High Functioning Team Quotes

One of the most bizarre and intriguing findings is that people with brain damage may be particularly good investors. Why? Because damage to certain parts of the brain can impair the emotional responses that cause the rest of us to do foolish things. A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and the University of Iowa conducted an experiment that compared the investment decisions made by fifteen patients with damage to the areas of the brain that control emotions (but with intact logic and cognitive functions) to the investment decisions made by a control group. The brain-damaged investors finished the game with 13 percent more money than the control group, largely, the authors believe, because they do not experience fear and anxiety. The impaired investors took more risks when there were high potential payoffs and got less emotional when they made losses.7 This

I write them to improve my productivity as a programmer. Making the quality assurance department happy is just a side effect. Unit tests are highly localized. Each test class works within a single package. It tests the interfaces to other packages, but beyond that it assumes the rest just works. Functional tests are a different animal. They are written to ensure the software as a whole works. They provide quality assurance to the customer and don't care about programmer productivity. They should be developed by a different team, one who delights in finding bugs.

Outcomes indicators include product vision, business objectives, and capabilities (high-level product functionality), not detail requirements. These outcome characteristics define a releasable product and quality objectives define a reliable and adaptable (works today, easy to enhance) product. These are the critical value traits, then teams need to strive to meet constraints—scope, schedule, and cost—but as secondary in importance to the value components. In many, if not most, agile projects schedule becomes the most critical constraint and is timeboxed (fixed) and scope varies.

great. This is a good description of Rovio, which was around for six years and underwent layoffs before the “instant” success of the Angry Birds video game franchise. In the case of the Five Guys restaurant chain, the founders spent fifteen years tweaking their original handful of restaurants in Virginia, finding the right bun bakery, the right number of times to shake the french fries before serving, how best to assemble a burger, and where to source their potatoes before expanding nationwide. Most businesses require a complex network of relationships to function, and these relationships take time to build. In many instances you have to be around for a few years to receive consistent recognition. It takes time to develop connections with investors, suppliers, and vendors. And it takes time for staff and founders to gain effectiveness in their roles and become a strong team.* So, yes, the bar is high when you want to start a company. You’ll have the chance to work on something you own and care about from day to day. You’ll be 100 percent engaged and motivated, and doing something you believe in. You can lead an integrated life, as opposed to a compartmentalized one in which you play a role in an office and then try to forget about it when you get home. You can define an organization, not the other way around. But even if you quit your job, hunker down for years, work hard for uncertain reward, and ask everyone you know for help, there’s still a great chance that your new business will not succeed. Over 50 percent of companies fail within their first three years.2 There’s a quote I like from an unknown source: “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.

astonishing number of senior leaders are systemically incapable of identifying their organization’s most glaring and dangerous shortcomings. This is not a function of stupidity, but rather stems from two routine pressures that constrain everybody’s thinking and behavior. The first is comprised of cognitive biases, such as mirror imaging, anchoring, and confirmation bias. These unconscious motivations on decision-making under uncertain conditions make it inherently difficult to evaluate one’s own judgments and actions. As David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, has shown in countless environments, people who are highly incompetent in terms of their skills or knowledge are also terrible judges of their own performance. For example, people who perform the worst on pop quizzes also have the widest variance between how they thought they performed and the actual score that they earned.22

[There is] no direct relationship between IQ and economic opportunity. In the supposed interests of fairness and “social justice”, the natural relationship has been all but obliterated. Consider the first necessity of employment, filling out a job application. A generic job application does not ask for information on IQ. If such information is volunteered, this is likely to be interpreted as boastful exaggeration, narcissism, excessive entitlement, exceptionalism [...] and/or a lack of team spirit. None of these interpretations is likely to get you hired. Instead, the application contains questions about job experience and educational background, neither of which necessarily has anything to do with IQ. Universities are in business for profit; they are run like companies, seek as many paying clients as they can get, and therefore routinely accept people with lukewarm IQ’s, especially if they fill a slot in some quota system (in which case they will often be allowed to stay despite substandard performance). Regarding the quotas themselves, these may in fact turn the tables, advantaging members of groups with lower mean IQ’s than other groups [...] sometimes, people with lower IQ’s are expressly advantaged in more ways than one. These days, most decent jobs require a college education. Academia has worked relentlessly to bring this about, as it gains money and power by monopolizing the employment market across the spectrum. Because there is a glut of college-educated applicants for high-paying jobs, there is usually no need for an employer to deviate from general policy and hire an applicant with no degree. What about the civil service? While the civil service was once mostly open to people without college educations, this is no longer the case, and quotas make a very big difference in who gets hired. Back when I was in the New York job market, “minorities” (actually, worldwide majorities) were being spotted 30 (thirty) points on the civil service exam; for example, a Black person with a score as low as 70 was hired ahead of a White person with a score of 100. Obviously, any prior positive correlation between IQ and civil service employment has been reversed. Add to this the fact that many people, including employers, resent or feel threatened by intelligent people [...] and the IQ-parameterized employment function is no longer what it was once cracked up to be. If you doubt it, just look at the people running things these days. They may run a little above average, but you’d better not be expecting to find any Aristotles or Newtons among them. Intelligence has been replaced in the job market with an increasingly poor substitute, possession of a college degree, and given that education has steadily given way to indoctrination and socialization as academic priorities, it would be naive to suppose that this is not dragging down the overall efficiency of society. In short, there are presently many highly intelligent people working very “dumb” jobs, and conversely, many less intelligent people working jobs that would once have been filled by their intellectual superiors. Those sad stories about physics PhD’s flipping burgers at McDonald's are no longer so exceptional. Sorry, folks, but this is not your grandfather’s meritocracy any more.

