Team Building Activities Quotes

We are adults undertaking a team-building activity in a professional capacity, so naturally we spend several minutes horsing around, striking poses with our paintball guns and making sound effects. Joshua and Sergeant Paintball watch us like orderlies at a mental facility.

The more we are able to engage in enthusiastic disagreement with each other, the more we will be able to uncover the best in ourselves and each other.

Effective leadership is purely effective listening. There will be problems in any organisation, your job is to actively listen so you can lead solutions.

Mother trees have an effect on the oceans as well, as Katsuhiko Matsunaga and his team in Japan had confirmed. The leaves, when they fall in the autumn, contain a very large, complex acid called fulvic acid. When the leaves decompose, the fulvic acid dissolves into the moisture of the soil, enabling the acid to pick up iron. This process is called chelation. The heavy, iron-containing fulvic acid is now ready to travel, leaving the home ground of the mother tree and heading for the ocean. In the ocean it drops the iron. Hungry algae, like phytoplankton, eat it, then grow and divide; they need iron to activate a body-building enzyme called nitrogenase. This set of relationships is the feeding foundation of the ocean This is what feeds the fish and keeps the mammals of the sea, like the whale and the otter healthy.

Teamwork is the best ever investment. If I make 3 and you make 5, together we will not make 8. We will make 15. Leaders build active teams!

Four years of fussing over spreadsheets until my eyes hurt and kissing egotistical traders’ asses in hopes that I could count on a good word come promotion time, staying late to cover for other risk analysts, planning team-building activities that didn’t involve used bowling shoes and all-you-can-eat MSG-laden buffets, and just like that, none of it matters. With one impromptu fifteen-minute meeting, I’m officially unemployed.

JFK asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to break up organized crime. Nobody high-up in government has tangled the Mafia. J. E. Hoover, the hired hands of FBI and CIA, ran the assassination teams. They have been used since World War II. JFK was attempting to end the oil-tax depletion rip-offs, to get tax money from oil companies. JFK instituted the nuclear test ban treaty, often called “the kiss of death,” to oppose the Pentagon. JFK called off the Invasion of Cuba. He allowed Castro to live, antagonized narcotics and gambling, oil and sugar interests, formerly in Cuba. JFK asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to break up the CIA, the “hidden government behind my back.” Allen Dulles was fired. Dulles, the attorney for international multinationals, was angry. JFK planned to withdraw troops from Vietnam after the 1964 elections. Nov. 24, 1963, two days after JFK’s burial, the Pentagon escalated the Vietnam war … with no known provocations, after JFK was gone. There was no chance Kennedy could survive antagonizing the CIA, oil companies, Pentagon, organized crime. He was not their man. The assassination of JFK employed people from the Texas-Southwest. It was not a Southern plot. Upstarts could not have controlled the northern CIA, FBI, Kennedy family connections. This was a more detailed, sophisticated conspiracy that was to set the pattern for future murders to take place. The murder was funded by Permindex, with headquarters in Montreal and Switzerland. Their stated purpose was to encourage trade between nations in the Western world. Their actual purpose was fourfold: 1) To fund and direct assassinations of European, Mid-East and world leaders considered threats to the western world, and to Petroleum Interests of their backers. 2) Provide couriers, agents for transporting and depositing funds through Swiss Banks for Vegas, Miami and the international gambling syndicate. 3) Coordinate the espionage activities of White Russian Solidarists and Division V of the FBI, headed by William Sullivan. 4) Build, acquire and operate hotels and gambling casinos. See: Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal, by William Torbitt.

As soon as we formulate a hypothesis that we want to test, the product development team should be engineered to design and run this experiment as quickly as possible, using the smallest batch size that will get the job done. Remember that although we write the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn because the activities happen in that order, our planning really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn and then work backwards to see what product will work as an experiment to get that learning. Thus, it is not the customer, but rather our hypothesis about the customer, that pulls work from product development and other functions. Any other work is waste.

To Polish the Gold & Help Others Shine . . . Catch people doing things right: Outstanding leaders know that people will be more engaged, perform at higher levels, and be more loyal when they are appreciated and celebrated. Jeff West, international speaker and author of The Unexpected Tour Guide, shares that “People will jump over high hurdles, fight fires and break through walls for leaders who find them doing things right. Building that kind of chemistry is essential if a team is going to jell.” Capitalize on the opportunity to notice what people are doing right at work and at home and they will deliver their best. As the old saying goes, “A person who feels appreciated will always do more than expected.

research psychologist named Hans Eysenck hypothesized that human beings seek “just right” levels of stimulation—not too much and not too little. Stimulation is the amount of input we have coming in from the outside world. It can take any number of forms, from noise to social life to flashing lights. Eysenck believed that extroverts prefer more stimulation than introverts do, and that this explained many of their differences: introverts enjoy shutting the doors to their offices and plunging into their work, because for them this sort of quiet intellectual activity is optimally stimulating, while extroverts function best when engaged in higher-wattage activities like organizing team-building workshops or chairing meetings.

Everything we do and say will either underline or undermine our discipleship process. As long as there is one unsaved person on my campus or in my city, then my church is not big enough. One of the underlying principles of our discipleship strategy is that every believer can and should make disciples. When a discipleship process fails, many times the fatal flaw is that the definition of discipleship is either unclear, unbiblical, or not commonly shared by the leadership team. Write down what you love to do most, and then go do it with unbelievers. Whatever you love to do, turn it into an outreach. You have to formulate a system that is appropriate for your cultural setting. Writing your own program for making disciples takes time, prayer, and some trial and error—just as it did with us. Learn and incorporate ideas from other churches around the world, but only after modification to make sure the strategies make sense in our culture and community. Culture is changing so quickly that staying relevant requires our constant attention. If we allow ourselves to be distracted by focusing on the mechanics of our own efforts rather than our culture, we will become irrelevant almost overnight. The easiest and most common way to fail at discipleship is to import a model or copy a method that worked somewhere else without first understanding the values that create a healthy discipleship culture. Principles and process are much more important than material, models, and methods. The church is an organization that exists for its nonmembers. Christianity does not promise a storm-free life. However, if we build our lives on biblical foundations, the storms of life will not destroy us. We cannot have lives that are storm-free, but we can become storm-proof. Just as we have to figure out the most effective way to engage our community for Christ, we also have to figure out the most effective way to establish spiritual foundations in each unique context. There is really only one biblical foundation we can build our lives on, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Pastors, teachers, and church staff believe their primary role is to serve as mentors. Their task is to equip every believer for the work of the ministry. It is not to do all the ministry, but to equip all the people to do it. Their top priority is to equip disciples to do ministry and to make disciples. Do you spend more time ministering to people or preparing people to minister? No matter what your church responsibilities are, you can prepare others for the same ministry. Insecurity in leadership is a deadly thing that will destroy any organization. It drives pastors and presidents to defensive positions, protecting their authority or exercising it simply to show who is the boss. Disciple-making is a process that systematically moves people toward Christ and spiritual maturity; it is not a bunch of randomly disconnected church activities. In the context of church leadership, one of the greatest and most important applications of faith is to trust the Holy Spirit to work in and through those you are leading. Without confidence that the Holy Spirit is in control, there is no empowering, no shared leadership, and, as a consequence, no multiplication.

