedt’s team were hearing worrying stories from refugees about large amounts of construction materiel being stockpiled at various locations

SOME MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT TEAMWORK 1. Effective teams work together a lot. We found instead that smoothly functioning groups work just as well when individuals are able to work independently, yet confidently. 2. Conflict between group members is bad. Many researchers agree that this is dangerous. But constructive conflict is essential to prevent such dysfunctions as individual apathy, group-think, and the so-called Abilene paradox, in which members agree to agree, even if they have qualms. What makes conflict constructive is controlled disagreements over ideas (not personalities) and a common commitment to, and mutual confidence in, execution after a decision is made. 3. Teams are better off when members like each other. True, it’s tough to work with someone when you have an overwhelming urge to throttle the person. On the other hand, there are plenty of groups whose members would not care to spend any time together on a personal basis but who do leverage each other’s experience and skill effectively. The key seems to be mutual respect rather than affection. 4. Team satisfaction produces performance. We found no necessary correlations. When a group puts more energy into its own good feelings than into the task at hand, performance suffers. In one extreme example, an IT project manager was so concerned about morale that she would hold pizza parties when deadlines were missed so that people didn’t feel discouraged.

SOME MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT TEAMWORK 1. Effective teams work together a lot. We found instead that smoothly functioning groups work just as well when individuals are able to work independently, yet confidently. 2. Conflict between group members is bad. Many researchers agree that this is dangerous. But constructive conflict is essential to prevent such dysfunctions as individual apathy, group-think, and the so-called Abilene paradox, in which members agree to agree, even if they have qualms. What makes conflict constructive is controlled disagreements over ideas (not personalities) and a common commitment to, and mutual confidence in, execution after a decision is made. 3. Teams are better off when members like each other. True, it’s tough to work with someone when you have an overwhelming urge to throttle the person. On the other hand, there are plenty of groups whose members would not care to spend any time together on a personal basis but who do leverage each other’s experience and skill effectively. The key seems to be mutual respect rather than affection. 4. Team satisfaction produces performance. We found no necessary correlations. When a group puts more energy into its own good feelings than into the task at hand, performance suffers. In one extreme example, an IT project manager was so concerned about morale that she would hold pizza parties when deadlines were missed so that people didn’t feel discouraged.

To think of the China story during the Trump administration as a binary fight between hawks and doves, panda sluggers and panda hug-gers, the blue team and the red team, or any other such construction is too simplistic.

With controlling interest his, Nevins ordered construction of a new mill. Within a year, the new Pemberton—resting on the solid original foundation—was up and running. It is still standing in the early years of the twenty-first century—its five floors above the old cellar held there firmly with columns made of thick wood. Captain Bigelow probably knew about the new mill’s construction and surely would have applauded the decision to abandon cast iron and use wood. Nevins’s new Pemberton in 1861 had 859 operatives, of whom 650 were female, working at 307 looms and 25,000 spindles. Four of the mill’s managerial team remained male: Henry S. Shaw as treasurer, Nevins and his Boston company as selling agent, John E. Chase as agent and Frederick E. Clarke as paymaster. And a woman had advanced to management level. “Miss E.L. Cleason” was listed as cashier.

Grudgingly, I can accept the fact that it was sensible for baseball to enlarge itself and to spread toward new centers of a growing population. What I cannot forgive is the manner in which the expansion was handled. In 1957, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, abruptly removed his team to Los Angeles after making a series of impossible demands upon the City of New York for the instantaneous construction of a new ballpark.

Of course, most of us, in the service of sanity, don’t fixate on the end. We go about the world focused on worldly concerns. We accept the inevitable and direct our energies to other things. Yet the recognition that our time is finite is always with us, helping to shape the choices we make, the challenges we accept, the paths we follow. As cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker maintained, we are under a constant existential tension, pulled toward the sky by a consciousness that can soar to the heights of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Einstein but tethered to earth by a physical form that will decay to dust. “Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”2 According to Becker, we are impelled by such awareness to deny death the capacity to erase us. Some soothe the existential yearning through commitment to family, a team, a movement, a religion, a nation—constructs that will outlast the individual’s allotted time on earth. Others leave behind creative expressions, artifacts that extend the duration of their presence symbolically. “We fly to Beauty,” said Emerson, “as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature.”3 Others still seek to vanquish death by winning or conquering, as if stature, power, and wealth command an immunity unavailable to the common mortal. Across the millennia, one consequence has been a widespread fascination with all things, real or imagined, that touch on the timeless. From prophesies of an afterlife, to teachings of reincarnation, to entreaties of the windswept mandala, we have developed strategies to contend with knowledge of our impermanence and, often with hope, sometimes with resignation, to gesture toward eternity. What’s new in our age is the remarkable power of science to tell a lucid story not only of the past, back to the big bang, but also of the future. Eternity itself may forever lie beyond the reach of our equations, but our analyses have already revealed that the universe we have come to know is transitory. From planets to stars, solar systems to galaxies, black holes to swirling nebulae, nothing is everlasting. Indeed, as far as we can tell, not only is each individual life finite, but so too is life itself. Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment. Still, here on earth we have punctuated our moment with astonishing feats of insight, creativity, and ingenuity as each generation has built on the achievements of those who have gone before, seeking clarity on how it all came to be, pursuing coherence in where it is all going, and longing for an answer to why it all matters. Such is the story of this book.

When the retail, operations, and finance teams began to construct the initial Amazon WBR, they turned to a well-known Six Sigma process improvement method called DMAIC, an acronym for Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control.1 Should you decide to implement a Weekly Business Review for your business, we recommend following the DMAIC steps as well. The order of the steps matters. Progressing through this metrics life cycle in this order can prevent a lot of frustration and rework, allowing you to achieve your goals faster.