Employees at all levels want and need to understand not only the particular work they are assigned and their team’s mission, but also the larger story of the way the business works, the challenges the company faces, and the competitive landscape. ▶ Truly understanding how the business works is the most valuable learning, more productive and appealing than “employee development” trainings. It’s the rocket fuel of high performance and lifelong learning. ▶ Communication between management and employees should genuinely flow both ways. The more leaders encourage questions and suggestions and make themselves accessible for give-and-take, the more employees at all levels will offer ideas and insights that will amaze you. ▶ If someone working for you seems clueless, chances are they have not been told information they need to know. Make sure you haven’t failed to give it to them. ▶ If you don’t tell your people about how the business is doing and the problems being confronted—good, bad, and ugly—then they will get that information somewhere else, and it will often be misinformation. ▶ The job of communicating is never done. It’s not an annual or quarterly or even monthly or weekly function. A steady stream of communication is the lifeblood of competitive advantage.

Legacy items. That’s the term we used to describe these golden moments. Sometimes we even knew what it meant. Taking out bin Laden was a legacy item. So was rescuing the auto industry, bringing troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, or repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” But just as often, we imagined our legacy with the starry eyes of a hobo describing the Big Rock Candy Mountain. We dreamed of a distant utopia, a sunny political paradise, where the credit flows like a waterfall and approvals stay sky-high. We weren’t there yet. With twenty months to go until POTUS left office, our place in history was far from certain. But inside the building, something had undoubtedly changed. President Obama’s jaunty, let’s-go-for-it attitude was infectious. We no longer felt like turtles in our shells. Our growing confidence was matched by growing competence as well. That’s not to disparage the early days: as White Houses go, Obama’s functioned fairly smoothly from the start. Still, the longer POTUS ran the institution, the more we learned from our mistakes. After the Healthcare.gov disaster, we began “red-teaming” a growing number of big decisions, assigning designated cynics to guard against undiluted hope. Confronted with its lack of diversity, Obamaworld gradually became a place where rooms full of white guys were the exception and not the rule. Baby steps, I know. But these baby steps made us a unicorn among bureaucracies—we improved over time. Somewhat to my astonishment, so did I. At the risk of sounding boastful, I had now gone two full years without angering a sovereign nation. Even better, the White House finally felt like home. There was no one moment when the transformation happened. I didn’t burst forth from a cocoon. It was more like learning a language. You study, you practice, you embarrass yourself. And then one day someone cuts you off in traffic and you call them a motherfucker in perfect Portuguese. Whoa, you think. I guess I’m learning.

Then, decades later, in the 1970s, a hard-assed U.S. swim coach named James Counsilman rediscovered it. Counsilman was notorious for his “hurt, pain, and agony”–based training techniques, and hypoventilation fit right in. Competitive swimmers usually take two or three strokes before they flip their heads to the side and inhale. Counsilman trained his team to hold their breath for as many as nine strokes. He believed that, over time, the swimmers would utilize oxygen more efficiently and swim faster. In a sense, it was Buteyko’s Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing and Zátopek hypoventilation—underwater. Counsilman used it to train the U.S. Men’s Swimming team for the Montreal Olympics. They won 13 gold medals, 14 silver, and 7 bronze, and they set world records in 11 events. It was the greatest performance by a U.S. Olympic swim team in history. Hypoventilation training fell back into obscurity after several studies in the 1980s and 1990s argued that it had little to no impact on performance and endurance. Whatever these athletes were gaining, the researchers reported, must have been based on a strong placebo effect. In the early 2000s, Dr. Xavier Woorons, a French physiologist at Paris 13 University, found a flaw in these studies. The scientists critical of the technique had measured it all wrong. They’d been looking at athletes holding their breath with full lungs, and all that extra air in the lungs made it difficult for the athletes to enter into a deep state of hypoventilation. Woorons repeated the tests, but this time subjects practiced the half-full technique, which is how Buteyko trained his patients, and likely how Counsilman trained his swimmers. Breathing less offered huge benefits. If athletes kept at it for several weeks, their muscles adapted to tolerate more lactate accumulation, which allowed their bodies to pull more energy during states of heavy anaerobic stress, and, as a result, train harder and longer. Other reports showed hypoventilation training provided a boost in red blood cells, allowing athletes to carry more oxygen and produce more energy with each breath. Breathing way less delivered the benefits of high-altitude training at 6,500 feet, but it could be used at sea level, or anywhere. Over the years, this style of breath restriction has been given many names—hypoventilation, hypoxic training, Buteyko technique, and the pointlessly technical “normobaric hypoxia training.” The outcomes were the same: a profound boost in performance.* Not just for elite athletes, but for everyone. Just a few weeks of the training significantly increased endurance, reduced more “trunk fat,” improved cardiovascular function, and boosted muscle mass compared to normal-breathing exercise. This list goes on. The takeaway is that hypoventilation works. It helps train the body to do more with less. But that doesn’t mean it’s pleasant.