In any case, there are all of those chores that most of us can’t avoid: cleaning, straightening, raking leaves, shopping for groceries, driving the children to various activities, preparing food, washing dishes, washing the car, commuting, performing the routine, repetitive aspects of our jobs. This is the “in-between time,” the stuff we have to take care of before getting on to the things that count. But if you stop to think about it, most of life is “in between.” When goal orientation comes to dominate our thoughts, little that seems to really count is left. During the usual nonplayoff year, the actual playing time for a National Football League team is sixteen hours. For the players, does this mean that the other 8,744 hours of the year are “in between”? Does all time take its significance only in terms of the product, the bottom line? And if winning, as the saying goes, is the only thing, does that mean that even the climactic hours achieve their worth merely through victory? There’s another way of thinking about it. Zen practice is ostensibly organized around periods of sitting in meditation and chanting. Yet every Zen master will tell you that building a stone wall or washing dishes is essentially no different from formal meditation. The quality of a Zen student’s practice is defined just as much by how he or she sweeps

The various ways of creating a culture of innovation that we’ve talked about so far are greatly influenced by the leaders at the top. Leaders can’t dictate culture, but they can nurture it. They can generate the right conditions for creativity and innovation. Metaphorically, they can provide the heat and light and moisture and nutrients for a creative culture to blossom and grow. They can focus the best efforts of talented individuals to build innovative, successful groups. In our work at IDEO, we have been lucky enough to meet frequently with CEOs and visionary leaders from both the private and public sectors. Each has his or her own unique style, of course, but the best all have an ability to identify and activate the capabilities of people on their teams. This trait goes far beyond mere charisma or even intelligence. Certain leaders have a knack for nurturing people around them in a way that enables them to be at their best. One way to describe those leaders is to say they are “multipliers,” a term we picked up from talking to author and executive advisor Liz Wiseman. Drawing on a background in organizational behavior and years of experience as a global human resources executive at Oracle Corporation, Liz interviewed more than 150 leaders on four continents to research her book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter. Liz observes that all leaders lie somewhere on a continuum between diminishers, who exercise tight control in a way that underutilizes their team’s creative talents, and multipliers, who set challenging goals and then help employees achieve the kind of extraordinary results that they themselves may not have known they were capable of.

The climate for relationships within an innovation group is shaped by the climate outside it. Having a negative instead of a positive culture can cost a company real money. During Seagate Technology’s troubled period in the mid-to-late 1990s, the company, a large manufacturer of disk drives for personal computers, had seven different design centers working on innovation, yet it had the lowest R&D productivity in the industry because the centers competed rather than cooperated. Attempts to bring them together merely led people to advocate for their own groups rather than find common ground. Not only did Seagate’s engineers and managers lack positive norms for group interaction, but they had the opposite in place: People who yelled in executive meetings received “Dog’s Head” awards for the worst conduct. Lack of product and process innovation was reflected in loss of market share, disgruntled customers, and declining sales. Seagate, with its dwindling PC sales and fading customer base, was threatening to become a commodity producer in a changing technology environment. Under a new CEO and COO, Steve Luczo and Bill Watkins, who operated as partners, Seagate developed new norms for how people should treat one another, starting with the executive group. Their raised consciousness led to a systemic process for forming and running “core teams” (cross-functional innovation groups), and Seagate employees were trained in common methodologies for team building, both in conventional training programs and through participation in difficult outdoor activities in New Zealand and other remote locations. To lead core teams, Seagate promoted people who were known for strong relationship skills above others with greater technical skills. Unlike the antagonistic committees convened during the years of decline, the core teams created dramatic process and product innovations that brought the company back to market leadership. The new Seagate was able to create innovations embedded in a wide range of new electronic devices, such as iPods and cell phones.

In the future that globalists and feminists have imagined, for most of us there will only be more clerkdom and masturbation. There will only be more apologizing, more submission, more asking for permission to be men. There will only be more examinations, more certifications, mandatory prerequisites, screening processes, background checks, personality tests, and politicized diagnoses. There will only be more medication. There will be more presenting the secretary with a cup of your own warm urine. There will be mandatory morning stretches and video safety presentations and sign-off sheets for your file. There will be more helmets and goggles and harnesses and bright orange vests with reflective tape. There can only be more counseling and sensitivity training. There will be more administrative hoops to jump through to start your own business and keep it running. There will be more mandatory insurance policies. There will definitely be more taxes. There will probably be more Byzantine sexual harassment laws and corporate policies and more ways for women and protected identity groups to accuse you of misconduct. There will be more micro-managed living, pettier regulations, heavier fines, and harsher penalties. There will be more ways to run afoul of the law and more ways for society to maintain its pleasant illusions by sweeping you under the rug. In 2009 there were almost five times more men either on parole or serving prison terms in the United States than were actively serving in all of the armed forces.[64] If you’re a good boy and you follow the rules, if you learn how to speak passively and inoffensively, if you can convince some other poor sleepwalking sap that you are possessed with an almost unhealthy desire to provide outstanding customer service or increase operational efficiency through the improvement of internal processes and effective organizational communication, if you can say stupid shit like that without laughing, if your record checks out and your pee smells right—you can get yourself a J-O-B. Maybe you can be the guy who administers the test or authorizes the insurance policy. Maybe you can be the guy who helps make some soulless global corporation a little more money. Maybe you can get a pat on the head for coming up with the bright idea to put a bunch of other guys out of work and outsource their boring jobs to guys in some other place who are willing to work longer hours for less money. Whatever you do, no matter what people say, no matter how many team-building activities you attend or how many birthday cards you get from someone’s secretary, you will know that you are a completely replaceable unit of labor in the big scheme of things.

THE ORIGIN OF INTELLIGENCE Many theories have been proposed as to why humans developed greater intelligence, going all the way back to Charles Darwin. According to one theory, the evolution of the human brain probably took place in stages, with the earliest phase initiated by climate change in Africa. As the weather cooled, the forests began to recede, forcing our ancestors onto the open plains and savannahs, where they were exposed to predators and the elements. To survive in this new, hostile environment, they were forced to hunt and walk upright, which freed up their hands and opposable thumbs to use tools. This in turn put a premium on a larger brain to coordinate tool making. According to this theory, ancient man did not simply make tools—“tools made man.” Our ancestors did not suddenly pick up tools and become intelligent. It was the other way around. Those humans who picked up tools could survive in the grasslands, while those who did not gradually died off. The humans who then survived and thrived in the grasslands were those who, through mutations, became increasingly adept at tool making, which required an increasingly larger brain. Another theory places a premium on our social, collective nature. Humans can easily coordinate the behavior of over a hundred other individuals involved in hunting, farming, warring, and building, groups that are much larger than those found in other primates, which gave humans an advantage over other animals. It takes a larger brain, according to this theory, to be able to assess and control the behavior of so many individuals. (The flip side of this theory is that it took a larger brain to scheme, plot, deceive, and manipulate other intelligent beings in your tribe. Individuals who could understand the motives of others and then exploit them would have an advantage over those who could not. This is the Machiavellian theory of intelligence.) Another theory maintains that the development of language, which came later, helped accelerate the rise of intelligence. With language comes abstract thought and the ability to plan, organize society, create maps, etc. Humans have an extensive vocabulary unmatched by any other animal, with words numbering in the tens of thousands for an average person. With language, humans could coordinate and focus the activities of scores of individuals, as well as manipulate abstract concepts and ideas. Language meant you could manage teams of people on a hunt, which is a great advantage when pursuing the woolly mammoth. It meant you could tell others where game was plentiful or where danger lurked. Yet another theory is “sexual selection,” the idea that females prefer to mate with intelligent males. In the animal kingdom, such as in a wolf pack, the alpha male holds the pack together by brute force. Any challenger to the alpha male has to be soundly beaten back by tooth and claw. But millions of years ago, as humans became gradually more intelligent, strength alone could not keep the tribe together.

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

Teams that did well had fewer than three active branches at any time, their branches had very short lifetimes (less than a day) before being merged into trunk and never had “code freeze” or stabilization periods.

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

Trunk-based development has been shown to be a predictor of high performance in software development and delivery. It is characterized by fewer than three active branches in a code repository; branches and forks having very short lifetimes (e.g., less than a day) before being merged into master; and application teams rarely or never having “code lock” periods when no one can check in code or do pull requests due to merging conflicts, code freezes, or stabilization phases.