Our true strength resides not merely in our abilities but in our collective power to construct teams that wholeheartedly embrace and complement our weaknesses. Through the beautiful fabric of our diversity and unwavering collaboration, we pave the path toward greatness, surmounting any obstacle that dares to impede our progress.

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I never questioned Kevin’s loyalty or sincerity. He had always participated candidly and constructively, as a team player, in our deliberations.

As I was to learn, the process for creating the digital media business would be quite different because there was so much more to creating a great digital media customer experience than simply adding the next retail category to the Amazon website. The first part of the process went as normal. Our team of three or four people developed plans using the tried-and-true MBA-style methods of the time. We gathered data about the size of the market opportunity. We constructed financial models projecting our annual sales in each category, assuming, of course, an ever-increasing share of digital sales. We calculated gross margin assuming a certain cost of goods from our suppliers. We projected an operating margin based on the size of the team we would need to support the business. We outlined the deals we would make with media companies. We sketched out pricing parameters. We described how the service would work for customers. We put it all together in crisp-looking PowerPoint slides (this was still several months before the switch to narratives) and comprehensive Excel spreadsheets.

The mobile industry quickly developed, and lawyers, investment bankers, consultants and contractors offered their services. The feeling of ownership of the projects and the effort of getting networks up and running within the shortest possible time span was gigantic. Engineers slept in their cars to make sure that they could start early mornings, ‘war rooms’ were kitted out with huge maps, project timelines, pictures and milestone markers. Contests ongoing between different teams in the specific country regions where we were building. Employing a thousand people in no time and generating work for tenfold that number; network and other suppliers, construction companies, distributors, retailers and other often highly skilled third parties.

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Taking inspiration from Personal Construct Psychology and the work of Burr et al (2014), it can be useful for the team to reflect on the following questions: How do we perceive ourselves as a team? How do we perceive the other team? How do we think the other team perceives us? How do we think the other team perceives themselves?

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Therefore, since it was all but inevitable that there would be a power struggle of some kind between the two great power centers on earth, even without declared hostility, the intelligence community proponents said that it would be easier to begin our national defense posture by delineating the source of all concern and danger, i.e. world communism, and then to draw lines for a never-ending battle, sometimes called the Cold War. The line so constructed was, in the beginning, the Iron Curtain. Although one might expect that the battles would be waged by our forces on their side of the curtain, and the skirmishes by their forces would be on our side, it has not turned out that way. The battles that have been fought since 1947 for the most part have been fought on our side of the Iron Curtain. It had to happen this way because the intelligence community has gained the initiative, and the response technique will not work on the other side. This was the great contest and although the principals on both sides of the argument, which was of such vital concern to the foreign policy and defense posture of this country, might deny it, this was the basis for the contention that the Central Intelligence Group should be assigned to a position subordinate to the Secretaries of State and Defense and under their direction.

The Judge’s most damaging lie is that we are not worthy of love or respect by just being who we are. Instead, it forces us to constantly perform for them; this forms the construct of “conditional love.” Most of us grow up experiencing love that is conditional on being good or performing, and we get into the habit of placing the same conditions on self-love. But conditional love is not real love. It’s more like receiving a carrot for good behavior.

a team of Japanese engineers had recently tried to build a 35-feet-high replica of the Great Pyramid (rather smaller than the original, which was 481 feet 5 inches in height). The team started off by limiting itself strictly to techniques proved by archaeology to have been in use during the Fourth Dynasty. However, construction of the replica under these limitations turned out to be impossible and, in due course, modern earth-moving, quarrying and lifting machines were brought to the site. Still no worthwhile progress was made. Ultimately, with some embarrassment, the project had to be abandoned.

Wuxi Engineering Complex wasn’t detailed by a team, it was detailed by one woman, using, of course, feedback from the departments that would be using the building.” I gape. “Exactly,” she says, smiling. “A team would not have constructed the building as a unit, but as a series of connected, but compromised and adjusted, ideas.” “It can’t be done. It had to have taken years.” “It did take over two years, but it can be done.

works and give advice as needed, making procedure adjustments. Coaching is a form of on-the-job training. Promote meritocracy. Ensure the establishment and continuous improvement of a performance evaluation system (standardize the process). Promote an honest, constructive evaluation of your team, providing it with regular feedback (at least once a year). Dismiss when necessary. Dismiss 5 percent to 10 percent of the team members that have received

Roman armies could move faster than the Gauls, especially over long distances, because of two advantages: superior engineering and better discipline. The Romans were not stopped by natural obstacles, because their engineers could quickly improvise a bridge across a river. The Gauls were taken by surprise because they regarded high mountain passes as impassable during winter, but Caesar’s soldiers, who were more like construction workers than soldiers, worked in teams to clear away deep snow. Gauls liked fighting but they thought the dirty work of building roads and fortifications was beneath their dignity as warriors. Romans did everything they were asked because their troops were highly disciplined. Roman soldiers knew that the faster they did these routine tasks, the more surely they would win, even against armies much bigger than themselves.

The only way that Jason can claim his rightful place as ruler of Iolcus, Greece, is by retrieving the fabled Golden Fleece from distant lands. The problem? Everyone considers the task impossible, fraught with terrifying perils certain to kill any man. Jason isn’t so sure. He assembles a mighty team of warriors—the Argonauts—and builds the largest ship ever constructed. He then figures out how to successfully navigate the legendary maze of crushing rocks known as the Symplegades, yoke fire-breathing, bronze-hoofed oxen, trick a mighty army guarding the Fleece into ravaging itself to pieces, and drug a sleepless dragon into its first slumber. Four months after departing, Jason returns with the Fleece to take his throne.