No major piece of work should be fully funded before we have evidence to support the business and economic model on which it is based, and this exploration must be done with small, cross-functional teams with a limited runway,

High-functioning teams are gold and the true key to success.

You can predict with nearly 90 percent accuracy which projects will fail—months or years in advance. And now back to our premise. The predictor of success or failure was whether people could hold five specific crucial conversations. For example, could they speak up if they thought the scope and schedule were unrealistic? Or did they go silent when a cross-functional team member began sloughing off? Or even more tricky—what should they do when an executive failed to provide leadership for the effort?

Ensure that existing resources are made available and accessible to everyone in the organization. Create space and opportunities for learning and improving. Establish a dedicated training budget and make sure people know about it. Also, give your staff the latitude to choose training that interests them. This training budget may include dedicated time during the day to make use of resources that already exist in the organization. Encourage staff to attend technical conferences at least once a year and summarize what they learned for the entire team. Set up internal hack days, where cross-functional teams can get together to work on a project.

create their own OKRs for their own organization. For example, the design department might have objectives related to moving to a responsive design; the engineering department might have objectives related to improving the scalability and performance of the architecture; and the quality department might have objectives relating to the test and release automation. The problem is that the individual members of each of these functional departments are the actual members of a cross‐functional product team. The product team has business‐related objectives (for example, to reduce the customer acquisition cost, to increase the number of daily active users, or to reduce the time to onboard a new customer), but each person on the team may have their own set of objectives that cascade down through their functional manager. Imagine if the engineers were told to spend their time on re‐platforming, the designers on moving to a responsive design, and QA on retooling. While each of these may be worthy activities, the chances of solving the business problems that the cross‐functional teams were created to solve are not high.

Climate change is the biggest threat facing the world. And Erick Miller has a big idea to tackle it. Miller, a frenetic L.A.-based entrepreneur and venture investor, has worked in Hollywood, invested in early dot-coms, and had a vital role in developing Snapchat’s highly popular spectacles. Now he wants to “tokenize the world” through his investment fund CoinCircle. As part of that, he and his partners have come up with a term they call “crypto-impact-economics.” Out of this concept, Miller and a team that includes UCLA finance professor Bhagwan Chowdhry and World Economic Forum oceans conservationist Gregory Stone came up with two special value tokens: the Ocean Health Coin and the Climate Coin. Those tokens would be issued to key stakeholders in the global climate problem, a mix of companies, governments, consumers, NGOs, and charities, who could use them to pay for a range of functions having to do with managing carbon credits and achieving emission and pollution reductions. The idea includes a reserve of tokens controlled by the World Economic Forum to manage the value of the global float of coins. The meat of the proposal involves a plan to irrevocably destroy some of the coins in reserve whenever international scientific bodies confirm that improvements in pollution and carbon emission targets have occurred. That act of destroying tokens, through a cryptographic function, will increase the surviving tokens’ scarcity and thus their value. The point: holders are motivated to act in the interests of improving the planet now, not tomorrow.

we must also ensure delivery teams are cross-functional, with all the skills necessary to design, develop, test, deploy, and operate the system on the same team.

The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.84 Because Buffett generally invests in low-tech companies like See’s Candies or Coca-Cola, the moat he refers to is often a strong brand or a unique business model. For software products with network effects, a strong moat means something different: how much effort, time, and capital does it take to replicate a product’s features and its network? In the modern era, cloning software features is usually not the hard part—replicating the complete functionality of a Slack or Airbnb might take time, but it is tractable. It’s the difficulty of cloning their network that makes these types of products highly defensible. I’ll use an example to think through the competitive moat. Let’s start from first principles, with an example of Airbnb trying to launch in a new city with no competitors in sight. As the early Airbnb team described, the Cold Start Problem lies in the difficulty of launching a new city to a Tipping Point of over 300 listings with 100 reviews. This requires real effort, because the minimum network size is quite large—contrasted to many other network types like communication apps, which might only require two or three people to get started. But once Airbnb has reached Escape Velocity in a market, the Cold Start Problem creates the defense against new entrants.

other words, they must build bridges across the chasms separating different functions, business units, or teams internally, and they must motivate people to walk across those bridges.

am impressed with how well they do in a world where street crime seems to be increasing exponentially. There is an obvious economic relationship between the amount of “free crime” at the top of the economic food chain, and the increases in poverty, hopelessness addiction and street crime at the bottom. The police are doing a great job (on the streets) in my view. If memory serves me they responded to 35,000 calls in one year with their $40 million dollar budget. However, the public must know that they (police) rarely respond or get involved in high value economic crime, and often they tell victims of million dollar crimes, that their complaint is a “civil matter” and should be dealt with in the civil courts. They do a great job at the level of street safety and property protection, but at most crimes over a certain financial level, or complexity, they defer to others. Police do not appear to function in government buildings and office suites, like they do in the streets. My government has offices for high value economic crimes. These are commercial crime police units called the RCMP Integrated Markets Enforcement Teams. (RCMP IMET) By some coincidence they also operate on a budget in the neighborhood of $40 Million dollars…but $40 Million is what they have for the protection of the entire country of Canada. They handle perhaps a dozen cases a year, and we rarely hear of a successful prosecution. I believe it is intentional. No person power finds it wise…to investigate persons in power.