Teens eat, bunk, talk, and play together; team-building challenges help them rely on one another, and activities help them find creative solutions together.

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The viewing figures we saw earlier in this book suggest that sport is the most important communal activity in many people’s lives. Nearly a third of Americans watch the Super Bowl. However, European soccer is even more popular. In the Netherlands, possibly the European country that follows its national team most eagerly, three-quarters of the population watch Holland’s biggest soccer games. In many European countries, World Cups may now be the greatest shared events of any kind. To cap it all, World Cups mostly take place in June, the peak month for suicides in the Northern Hemisphere. How many Exleys have been saved from jumping off apartment buildings by international soccer tournaments, the world’s biggest sporting events?

The Interview The largest determining factor in whether you get a job is usually the interview itself. You’ve made impressions all along—with your telephone call and your cover letter and resume. Now it is imperative that you create a favorable impression when at last you get a chance to talk in person. This can be the ultimate test for a socially anxious person: After all, you are being evaluated on your performance in the interview situation. Activate your PMA, then build up your energy level. If you have followed this program, you now possess the self-help techniques you need to help you through the situation. You can prepare yourself for success. As with any interaction, good chemistry is important. The prospective employer will think hard about whether you will fit in—both from a production perspective and an interactive one. The employer may think: Will this employee help to increase the bottom line? Will he interact well as part of the team within the social system that already exists here? In fact, your chemistry with the interviewer may be more important than your background and experience. One twenty-three-year-old woman who held a fairly junior position in an advertising firm nonetheless found a good media position with one of the networks, not only because of her skills and potential, but because of her ability to gauge a situation and react quickly on her feet. What happened? The interviewer began listing the qualifications necessary for the position that was available: “Self-starter, motivated, creative . . .” “Oh,” she said, after the executive paused, “you’re just read my resume!” That kind of confidence and an ability to take risks not only amused the interviewer; it displayed some of the very skills the position required! The fact that interactive chemistry plays such a large role in getting a job has both positive and negative aspects. The positive side is that a lack of experience doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t get a particular job. Often, with the right basic education and life skills, you can make a strong enough impression based on who you are and how capable you seem that the employer may feel you are trainable for the job at hand. In my office, for example, we interviewed a number of experienced applicants for a secretarial position, only to choose a woman whose office skills were not as good as several others’, but who had the right chemistry, and who we felt would fit best into the existing system in the office. It’s often easier to teach or perfect the required skills than it is to try to force an interactive chemistry that just isn’t there. The downside of interactive chemistry is that even if you do have the required skills, you may be turned down if you don’t “click” with the interviewer.

When strategy is adjusted, leadership teams must scrutinize the work of the organization and discern what new or existing activities and touch points will actually deliver differentiation in the marketplace. Not what activities are familiar old friends that have previously contributed to success. Not what activities are headed by the most charismatic or brilliant people in your company. Not what activities are considered "best in class.” Not what activities are prescribed by the myriad of institutions that inform the education and professional certification of technical experts you have hired. Not what activities are legislated. Just those activities that will help you win because they set you apart from everyone else.

Part of their approach involved making structure change to group competitive work more tightly together and separate it from noncompetitive work. The mind-set required by the two workforces is different—one to strive toward differentiation and excellence, one to aim for extraordinary efficiency. Non-competitive work is not necessarily less important—many non-strategic tasks, such as payroll, sales administration, and network operations, are absolutely crucial for running the business. But non-competitive work tends to be more transactional in nature. It often feels more urgent as well. And herein lies the problem. If the same product expert who answers demanding administrative questions and labors to fill out complicated compliance paperwork is also responsible for helping to craft unique, integrated solutions for clients, the whole client experience—the competitive work—could easily fall apart. Prying apart these two different types of activities so different teams can perform them ensures that vital competitive work is not engulfed by less competitive tasks.

I’ve learned that you have to be part therapist, part leader, and part den mother to your people. It takes a ton of work. It’s exhausting. And constant. But when you do it: when you build that team of people who would take a bullet for you, or anyone else on their team, that’s when you make magic.

in the content and bring ideas to discuss during the session. Then, when everyone was together, Craig facilitated a dialogue on the topic and ensured that everyone had a chance to share their thoughts and connect them to both their group and the work that they did. Prior to these sessions, Craig shared that his colleagues often squabbled over resources, resisted collaboration on even simple ideas, and it felt like people were actively working against one another to build up their own department while breaking down others. He was amazed that, as he introduced these leadership concepts, like team trust, credibility, and accountability, both the conversation and cooperation among peers gradually shifted. The risk that he took—reimagining meetings and sharing new ideas—transformed his environment.

To begin the discussion of the Tipping Point, I’ll start with a prominent strategy, “Invite-Only,” that is often used to suck in a large network through viral growth. Another method to tip over a market is with a “Come for the Tool, Stay for the Network” strategy. Take Dropbox, for instance, which is initially adopted by many people for file backup and keeping files synced up between work and home computers—this is the tool. But eventually, a more advanced and stickier use case emerges to share folders with colleagues—this is the network. And if that doesn’t work, some products can always just spend money to build out their network, with a strategy of just “Paying Up for Launch.” For many networked products that touch transactions like marketplaces, teams can just subsidize demand and spend millions to stimulate activity, whether that’s in paying content creators for your social network, or subsidizing driver earnings in rideshare. If the hard side of the network isn’t yet activated, a team can just fill in their gaps themselves, using the technique of “Flintstoning”—as Reddit did, submitting links and content until eventually adding automation and community features for scale. In the end, all of these strategies require enormous creativity. And to close out the Tipping Point section of the book, I introduce Uber’s core ethos of “Always Be Hustlin’”—describing the creativity and decentralized set of teams, all with its own strategies that were localized to each region. Sometimes adding the fifth or one hundredth network requires creativity, product engagements, and tactical changes. In the goal of reaching the Tipping Point, teams must be fluid to build out a broad network of networks.

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There is great power in music. The main reason movies and television shows have soundtracks is to heighten our emotional experience. Music can move us to feel all sorts of emotions including excitement, love, and joy. It is communal. It brings us together in ways that other team-building activities can’t.

building and running software systems is a sociotechnical activity, not an assembly line in a factory.

Said differently, in the modern work environment, the cycle of learning, unlearning, and learning again demands that workers embrace their agency to act and work in ways that make them more creative, more productive, and more fully human. Workplace leaders must risk the vulnerability to admit they don't have all the answers and willingness to discover together with their teams. The honest and fearless embrace of your own vulnerability builds the psychological safety that enables your team to be active, adaptive learners.

About the Bacharach Leadership Group: Training for Pragmatic Leadership™ “Vision without execution is hallucination.”—Thomas Edison The litmus test of pragmatic leadership is results. The Bacharach Leadership Group (BLG) focuses on the skills necessary to lead and move agendas. Whether in corporations, nonprofits, universities, or entrepreneurial start-ups, BLG instructors train leaders in the core competencies necessary to execute change and innovation. At all levels of the organization, leaders must master ideation skills for innovation, political skills for moving change, negotiation skills for building support, coaching skills for engagement, and team leadership skills for going the distance. The BLG approach: 1. ASSESSMENT BLG will assess your organizational challenges and leadership needs. 2. ALIGNMENT BLG will align its training solutions with your organization’s challenges and culture. 3. TRAINING BLG training includes options for mixed-modality delivery, interactive activities, and collaboration with an emphasis on application. 4. OWNERSHIP BLG provides continuous follow-up, access to the exclusive BLG mobile apps library, and coaching. Whether delivering a complete leadership academy or a specific program or workshop, BLG will partner with you to get the results you need. To keep up to date with the BLG perspective, visit blg-lead.com or contact us at info@blg-lead.com.