The Very Difference Between Game Design & 3D Game Development You Always Want to Know Getting into the gaming industry is a dream for many people. In addition to the fact that this area is always relevant, dynamic, alive and impenetrable for problems inherent in other areas, it will become a real paradise for those who love games. Turning your hobby into work is probably the best thing that can happen in your career. What is Game Designing? A 3D Game Designer is a creative person who dreams up the overall design of a video game. Game design is a large field, drawing from the fields of computer science/programming, creative writing, and graphic design. Game designers take the creative lead in imagining and bringing to life video game worlds. Game designers discuss the following issues: • the target audience; • genre; • main plot; • alternative scenarios; • maps; • levels; • characters; • game process; • user interface; • rules and restrictions; • the primary and secondary goals, etc Without this information, further work on the game is impossible. Once the concept has been chosen, the game designers work closely with the artists and developers to ensure that the overall picture of the game is harmonized and that the implementation is in line with the original ideas. As such, the skills of a game designer are drawn from the fields of computer science and programming, creative writing and graphic design. Game designers take the creative lead in imagining and bringing to life video game stories, characters, gameplay, rules, interfaces, dialogue and environments. A game designer's role on a game development outsourcing team differs from the specialized roles of graphic designers and programmers. Graphic designers and game programmers have specific tasks to accomplish in the division of labor that goes into creating a video game, international students can major in those specific disciplines if desired. The game designer generates ideas and concepts for games. They define the layout and overall functionality of the Game Animation Studio. In short, they are responsible for creating the vision for the game. These geniuses produce innovative ideas for games. Game designers should have a knack for extraordinary and creative vision so that their game may survive in the competitive market. The field of game design is always in need of artists of all types who may be drawn to multiple art forms, original game design and computer animation. The game designer is the artist who uses his/her talents to bring the characters and plot to life. Who is a Game Development? Games developers use their creative talent and skills to create the games that keep us glued to the screen for hours and even days or make us play them by erasing every other thought from our minds. They are responsible for turning the vision into a reality, i.e., they convert the ideas or design into the actual game. Thus, they convert all the layouts and sketches into the actual product. It may involve concept generation, design, build, test and release. While you create a game, it is important to think about the game mechanics, rewards, player engagement and level design. 3D Game development involves bringing these ideas to life. Developers take games from the conceptual phase, through *development*, and into reality. The Game Development Services side of games typically involves the programming, coding, rendering, engineering, and testing of the game (and all of its elements: sound, levels, characters, and other assets, etc.). Here are the following stages of 3D Game Development Service, and the best ways of learning game development (step by step). • High Concept • Pitch • Concept • Game Design Document • Prototype • Production • Design • Level Creation • Programming

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a marketing strategy that focuses on managing interactions and relationships with customers. CRM enables businesses to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention by providing personalized experiences that meet their needs. CRM is an essential aspect of modern marketing as it enables businesses to understand their customers' behavior, preferences, and needs and develop targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with them. In Go High Level, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a core component of the platform. The CRM functionality in Go High Level enables businesses to manage their customer interactions and relationships more effectively, improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. The CRM functionality in Go High Level includes a range of features and tools designed to help businesses automate and streamline their customer-facing processes, as well as provide them with insights into their customers' behavior, preferences, and needs. In essence, CRM is a set of practices, technologies, and strategies that businesses use to manage their customer interactions and relationships. The goal of CRM is to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with customers by providing them with personalized experiences and tailored solutions. CRM in marketing can be divided into three main categories: operational CRM, analytical CRM, and collaborative CRM. Operational CRM focuses on automating and streamlining customer-facing processes, such as sales, marketing, and customer service. This type of CRM is designed to improve efficiency and productivity by automating repetitive tasks and providing a centralized database of customer information. Operational CRM includes features such as sales pipeline management, lead nurturing, and customer service management. Analytical CRM focuses on analyzing customer data to gain insights into their behavior, preferences, and needs. This type of CRM enables businesses to make data-driven decisions by providing them with a better understanding of their customers' needs and preferences. Analytical CRM includes features such as customer segmentation, data mining, and predictive analytics. Collaborative CRM focuses on enabling businesses to collaborate and share customer information across different departments and functions. This type of CRM helps to break down silos within organizations and improve communication and collaboration between different teams. Collaborative CRM includes features such as customer feedback management, social media monitoring, and knowledge management. CRM is important for marketing because it enables businesses to build stronger, more meaningful relationships with customers. By understanding their customers' behavior, preferences, and needs, businesses can develop targeted marketing campaigns that resonate with them. This results in higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. CRM can also help businesses to improve their sales and marketing processes by providing them with better visibility into their sales pipeline and enabling them to track and analyze their marketing campaigns' effectiveness. This enables businesses to make data-driven decisions to improve their sales and marketing strategies, resulting in increased revenue and growth. Another benefit of CRM in marketing is that it enables businesses to personalize their marketing campaigns. Personalization is essential in modern marketing as it enables businesses to tailor their marketing messages and solutions to meet their customers' specific needs and preferences. This results in higher engagement and conversion rates, as customers are more likely to respond to marketing messages that resonate with them. Lead Generation: Go High Level provides businesses with a range of tools to generate leads, including customizable landing pages, web forms, and social media integrations.