I believe that the use of such words as multitask, access, interface, download, and others to describe human activity versus machine activity is one of the subtle ancillary aspects of the high-tech workplace that contributes to the further dehumanization of that workplace.

You can do a lot to compensate for your vulnerabilities. Three basic tools are self-discipline, team building, and advice and counsel. You need to discipline yourself to devote time to critical activities that you do not enjoy and that may not come naturally. Beyond that, actively search out people in your organization whose skills are sharp in these areas, so that they can serve as a backstop for you and you can learn from them. A network of advisers and counselors can also help you move beyond your comfort zone.

One way to make yourself less vulnerable to copycats is to build a moat around your business. How Can I Build a Moat? As you scale your company, you need to think about how to proactively defend against competition. The more success you have, the more your competitors will grab their battering ram and start storming the castle. In medieval times, you’d dig a moat to keep enemy armies from getting anywhere near your castle. In business, you think about your economic moat. The idea of an economic moat was popularized by the business magnate and investor Warren Buffett. It refers to a company’s distinct advantage over its competitors, which allows it to protect its market share and profitability. This is hugely important in a competitive space because it’s easy to become commoditized if you don’t have some type of differentiation. In SaaS, I’ve seen four types of moats. Integrations (Network Effect) Network effect is when the value of a product or service increases because of the number of users in the network. A network of one telephone isn’t useful. Add a second telephone, and you can call each other. But add a hundred telephones, and the network is suddenly quite valuable. Network effects are fantastic moats. Think about eBay or Craigs-list, which have huge amounts of sellers and buyers already on their platforms. It’s difficult to compete with them because everyone’s already there. In SaaS—particularly in bootstrapped SaaS companies—the network effect moat comes not from users, but integrations. Zapier is the prototypical example of this. It’s a juggernaut, and not only because it’s integrated with over 3,000 apps. It has widened its moat with nonpublic API integrations, meaning that if you want to compete with it, you have to go to that other company and get their internal development team to build an API for you. That’s a huge hill to climb if you want to launch a Zapier competitor. Every integration a customer activates in your product, especially if it puts more of their data into your database, is another reason for them not to switch to a competitor. A Strong Brand When we talk about your brand, we’re not talking about your color scheme or logo. Your brand is your reputation—it’s what people say about your company when you’re not around.

•  Join a sports team (a structured activity, yes, but better than nothing!), or take a fun exercise class like pole dancing, trampoline, or trapeze.         •  Engage in games that are fun for you. It could be board or card games, crosswords, or darts. Perhaps you love putting together model airplanes or building with Legos. Consider buying a Ping-Pong or pool table . . . and be careful not to turn that table into another place for competition and über-focus.         •  Find a play partner. Animals and children are always ready to play and laugh. Find opportunities to play with your own children or pets or those of friends and family. Finding

The next step is, then, for each member of the group, beginning with the founder, to ask: ‘What are the activities that I am doing well? And what are the activities that each of my key associates in this business is actually doing well?’ Again, there is going to be agreement on most of the people and on most of their strengths. But, again, any disagreement should be taken seriously. Next, one asks: ‘Which of the key activities should each of us, therefore, take on as his or her first and major responsibility because they fit the individual’s strengths? Which individual fits which key activity?’ Then the work on building a team can begin. The founder starts to discipline himself (or herself) not to handle people and their problems, if this is not the key activity that fits him best. Perhaps this individual’s key strength is new products and new technology. Perhaps this individual’s key activity is operations, manufacturing, physical distribution, service. Or perhaps it is money and finance and someone else had better handle people. But all key activities need to be covered by someone who has proven ability in performance.

Teamwork is the best ever investment. If I make 3 and you make 5, together we will not make 8. We will make 15. Leaders build active teams.

But why are those moments so essential? It's because laughter boosts productivity. It makes a task more manageable. It releases endorphins, forges emotional connections, and can encourage more honest communication. When your staff has fun at work, they work together more collaboratively. Every single day at work becomes a team-building activity.

Creative people in particular traditionally have strained relations with systems, structures, standards, and other perceived constraints on their creative freedom. Nowhere is this clearer than in big organizations where people often complain that “the systems” kill creativity, longingly thinking back to the halcyon days when the company was young and less bureaucratic. Going back to the unstructured start-up days is not an option, however. Established companies require a different kind of innovation: they need a culture in which creativity is part of the corporate ecosystem. The key to building a creative culture is not to declare war on systems, processes, and policies, but to embrace and redesign them so they support and actively enhance innovative behavior. Managers, in other words, have to fight systems with systems, creating an architecture of innovation in their teams and departments. The primary aim is to help people behave more like innovators.

for several years starting in 2004, Bezos visited iRobot’s offices, participated in strategy sessions held at places like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and became a mentor to iRobot chief executive Colin Angle, who cofounded the company in 1990. “He recognized early on that robots were a very disruptive game-changer,’’ Angle says of Bezos. “His curiosity about our space led to a very cool period of time where I could count upon him for a unique perspective.’’ Bezos is no longer actively advising the company, but his impact on the local tech scene has only grown larger. In 2008, Bezos’ investment firm provided initial funding for Rethink Robotics, a Boston company that makes simple-to-program manufacturing robots. Four years later, Amazon paid $775 million for North Reading-based Kiva, which makes robots that transport merchandise in warehouses. Also in 2012, Amazon opened a research and software development outpost in Cambridge that has done work on consumer electronics products like the Echo, a Wi-Fi-connected speaker that responds to voice commands. Rodney Brooks, an iRobot cofounder who is now chief technology officer of Rethink, says he met Bezos at the annual TED Conference. Bezos was aware of work that Brooks, a professor emeritus at MIT, had done on robot navigation and control strategies. Helen Greiner, the third cofounder of iRobot, says she met Bezos at a different technology conference, in 2004. Shortly after that, she recruited him as an adviser to iRobot. Bezos also made an investment in the company, which was privately held at the time. “He gave me a number of memorable insights,’’ Angle says. “He said, ‘Just because you won a bet doesn’t mean it was a good bet.’ Roomba might have been lucky. He was challenging us to think hard about where we were going and how to leverage our success.’’ On visits to iRobot, Greiner recalls, “he’d shake everyone’s hand and learn their names. He got them engaged.’’ She says one of the key pieces of advice Bezos supplied was about the value of open APIs — the application programming interfaces that allow other software developers to write software that talks to a product like the Roomba, expanding its functionality. The advice was followed. (Amazon also offers a range of APIs that help developers build things for its products.) By spending time with iRobot, Bezos gave employees a sense they were on the right track. “We were all believers that robotics would be huge,’’ says former iRobot exec Tom Ryden. “But when someone like that comes along and pays attention, it’s a big deal.’’ Angle says that Bezos was an adviser “in a very formative, important moment in our history,’’ and while they discussed “ideas about what practical robots could do, and what they could be,’’ Angle doesn’t want to speculate about what, exactly, Bezos gleaned from the affiliation. But Greiner says she believes “there was learning on both sides. We already had a successful consumer product with Roomba, and he had not yet launched the Kindle. He was learning from us about successful consumer products and robotics.’’ (Unfortunately, Bezos and Amazon’s public relations department would not comment.) The relationship trailed off around 2007 as Bezos got busier — right around when Amazon launched the Kindle, Greiner says. Since then, Bezos and Amazon have stayed mum about most of their activity in the state. His Bezos Expeditions investment team is still an investor in Rethink, which earlier this month announced its second product, a $29,000, one-armed robot called Sawyer that can do precise tasks, such as testing circuit boards. The warehouse-focused Kiva Systems group has been on a hiring tear, and now employs more than 500 people, according to LinkedIn. In December, Amazon said that it had 15,000 of the squat orange Kiva robots moving around racks of merchandise in 10 of its 50 distribution centers. Greiner left iRo

A Complete Guide to Conduct A Backlinks Audit Google's web spam team is very pro-active today to detect spam at maximum lowest degree in order to give spam-free search results to its viewers. In this regard, Google is making their algorithm strong to block the spammers from search results and attacking on each and every websites having un-natural or spam link profiles. If your website has large number of low quality backlinks OR exceeding 3% backlinks with exact match anchor texts then you should consider reviewing your website's link profile. If you are victim of Google penguin penalty then you have to evaluate your website's link profile to clean it from low quality or over-optimized backlinks. Building backlinks for a single or multiple websites can be a easy task while evaluating backlinks quality can be a challenging. In this regard, you should conduct a detailed backlinks analysis in order clean-up your website from low quality or un-natural backlinks. You should consider the following points while analyzing backlinks profile of a website: 1: Total number of backlinks 2: Total number of referring domains 3: Anchor text distribution ratio 4: Quality of backlinks 1: Number of backlinks This is the 1st main point to review while checking the link profile. You have to download the list of all backlinks to check each and every backlinks. Google Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, MajesticSEO and Opensiteexplore are some important tools can help you to get the list of backlinks attached with your website. Now, check each and every backlinks from the list you download and see if these are on Google's webmaster quality guidelines or not. 2: Referring Domains You should check the quality also for TLDs linked with your website. Check the PA and DA of each domain and see if these are relevant to your website niche to get backlinks. If linked domains have high external backlinks and not relevant to your website niche then try to remove these domains from your website. 3: Anchor test distribution This is the most important thing to consider while doing backlinks analysis of any website. Most of SEOs prefer to build backlinks with exact match anchor text only and ignoring Brand, Generic, LSI as well as other types of anchor text. Google penguin heavily attack on website having over-optimized exact match anchor text backlinks profile. Review all exact-match anchor text backlinks and remove it if found not-relevant or from low quality websites. 4: Quality of backlinks Backlinks quality really matters while doing backlinks analysis. If your website is full of linked with low quality and irrelevant websites then you should immediately try to remove these from your website. These low quality backlinks might be reason for your web penalization from search results.

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!

Benefits of Being Nice • You set positive karma into motion. • What you give is what you get back in return. • You are more likable. • People will treat you better. • You will reduce personal stress. • You will make friends more easily. • You can improve someone else’s day. • You will have less drama in your life. • It takes less energy than being otherwise. • It makes you a more valuable team player. • You create a sense of emotional safety for others. • It can keep you physically and psychologically safe. • You set a positive example for others to play nicely. • You will build bridges of cooperation and collaboration. • You will improve personal and professional interactions • Lastly, being nice feels nice!

For some time now, the conventional wisdom at most agencies has been to partner with experts in specific fields—social networking, gaming, mobile, or any other discipline—in order to “get the best people for the job.” But given the success of AKQA, R/GA, and so many other innovators, perhaps it can be argued that to be truly holistic in our approach, it’s better to grow innovations from one’s own stem cells, so to speak, than to try to graft on capabilities on an ad-hoc basis. Some would no doubt argue that it makes the most economic sense to hire experts to execute as needed, rather than taking on more overhead in an increasingly competitive marketplace. But it should be pointed out that it’s hard to have the original ideas themselves if your own team doesn’t have a firm grasp of the technologies. Without a cross-disciplinary team of in-house experts, who knows what opportunities you—and by extension, your clients—may miss. “It comes down to the brains that you have working with you to make it a reality,” John Butler, cofounder of Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, tells me. “The history of the ad agency is the Bernbach model—the writer and art director sitting in a room together coming up with an idea,” he says, referring to legendary adman Bill Bernbach, cofounder of DDB and the man who first combined copywriters and art directors as two-person teams. Now, all that’s changed. “[Today, there are] fifteen people sitting in a room. Media is as much a part of the creative department as a writer or an art director. And we have account planners—we call them ‘connection planners’—in the room throwing around ideas,” he says. “That facilitates getting to work that is about the experience, about ways to compel consumers to interact with your brand in a way that they become like free media” by actively promoting the brand for you. If his team worked on the old Bernbach model, Butler adds, they would never have created something like those cool MINI billboards that display messages to drivers by name that I described in the last chapter. The idea actually spun out of a discussion about 3-D glasses for print ads. “Someone in the interactive group said, ‘We can probably do that same thing with [radio frequency identification] technology.’” By using transmitters built into the billboards, and building RFID chips into MINI key fobs, “when a person drives by, it will recognize him and it will spit out a message just for him.” He adds with considerable understatement: “Through having those capabilities, in-house engineers, technical guys who know the technology and what’s available, we were able to create something that was really pretty cool.

Universities use their endowments to finance a range of activities, from scholarships to building projects. Harvard has promised to use its financial resources to make sure that anyone can afford to attend. Harvard did not give a reason for Ms. Mendillo’s departure. In an interview, Ms. Mendillo, a former chief investment officer of Wellesley College who spent an earlier 15-year period at the Harvard Management Company, said she felt the time was right to move on. “We’ve made a great recovery from the financial crisis, we’ve repositioned the portfolio and we’ve built a great team,” she said.

test subjects played a gambling game while Knutson and his team looked at which areas of their brains became more active. The startling results showed that the nucleus accumbens was not activating when the reward (in this case a monetary payout) was received, but rather, in anticipation of it. The study revealed that what draws us to act is not the sensation we receive from the reward itself, but the need to alleviate the craving for that reward. The stress of desire in the brain appears to compel us, just as it did in Olds’ and Milner’s lab mouse experiments.

In 1857, to encourage continued settlement of the West, Congress passed the Pacific Wagon Road Act, which among other improvements to the trail called for the surveying of a shorter route to Idaho across the bottom of the Wind Rivers and the forested Bridger-Teton wilderness to the west. Frederick W. Lander, a hotheaded but experienced explorer and engineer, was assigned the job. He made Burnt Ranch the trailhead and main supply depot for the trail-building job, which became one of the largest government-financed projects of the nineteenth century. Lander hired hundreds of workers from the new Mormon settlement at Salt Lake and supplied the enterprise with large mule-team caravans that ferried provisions and equipment from U.S. Army depots in Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. “With crowds of laborers hauling wood, erecting buildings and tending stock,” writes historian Todd Guenther, “the area was a beehive of activity.” The engineers, logging crews, and workers quickly hacked out what became known as the Lander Cutoff, which saved more than sixty miles, almost a week’s travel, across the mountains. In places, the Lander Cutoff was a steep up-and-down ride, but the route offered cooler, high terrain and plentiful water, an advantage over the scorching desert of the main ruts to the south. Eventually an estimated 100,000 pioneers took this route, and the 230-mile Lander Cutoff was considered an engineering marvel of its time. This