Chemically induced joy comes at a cost. That cost can be high. Very, very high. So high that you’re going to think twice after reading what science has to say about drug use. One study found that adolescents who smoke just a couple of joints of marijuana show changes in their brains. That’s not a couple of years of smoking or the decades that some adults rack up. It’s just two joints. A research team led by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a professor and psychiatrist at the McGill University Health Center in Montreal, discovered that teenagers using cannabis had a nearly 40% greater risk of depression and a 50% greater risk of suicidal ideation in adulthood. Dr. Gobbi stated that “given the large number of adolescents who smoke cannabis, the risk in the population becomes very big. About 7% of depression is probably linked to the use of cannabis in adolescence, which translates into more than 400,000 cases.” The research that revealed these startling numbers was not just a single study of adolescent marijuana use. It was a meta-analysis and review of 11 studies with a total of 23,317 teenage subjects followed through young adulthood. Further, Gobbi’s team only reviewed studies that provided information on depression in the subjects prior to their cannabis use. “We considered only studies that controlled for [preexisting] depression,” said Dr. Gobbi. “They were not depressed before using marijuana, so they probably weren’t using it to self-medicate.” Marijuana use preceded depression. The specific findings of Gobbi’s research include: The risk of depression associated with marijuana use in teens below age 18 is 1.4 times higher than among nonusers. The risk of suicidal thoughts is 1.5 times higher. The likelihood that teen marijuana users will attempt suicide is 3.46 times greater. In adults with prolonged marijuana use, the wiring of the brain degrades. Areas affected include the hippocampus (learning and memory), insula (compassion), and prefrontal cortex (executive functions). The authors of one study stated that “regular cannabis use is associated with gray matter volume reduction in the medial temporal cortex, temporal pole, parahippocampal gyrus, insula, and orbitofrontal cortex; these regions are rich in cannabinoid CB1 receptors and functionally associated with motivational, emotional, and affective processing. Furthermore, these changes correlate with the frequency of cannabis use . . . [while the] . . . age of onset of drug use also influences the magnitude of these changes.” A large number of studies show that cannabis use both increases anxiety and depression and leads to worse health. Key parts of your brain shrink more, based on how early you began smoking weed, and how often you smoke it. That’s a “high” price to pay.

A TikTok clone app script is a pre-built software solution that allows you to create a short-form video sharing app that is similar to TikTok in terms of features and functionality. TikTok clone scripts are typically much less expensive than developing a custom app from scratch, and they can be deployed quickly, allowing you to launch your video sharing app in a short amount of time. TikTok clone scripts are highly customizable, allowing you to tailor the platform to your specific needs. For example, you can change the branding of the app, add or remove features, and integrate your own monetization strategies. Here are some of the key features that you should look for in a TikTok clone app script: • Video recording and editing: The script should allow users to record and edit short-form videos. Editing features should include trimming, cropping, adding music and effects, and more. • Social features: The script should include social features such as following other users, liking and commenting on videos, and creating and participating in challenges. • Content moderation: The script should have robust content moderation systems in place to prevent the spread of harmful or offensive content. • Monetization options: The script should support a variety of monetization options, such as in-app advertising, subscription fees, and virtual goods. Once you have chosen a TikTok clone app script, you will need to work with a development team to customize the script and deploy your app. The development team will also help you to set up your monetization strategies and launch your app on the App Store and Google Play.

When leaders solicit criticism, respond constructively to it, and reward it, they begin the process of normalizing feedback as a positive force. When the CEO solicits criticism and rewards people for giving it to them it sends a signal to middle managers that they should do the same. As people at all levels of the organization realize giving honest feedback is safe and even encouraged, a virtuous cycle ensues, producing teams that function at a remarkably high level. People are more innovative when they are less afraid to take risks, and when they learn from mistakes rather than hiding and repeating them.

I’ve been reading this amazing book by a Navy SEAL who says that high-functioning teams must be clear on three things: the purpose of the team, my role within the team, and the value I bring to the team. I want to take actions that are consistently aligned with those things, but I’m not clear on what some of them are. This is what I think our team’s purpose is, what my role is, what value I bring to the team, and what valuable actions I must hold. Am I on track?

By definition, a product outcome is within the product trio’s span of control. Business outcomes, on the other hand, often require coordination across many business functions. For example, suppose Sonja’s team discovered that, in addition to some customers not understanding the value of tailor-made dog food and some dogs not liking the food, poor customer-support response times and surprise price increases that occurred after their trial period ended also influenced their high churn rate. In this case, product, marketing, and customer support might need to coordinate their efforts to increase retention.

The solfeggio is a six-note scale and is also nicknamed “the creational scale.” Traditional Indian music calls this scale the saptak, or seven steps, and relates each note to a chakra. These six frequencies, and their related effects, are as follows: Do 396 Hz Liberating guilt and fear Re 417 Hz Undoing situations and facilitating change Mi 528 Hz Transformation and miracles (DNA repair) Fa 639 Hz Connecting/relationships Sol 741 Hz Awakening intuition La 852 Hz Returning to spiritual order Mi has actually been used by molecular biologists to repair genetic defects.115 Some researchers believe that sound governs the growth of the body. As Dr. Michael Isaacson and Scott Klimek teach in a sound healing class at Normandale College in Minneapolis, Dr. Alfred Tomatis believes that the ear’s first in utero function is to establish the growth of the rest of the body. Sound apparently feeds the electrical impulses that charge the neocortex. High-frequency sounds energize the brain, creating what Tomatis calls “charging sounds.”116 Low-frequency sounds drain energy and high-frequency sounds attract energy. Throughout all of life, sound regulates the sending and receiving of energy—even to the point of creating problems. People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder listen too much with their bodies, processing sound through bone conduction rather than the ears. They are literally too “high in sound.”117 Some scientists go a step further and suggest that sound not only affects the body but also the DNA, actually stimulating the DNA to create information signals that spread throughout the body. Harvard-trained Dr. Leonard Horowitz has actually demonstrated that DNA emits and receives phonons and photons, the electromagnetic waves of sound and light. As well, three Nobel laureates in medical research have asserted that the primary function of DNA is not to synthesize proteins, but to perform bioacoustic and bioelectrical signaling.118 While research such as that by Dr. Popp shows that DNA is a biophoton emitter, other research suggests that sound actually originates light. In a paper entitled “A Holographic Concept of Reality,” which was featured in Stanley Krippner’s book Psychoenergetic Systems, a team of researchers led by Richard Miller showed that superposed coherent waves in the cells interact and form patterns first through sound, and secondly through light.119 This idea dovetails with research by Russian scientists Peter Gariaev and Vladimir Poponin, whose work with torsion energies was covered in Chapter 25. They demonstrated that chromosomes work like holographic biocomputers, using the DNA’s own electromagnetic radiation to generate and interpret spiraling waves of sound and light that run up and down the DNA ladder. Gariaev and his group used language frequencies such as words (which are sounds) to repair chromosomes damaged by X-rays. Gariaev thus concludes that life is electromagnetic rather than chemical and that DNA can be activated with linguistic expressions—or sounds—like an antenna. In turn, this activation modifies the human bioenergy fields, which transmit radio and light waves to bodily structures.120

Distinction The functional level of a team is determined by the size of their commitments and their consistency in holding them. High-functioning teams make big commitments and hold them all the time and low-functioning teams don’t make commitments or fail to hold the ones they make.

Three years ago, researchers at Purdue University began monitoring every hit sustained by two high school teams. The goal was to study the effect of concussions. But when researchers administered cognitive tests to players who had never been concussed, hoping to set up a control group, they discovered that these teens showed diminished brain function as well. As the season wore on, their cognitive abilities plummeted. In some cases, brain activity in the frontal lobes—the region responsible for reasoning—nearly disappeared by season’s end. "You have the classic stereotype of the dumb jock and I think the real issue is that’s not how they start out," explained Thomas Talavage, one of the professors of the study. "We actually create that individual.

Change the location of strategy meetings. Create an element of surprise. ■ Invite provocative conversations and presentations with “outsiders,” including those outside a functional group, a product group, an industry sector, or a particular level of management. ■ Establish interactions with non-experts, academics, politicians, consultants, professionals from various fields, children, teenagers, young adults, middle-age and mature adults, religious leaders, people from an extreme range of economic backgrounds, and those of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. ■ Volunteer to be part of an action-learning team to solve a problem for tasks that are outside of familiar functional or product areas. ■ Join conversations, discussions, and meetings where your frame is an outlier. ■ Participate in high-level strategy-making meetings and code the frames represented as points of view are expressed. ■ Note any frame omissions that could bring value.

What is common in high-performance teams is that they are cross-functional, collocated, and autonomous.

The scientists. The technicians. Everyone you needed to make it happen. They actually had to do this. They had to watch the video of people dying all over Eros. They had to design those radioactive murder chambers. So unless you managed to round up every serial killer in the solar system and send them through a postgraduate program, how did you do this?” “We modified our science team to remove ethical restraints.” Half a dozen clues clicked into place in Holden’s head. “Sociopaths,” he said. “You turned them into sociopaths.” “High-functioning sociopaths,” Dresden said with a nod.

Google Proves Nice Counts. On a quest to discover what it takes to build the "perfect team," Google launched the Project Aristotle initiative to find the answers. Over a period of several years, they surveyed hundreds of teams, conducted interviews, analyzed studies, and observed how team members interacted with one another. Google’s findings revealed that "psychological safety" is the key ingredient for creating a high-functioning team. It nurtures a healthy environment that encourages freedom of expression, engaging communication, empathy for one another, caring, support, respect and, drum roll please . . . BEING NICE!