Get to know the interface   Now that you have caught your very first Pokémon, you’re set to shape your own Pokémon future and catch them all. Back on the map, which will be the screen you visit the most, you can find various points of interest, including your character’s position. Your position on the map is updated with real-time movement in your actual surroundings. Around your character is a radius, indicated with a purple circle. You can interact with points of interest within this radius. Do note that you will only be able to interact and move around when you have an active internet connection and when the application has access to your location.   Around your character, you will see blue floating cubes: PokéStops, as well as colored buildings: gyms. We will be treating these more carefully later on in the book. On the bottom of your screen you will see three main buttons: left being your avatar, right being Pokémon that are nearby and the middle button functions as the menu.   When you tap your avatar button, you can see your character and character name, your level, your balance, a journal of your activities, your team and last but not least: your medals. Increasing your level is achieved by gaining XP, short for experience. There are various ways to gain experience, which we will cover later on in this book. In this chapter, we just want to familiarize ourselves with the interface. You can check the requirements of any achievement by simply tapping on either of them.   When you make it back to the map, we will check out the middle button next to familiarize ourselves with the main menu. There are four subdivisions in the main menu: the Pokédex, the Shop, your Pokémon and your Items. First up is the Pokédex, it contains all the Pokémon you can come across in the game numbered accordingly. Whenever you catch a Pokémon, it will be added to the Pokédex and you can check their traits by simply tapping that particular Pokémon within your Pokédex. You will be shown a brief description about the Pokémon, its possible evolutions (if applicable), the type and how many times you have encountered and caught such Pokémon.   In the Shop, you’re able to spend your Pokécoins, which is your balance or currency. Pokécoins can be acquired by maintaining one or multiple gyms, but can also be bought directly through the store for real life currency. In the Shop you can buy various items such as Poké Balls, incense, eggs, and many more items and upgrades.   The third category in the main menu shows your Pokémon. In the beginning you can carry up to 250 Pokémon and up to 9 eggs, which are also included in the Pokémon tab count. If you wish to exceed these values, you can purchase upgrades in the Shop to increase your capacity. Your Pokémon are listed with their CP, short for Combat Power and their current HP, short for Health Points. The higher a Pokémon’s combat power, the stronger this Pokémon is and the harder it would be to catch.

OH, THAT YOU WOULD REND THE HEAVENS! THAT YOU WOULD COME DOWN! THE HEAVENS OPEN! The momentum of these meetings continued to build. In desperation, I positioned my heart to encounter God. I continued to see the open heaven swirling in the sanctuary of Living Waters Ministries. I was still seeing feathers and bolts of lightning, and hearing dozens of angels singing along with the worship team. On Saturday evening, the open heaven had grown to about a 25-foot circumference. I was well able to see it with my natural eyes and continued to watch it spin over the church. I was praying and observing everything. I was lying prostrate on the floor unable to move my body. I could see, and I could hear, but was totally unable to move. It was as if I was glued to the floor. However, I kept my eyes focused on the open heaven that was swirling in the church. I found myself in the same position on Sunday morning when a young man named Dean stood up to give his testimony about seeing Jesus in the Saturday evening service. When he began to share, I noticed that there was a flurry of activity around the edge of the open heaven that I was monitoring from my horizontal position on the floor. Dean became totally undone and was unable to speak about his experience. Several angels scurried to the edge and began to excitedly talk among themselves and point down at Dean. At first there were about six angels, and they were very keen to hear and see what was transpiring in the sanctuary. Soon a plethora of angels began to fill the circumference of the portal. There appeared to be angels of all ages, shapes, and sizes. I saw several small angels that appeared to be young children. (Jesus Himself referred to these; see Matthew 18:10.) I also witnessed angels

Let’s say that a client has asked you to speak to a management team of 50 people. It is a successful high-tech (or health-care or automotive—it really doesn’t matter) organization in a competitive marketplace. The vice president of operations wants to instill formalized techniques that people can use to constantly raise their own standards and outpace the competition. Your speech is the kickoff for the daylong conference. All of the other speakers and activities involve internal people.

No leader operates in a vacuum, and aligning their activities with the greater organization is essential for success.

The System would tolerate these harmless activities as a means to allow people to go through the Power Process to meet contrived needs which pose no threat to its dominance. For example, rather than directly work towards obtaining food and shelter, one would occupy one’s time with innocuous pastimes like building model ships or cheering for a particular football team, despite the fact that one’s quality of life would not be improved at all even by seeing one’s favourite team win the top championship game. Kaczynski of course calls these surrogate activities.

When you don’t prepare for breakpoints—don’t warn the team, don’t thoughtfully restructure the org around roles first and individuals second, don’t add new managers, don’t reassess your meetings and communication tools, don’t give people access to training or coaches, don’t actively work to preserve your culture—then the consequences are clear: In their quest to keep people happy, I’ve seen leaders build their org around existing employees instead of first figuring out what the optimal structure should be and fitting their team into those roles. Then roles and responsibilities overlap, there’s a ton of redundancy in the upper levels, they have to invent weird new titles for people, and nobody knows what they should be working on. Work slows to a crawl. Employees complain that the culture is dead. People start to quit. Panic sets in and it can feel like a full-blown crisis.

yet it’s so simple. A conscious leader needs to be actively appreciative. We can be tough leaders at times, we can and should be strong, but at the end of the day, human beings respond best to care and appreciation. It’s important to remember that in business, everything we accomplish is ultimately done with and through other people. That is what conscious leaders do—we inspire, motivate, develop, and lead others. To be appreciative of the gifts that other people share with us and with our teams is uplifting and creates a rewarding feeling of fulfillment. Appreciations are easy for leaders and organizations to implement, as we have done at Whole Foods, and they have very powerful reverberations. They unite people, create camaraderie, and help build trust. Conscious leaders should consider ways to institutionalize a culture of appreciation—their teams will thank them for it. Let me end this section on appreciation with a personal note. I have always felt so grateful for the truly amazing people I have worked with over the past forty-plus years at Whole Foods. Without them, the company never would have amounted to much of anything, and neither would I. Every day I work with people who I know are incredibly smart, talented, caring, and passionate

This single team finds it easy to communicate about proposed changes and refactorings, and typically has a good sense of ownership. Now let’s imagine a different scenario. Instead of a single, geolocated team owning our catalog service, suppose that teams in the UK and India both are actively involved in changing a service — effectively having joint ownership of the service. Geographical and time zone boundaries here make fine-grained communication between those teams difficult. Instead, they rely on more coarse-grained communication via video conferencing and email. How easy is it for a team member in the UK to make a simple refactoring with confidence? The cost of communications in a geographically distributed team is higher, and therefore the cost of coordinating changes is higher. When the cost of coordinating change increases, one of two things happen. Either people find ways to reduce the coordination/communication costs, or they stop making changes. The latter is exactly how we end up with large, hard-to-maintain codebases.

hunger lust drives many personalities to stand out from the crowd. Members of the new generation seek celebrity status regardless of the cost. We have each engaged in or witnessed someone else’s feeble attempts to define their personal strand of uniqueness derived through acquisitions, nationalism, body piercings, serving as rabid fans of various conglomeration’s sports teams, or by participating in other cult-like activities. Fervently engaging in these or similar misguided identity markers is laughable. Our real identity marker comes from engagement in a succession of character building experiences that integrate the conscious and unconscious mind into a coherent whole. A person defines the contours of their life through a series of life affirming actions, many of which choices initially seem disjointed from any functional significance beyond meeting the needs of our immediate family and mollifying our own selfishness. Akin to silent film actors of yesteryear, we must each play some worthwhile role in the symposium of life which staccato orchestra of spring beauty embraces every nook and cranny of planet Earth.

It’s the AEIOU method3 that provides you five sets of questions you can use when reflecting on your Activity Log. Activities. What were you actually doing? Was this a structured or an unstructured activity? Did you have a specific role to play (team leader) or were you just a participant (at the meeting)? Environments. Our environment has a profound effect on our emotional state. You feel one way at a football stadium, another in a cathedral. Notice where you were when you were involved in the activity. What kind of a place was it, and how did it make you feel? Interactions. What were you interacting with—people or machines? Was it a new kind of interaction or one you are familiar with? Was it formal or informal? Objects. Were you interacting with any objects or devices—iPads or smartphones, hockey sticks or sailboats? What were the objects that created or supported your feeling engaged? Users. Who else was there, and what role did they play in making it either a positive or a negative experience?