There are other media too [the first being newspapers and control of information] whose basic social role is quite different. It’s diversion. There’s the real mass media, the kinds that are aimed at the guys who… Joe six-pack. That kind. The purpose of those media is just to dull people’s brain. This is an over-simplification, but for the 80 per cent or whatever they are, the main thing for them is to divert them. To get them to watch National Football League, and to worry about the… you know… mother with child with six heads, or whatever the thing you pick up on the supermarket stands, and so on. Or, you know, look at astrology, or get involved in fundamentalist stuff, or something. Just get them away you know. Get them away from things that matter. And for that, it’s important to reduce their capacity to think. Sports. That’s another crucial example of the indoctrination system in my view. For one thing, because it offers people something to pay attention to that is of no importance. That keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea about doing something about. And in fact, it’s striking to see the intelligence that’s used by ordinary people in sports. You listen to radio sations where people call in. They have the most exotic information and understanding of all kinds of arcane issues, and the press undoubtedly does a lot with this. I remember in high school I suddenly asked myself at one point: Why do I care if my high school team wins the football game? I mean, I don’t know anybody on the team, you know. […] It doesn’t make any sense. But the point is, it does make sense. It’s a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority. And, you know, group cohesion behind… you know, leadership elements. In fact, it’s training in irrational jingoism. That’s also a feature of competitive sports. I think, if you look closely at those things, typically, they do have functions, and that’s why energy is devoted to supporting them, and creating basis for them, and advertisers are willing to pay for them.

The essence of business consulting Business consulting is becoming a well-liked hit everywhere in the world. Consultation providers are important to business folks since they help them in making informative choices. That is solely potential after serving to them understand the workforce within the enterprise world. Managers who analyze the functionality of their businesses are bound to make higher earnings than those that don’t consult an expert for surveillance. They should perceive the risks concerned, weaknesses and strengths in order for their businesses to survive competition. It is with enterprise consulting that companies are capable of analyze as well as improve upon their strategic operations. This turns into attainable because of the experience across assorted fields translating into a spectrum of new ideas. Any effective enterprise consulting will allow you to faucet into their varied sources, capabilities as well as services. Your online business will take pleasure in proven approaches, ideas and even methods. Because of this you would not have to reinvent the wheel again. You make use of confirmed strategies and construct upon them. In spite of everything, this can ultimately translate into increased productiveness in addition to more sales for your online business. As a Richmond Business Help way to grow to be more productive in addition to worthwhile, the companies of a enterprise consulting cannot be ignored. Simply just remember to are on the same page as them. It's highly vital for a business to be on the identical wavelength as their enterprise consulting team. The enterprise states its wishes whereas the enterprise consultants rework it into an achievable aim. The business states its desires and the enterprise consultants define whether or not it's practical and the simplest method to turn dreams into reality. Involving a professional guide will information you in making crucial choices. They usually present you with different scenarios that are more likely to happen in the market in the present day. Additionally they explain how your decisions are prone to impression on what you are promoting in the future. In addition they present strategies on find out how to diversify the product line rather than relying on a single product. They are going to guide you to ensure that there's utmost progress and competition is at per. Enterprise consultants enhance the information stage of a business. Their data is effective. They've been involved in varied tasks earlier than and understand all of the facets involved in the planning process. Additionally they have a clear understanding of the dangers concerned in each enterprise growth step. You possibly can due to this fact depend upon them for the event of your enterprise.

Based on our research and interviews, we have identified nine core characteristics that mark an individual as having high potential: Drive—the unrelenting need for achievement and constant self-improvement Resiliency—the ability to persevere in the face of challenge and bounce back from setbacks Adaptability—the ability to adjust according to the situation, learn new things, innovate, and try new methods Humility—self-confidence in one’s ability while understanding that there’s always room for improvement and that others’ experiences and knowledge are valuable Integrity—an adherence to not only what is legal but also what is right Effective intelligence—the ability to apply one’s knowledge to real-world scenarios Team-ability—the ability to function as part of a team, placing the success of the whole above the needs of the self Curiosity—a desire to explore the unknown and question the status quo in pursuit of better, more effective solutions Emotional strength—a positive attitude, high empathy, and control over one’s emotions, especially in chaotic and stressful situations

2. Once you are at about 30 people, you should hold a weekly staff meeting. Schedule a regular weekly time. Review key metrics. Be ready with a set of key topics for discussion on broader company or product strategy or key issues a functional area faces. Different members of the staff can present on a specific key topics or issue each week. Note: this is not meant to be an opportunity for team members to give an in-depth update once a week—it is a forum for discussion of metrics and strategy. Remember the purpose of the meeting may be more for your reports then for you. While you have context on what every executive is doing, the other executives will not otherwise have clarity into their peers’ organizations. The weekly staff meetings are meant to create a forum for knowledge sharing and issue raising, relationship building, collaboration, and strategy.