Explain why you are doing this particular activity. Share with the team what you hope to accomplish in the next 15 minutes. The more they see purpose to the activity, the more likely they will participate and learn what you want them to learn. For a few of the activities in this book, however, you would ruin their impact by sharing the objective up front. In those cases, tell them there is an objective that will become clear to them in a few minutes. Make sure that objective is called out during the Debrief (the discussion that is held immediately after the activity).

Get Specific. First, a courageous question focuses on a specific activity, behavior, or outcome. This is a critical behavior to Cultivate Curiosity: ask for what you need.

Curiosity is questioning, exploring, and trying what’s new. Curiosity means that everyone explores how to improve. People ask great questions and actively listen to one another. Curiosity ensures that your organization consistently becomes the best version of itself. Curiosity contributes to a Courageous Culture by shifting the culture from permission to intention. Solving problems and speaking up isn’t just allowed—it’s who you are and what you do.

Good ideas can come from anywhere. Don’t let your ego prevent you from getting advice or counsel from others. 8.  Understand the feelings and motivation of everyone on your team by communicating with them. 9. Having fun activities and using humor to break up routine can help improve performance. 10. You can take your craft seriously and still maintain perspective in your life.

The mission describes the business problem and its solution. For example, “The operations lead will create and manage a world-class department that will support every team member by providing the environment, information, tools, training, and habits they need to succeed in their role and make the company a massive success.” • The outcomes are what the person must get done. There should be three to eight outcomes (target is five) ranked by order of importance. They should be measurable and have an accomplish-by date. For example, “Turn every team member into a ninja user of our internal tools (Asana, Salesforece, Notion) and methodologies (GTD, Inbox Zero, management by objectives, active listening) by October 31.” • The competencies are the traits or habits that are required to succeed in the role and fit in at the company. They are the how—the behaviors that someone must exhibit in order to achieve the outcomes. Here are some examples: ○ Organized: Follows the GTD method and stays well aware of all to-dos and events ○ Innovative: Seeks to make process improvements to make their role and the team more efficient going forward ○ Collaborative: Reaches out to peers and cooperates with managers to establish an overall collaborative environment ○ Persuasive: Is able to convince others to pursue a course of action ○ Coachable: Wants to improve and is open to feedback and acts on that feedback

PE Scholar provides outstanding resources, courses and insight to bridge the gap between research and practice and consequently help physical education thrive. We are a digital platform for physical educators around the world. We aim to ensure all young people get the very best PE, school sport and physical activity experience to ignite a passion for movement in life. We help teachers make this happen by closing the research practice gap via insight posts, teaching resources and expertly led professional development. We build supportive communities of practices where you can connect with, collaborate, and learn from others including the very best in our sector via online and face to face training and consultancy. Our team of practitioners, researchers and teacher educators are here to ensure that PE stands for positive experiences and are committed to helping our subjects thrive.

A Customer Advocate is the employee who sees through your customers’ eyes and speaks up on their behalf. Customers may include your clients, students, patients, citizens, or for internal corporate support roles, your colleagues. Customer Advocates actively look for ways to improve customers’ experience and minimize customer frustrations.

I think the purpose of team-building is that it’s cooperative and everyone approaches it with an open mind and a good outlook, thereby keeping up morale,” he says meaningfully, dipping his chin and lifting his brows. “I suppose we could take turns picking said activity if that would help? I’d be happy to visit your coven, write up surveys, stand outside of Kindergarten classrooms with signs telling them that Santa’s a hoax and your mom decapitated your Elf on the Shelf … Throw M&M’s at them while they cry. You know, whatever it is that you like to do for fun.

it recognizes that building and running software systems is a sociotechnical activity, not an assembly line in a factory.

In a now-famous experiment, he and his colleagues compared three groups of expert violinists at the elite Music Academy in West Berlin. The researchers asked the professors to divide the students into three groups: the “best violinists,” who had the potential for careers as international soloists; the “good violinists”; and a third group training to be violin teachers rather than performers. Then they interviewed the musicians and asked them to keep detailed diaries of their time. They found a striking difference among the groups. All three groups spent the same amount of time—over fifty hours a week— participating in music-related activities. All three had similar classroom requirements making demands on their time. But the two best groups spent most of their music-related time practicing in solitude: 24.3 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a day, for the best group, compared with only 9.3 hours a week, or 1.3 hours a day, for the worst group. The best violinists rated “practice alone” as the most important of all their music-related activities. Elite musicians—even those who perform in groups—describe practice sessions with their chamber group as “leisure” compared with solo practice, where the real work gets done. Ericsson and his cohorts found similar effects of solitude when they studied other kinds of expert performers. “Serious study alone” is the strongest predictor of skill for tournament-rated chess players, for example; grandmasters typically spend a whopping five thousand hours—almost five times as many hours as intermediatelevel players—studying the game by themselves during their first ten years of learning to play. College students who tend to study alone learn more over time than those who work in groups. Even elite athletes in team sports often spend unusual amounts of time in solitary practice. What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.” To see Deliberate Practice in action, we need look no further than the story of Stephen Wozniak. The Homebrew meeting was the catalyst that inspired him to build that first PC, but the knowledge base and work habits that made it possible came from another place entirely: Woz had deliberately practiced engineering ever since he was a little kid. (Ericsson says that it takes approximately ten thousand hours of Deliberate Practice to gain true expertise, so it helps to start young.)

At a minimum, weekly touchpoints with customers By the team building the product Where they conduct small research activities In pursuit of a desired outcome

a team-based learning and development intervention that considers the team to be a system and is applied collectively to the team as a whole. The focus of team coaching is on team performance and the achievement of a common or shared team goal. Team learning is empowered via specific team coaching activities for self and team reflection, which is facilitated by the team coach(es) through the application of coaching techniques such as impactful, reflective questioning which raises awareness, builds trusting relationships and improves communication. A team coach does not provide advice or solutions to the team. Rather, team coaching requires advanced coaching skills from the coach such as considering multiple perspectives simultaneously and observing and interpreting dynamic interactions and is typically provided over a series of sessions rather than as a one-off intervention (p. 73).

Skip table Area Description Desirable features Key benefits eg Youth Services Organization Purpose ​–​Why do we exist beyond financial gain? ​–​Emotional appeal ​–​The emphasis shouldn’t change over time ​–​Calls for a togetherness ​–​Grabs attention ​–​Memorable ​–​Benefits selected stakeholders (eg employees, customers, society) ​–​Heart then head appeal ​–​Inspires selflessness ​–​Creates belonging ​–​Catalyst for collaboration ​–​Helps people find meaning ​–​Attracts followers ​–​Creates advocates ​–​To give hope to vulnerable young people Vision ​–​What would success look, feel and sound like? ​–​Brings purpose to life ​–​Evokes imagery ​–​Takes a long-term view ​–​Increases clarity ​–​Has uniqueness ​–​Presents a challenge ​–​Commercial reference ​–​Provides an impetus for and inspires action ​–​Creates focus beyond the day-to-day activities ​–​Provides a benchmark to measure progress against ​–​To become the most respected, innovative and sustainably funded youth services provider in xx countries

Scott allowed us to conduct a paranormal investigation of this property, and I invited one of the teams I am a member of, the Georgia Ghost Society, to take part in this one. We were also extremely lucky to have John Zaffis, world-renowned demonologist, with us. He is referred to as the “Godfather of the Paranormal,” having had around thirty-five years of experience with hauntings, demonic possessions and paranormal investigations. We found it interesting that we were allowed to conduct our investigation completely alone. None of the salon’s employees had any interest in being there at night, and we realized then how serious they were about that. Drew Hester, co-director of the Georgia Ghost Society, recalls our investigation there that night: While running the baseline upstairs I had the Tri-Field Meter. Throughout the rest of the house turned salon, the baseline showed normal readings, but suddenly the meter went off the scale and we both jumped a little. Then it went down to normal. We looked at each other and shrugged it off assuming it was due to natural energy floating around. Then it happened again. This took place about 5 times, each time with about 30 to 45 seconds in between. Interestingly enough this correlated with what a sensitive had “felt” earlier that evening before we even entered the location, when she mentioned the feeling of a woman walking or pacing back and forth in the upstairs area. John Zaffis states: The salon investigation was one I went into not knowing the researchers at all yet, nor the history of the place, but it turned out to be a surprisingly good hunt that night. When the ghost came into the room upstairs with us, just about everybody had some type of experience with something. We encountered the most activity on the second floor and I know we had at least more than one ghost up there with us. We all walked away knowing that the building where Voila Salon operates out of was definitely haunted by several ghosts dating back many years.