The Group Product Manager Role There's a role in larger product organizations that I find especially effective. The role is titled group product manager, usually referred to as GPM. The GPM is a hybrid role. Part individual contributor and part first‐level people manager. The idea is that the GPM is already a proven product manager (usually coming from a senior product manager title), and now the person is ready for more responsibility. There are generally two career paths for product managers. One is to stay as an individual contributor, which, if you're strong enough, can go all the way up to a principal product manager—a person who's an individual contributor but a rock‐star performer and willing and able to tackle the toughest product work. This is a very highly regarded role and generally compensated like a director or even VP. The other path is to move into functional management of the product managers (the most common title is director of product management) where some number of product managers (usually somewhere between 3 and 10) report directly to you. The director of product management is really responsible for two things. The first is ensuring his or her product managers are all strong and capable. The second is product vision and strategy and connecting the dots between the product work of the many teams. This is also referred to as holistic view of product. But lots of strong senior product managers are not sure about their preferred career path at this stage, and the GPM role is a great way to get a taste of both worlds. The GPM is the actual product manager for one product team, but in addition, she is responsible for the development and coaching of a small number of additional product managers (typically, one to three others). While the director of product management may have product managers who work across many different areas, the GPM model is designed to facilitate tightly coupled product teams.

As strange as it sounds, it is no longer possible to determine how many human genomes have been sequenced. At present the strategy of choice is whole-genome re-sequencing (Chapter 3) whereby next-generation sequence data are mapped onto a reference genome. The results have been breathtaking. The recently concluded (and aptly named) 1000 Genomes Project Consortium catalogued ~85 million SNPs, 3.6 million short insertions/deletions, and 60,000 larger structural variants in a global sampling of human genetic diversity. These data are catalysing research in expected and unexpected ways. Beyond providing a rich source of data for GWA-type studies focused on disease, scientists are also using the 1000 Genomes Project data to learn about our basic biology, something that proved surprisingly difficult when only a pair of genomes was available. For example, a recent GWAS taking advantage of the 1000 Genomes Project data identified ten genes associated with kidney development and function, genes that had previously not been linked to this critical aspect of human physiology. In 2016, Craig Venter’s team reported the sequencing of 10,545 human genomes. Beyond the impressively low cost (US$1,000–2,000 per genome) and high quality (30–40× coverage), the study was significant in hinting at the depths of human genome diversity yet to be discovered. More than 150 million genetic variants were identified in both coding and non-coding regions of the genome; each sequenced genome had on average ~8,600 novel variants. Furthermore, each new genome was found to contain 0.7 Mbp of sequence that is not contained in the reference genome. This underscores the need for methods development in the area of structure variation detection in personal genome data. Overall, however, the authors concluded that ‘the data generated by deep genome sequencing is of the quality necessary for clinical use’.

Most squads are cross-functional, consisting of engineers and marketers, collaborating as a single team with a shared understanding of customer value.

For example, high performance with a functional-oriented and centralized Operations group is possible, as long as service teams get what they need from Operations reliably and quickly (ideally on demand) and vice-versa. Many

At the same time, the 3-point line starts to look more and more inviting. In the opening five minutes of the average NBA game, 17 percent of attempts are 3-pointers. In the clutch, 27 percent are 3-pointers. Accuracy plummets on those shots from 38% down to 31%, dropping from 1.15 points per shot to 0.93 points per shot. This is not a function of desperation 3-pointers or high-variance strategy – teams simply switch their tactics at the end of games. And they probably aren't even aware of this.117

Management—or the oversight of people, processes, and production—is just one function of some leaders. Organizations hope their managers will lead, but to be a leader, you need not have a management title because leadership is something else entirely. Leadership is not married to hierarchy, an organizational chart, or formal authority over a team. It’s a different animal, with more depth, breadth, and impact. I’ve known people who were little more than the boss of the applesauce, and yet they proved to be outstanding leaders. And I’ve known some vice presidents, executives, and Grand Poobahs—all with high-powered management titles, and not one of them could lead themselves, or anyone else, around a corner.

Teams fail—and the failure rate has been high—primarily because they do not impose on themselves the self-discipline and responsibility that are required precisely because of the high degree of freedom team organization gives. No task force can be “permissive” and function. This is the reason why the same young educated people who clamor for team work tend so often in reality to resist it. It makes tremendous demands on self-discipline.

As a manager in high altitude astronomy, if you report to the upper management team that their staff appear sick and that they are displaying behavioral problems, it was my experience that they respond by notifying you that your contract will not be renewed and that you will be terminated without notice if anyone complains about you! High altitude astronomy is a very shady industry that only functions by ignoring worker health and safety issues.

A cavalry scout is generally thought to function as the eyes and ears of a commander during battle. But in fact, a scout’s role extends quite a bit further. We refer to ourselves as “jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none,” and we are trained to have a working familiarity with—quite literally—every job in the army. We are experts in reconnaissance, countersurveillance, and navigation, but we’re also extremely comfortable with all aspects of radio and satellite communications. We know how to assemble and deploy three-man hunter/killer teams. We’re pretty good at blowing things up using mines and high explosives. We can function as medics, vehicle mechanics, and combat engineers. And we have a thorough understanding of every single weapons system, from a 9-mm handgun to a 120-mm howitzer.