To recap, here’s what we all can do to stop the mass shooting epidemic: As Individuals: Trauma: Build relationships and mentor young people Crisis: Develop strong skills in crisis intervention and suicide prevention Social proof: Monitor our own media consumption Opportunity: Safe storage of firearms; if you see or hear something, say something. As Institutions: Trauma: Create warm environments; trauma-informed practices; universal trauma screening Crisis: Build care teams and referral processes; train staff Social proof: Teach media literacy; limit active shooter drills for children Opportunity: Situational crime prevention; anonymous reporting systems As a Society: Trauma: Teach social emotional learning in schools. Build a strong social safety net with adequate jobs, childcare, maternity leave, health insurance, and access to higher education Crisis: Reduce stigma and increase knowledge of mental health; open access to high quality mental health treatment; fund counselors in schools Social proof: No Notoriety protocol; hold media and social media companies accountable for their content Opportunity: Universal background checks, red flag laws, permit-to-purchase, magazine limits, wait periods, assault rifle ban

We want Next Jump to be a company that our mothers and fathers would be proud of us for building,” says Kim. And a large part of making our parents proud comes in the form of being a good person and doing the right thing. And so he implemented a policy of Lifetime Employment. Next Jump might be the only tech company in the country to do such a thing. No one will get fired to balance the books. And even costly mistakes or poor individual performance are not grounds for dismissal. If anything, the company will spend the time to help figure out what the problem is and help its people overcome it. Like an athlete who goes through a slump, a Next Jumper doesn’t get fired, they get coached. About the only situation in which an employee would be asked to leave is if someone worked outside the company’s high moral values or if someone actively worked to undermine their colleagues.

Recruiting isn't just about finding experienced candidates, it's about seeking out individuals with high EQ. By adopting a dynamic recruiting environment where every team member actively invites quality individuals to join us, we can build a culture of winning, high retention, and collaboration. Together, we can achieve greatness.

If you want to improve your culture, implementing CD practices will help. By giving developers the tools to detect problems when they occur, the time and resources to invest in their development, and the authority to fix problems straight away, we create an environment where developers accept responsibility for global outcomes such as quality and stability. This has a positive influence on the group interactions and activities of team members’ organizational environment and culture.

The dominance of football in Texas high schools had become the focus of raging debate all over the state in 1983. The governor of Texas, Mark White, appointed Perot to head a committee on educational reform. In pointing to school systems he thought were skewed in favor of extracurricular activities, Perot took particular aim at Odessa. On ABC’s Nightline, he called Permian fans “football crazy,” and during the show it was pointed out that a $5.6 million high school football stadium had been built in Odessa in 1982. The stadium included a sunken artificial-surface field eighteen feet below ground level, a two-story press box with VIP seating for school board members and other dignitaries, poured concrete seating for 19,032, and a full-time caretaker who lived in a house on the premises. “He made it look like we were a bunch of West Texas hicks, fanatics,” said Allen of Perot. The stadium “was something the community took a lot of pride in and he went on television and said you’re a bunch of idiots for building it.” Most of the money for the stadium had come from a voter-approved bond issue.

For all of its khakis and team building activities, modern corporations look like feudalistic societies, but with donuts in the break room.

This is in contrast with companies making products exhibiting infinite variability—experiences that maintain user interest by sustaining variability with use. For example, games played to completion offer finite variability, while those played with other people have higher degrees of infinite variability because the players themselves alter the gameplay throughout. World of Warcraft, the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, still captures the attention of more than 10 million active users eight years after its release.31 FarmVille is played mostly in solitude, but World of Warcraft is frequently played with teams; it is the hard-to-predict behavior of other people that keeps the game interesting.

People learn together by working together. Don’t waste time on fake team-building activities such as anything physical. Those activities might be fun for some people, but they don’t help people learn how to work together at work.

Building a Team 1. Make a list of three to five people who might be a part of your Life Design Team. Think of your supporters, your intimates, your mentors or possible mentors. Ideally, these will be three to five people also actively engaged in designing their lives. 2. Make sure everyone has a copy of the book (or buy books for everyone), so all the members of your team understand how life design works and have reviewed the team roles and rules. 3. Agree to meet regularly and actively to co-create a well-designed life as a community.

Everyone is facing the same crisis, but not facing the same circumstances.

When people feel safe, they open up. When they don’t, they shut down. People only feel safe enough to venture into dicey dialogue when those around them generate sufficient positive evidence of their intentions and respect.

Every decade has a unique hematological riddle, and for Minot's era, that riddle was pernicious anemia. Anemia is the deficiency of red blood cells-and its most common form arises from a lack of iron, a crucial nutrient used to build red blood cells. But pernicious anemia, the rare variant that Minot studied, was not caused by iron deficiency (indeed, its name derives from its intransigence to the standard treatment of anemia with iron). By feeding patients increasingly macabre concoctions-half a pound of chicken liver, half-cooked hamburgers, raw hog stomach, and even once the regurgitated gastric juices of one of his students (spiced up with butter, lemon, and parsley)-Minot and his team of researchers conclusively demonstrated in 1926 that pernicious anemia was caused by the lack of a critical micronutrient, a single molecule later identified as vitamin b13. In 1934, Minot and two of his colleagues won the Nobel Prize for this pathbreaking work. Minot had shown that replacing a single molecule could restore the normalcy of blood in this complex hematological disease. Blood was an organ whose activity could be turned on and off by molecular switches.

if you’re building a global business, there are three key elements you need to put in place. A set of managers who are responsible for, and have strong executive control over, their individual markets globally An understanding of how those markets differ, which leads to a variety of plans for how to grow in each of those markets A unified executive team to coordinate global operations, including the activity of the individual managers leading operations in each country The first two elements involve a decentralized command structure that allows the individual “captains” of the ships in the fleet to operate with entrepreneurial vigor. The third involves a centralized staff that can help the “admiral” coordinate the actions of the fleet for maximum impact.

Blitzscaling organizations need organization, not just to coordinate their many resources and activities, but in order to maximize speed. The organization’s collective learning rate—especially within its leadership team—determines its ability to anticipate future trends, while the strength of its internal structure—especially in terms of its frontline teams—determines its ability to act quickly on those key insights and seize the competitive advantage.

Activities. What were you actually doing? Was this a structured or an unstructured activity? Did you have a specific role to play (team leader) or were you just a participant (at the meeting)? Environments. Our environment has a profound effect on our emotional state. You feel one way at a football stadium, another in a cathedral. Notice where you were when you were involved in the activity. What kind of a place was it, and how did it make you feel? Interactions. What were you interacting with—people or machines? Was it a new kind of interaction or one you are familiar with? Was it formal or informal? Objects. Were you interacting with any objects or devices—iPads or smartphones, hockey sticks or sailboats? What were the objects that created or supported your feeling engaged? Users. Who else was there, and what role did they play in making it either a positive or a negative experience?

Benefits of Outsourcing to Architectural Rendering Companies The demand for high-quality visuals has never been greater. Whether it’s showcasing a futuristic skyscraper or visualizing a cozy residential home, architectural renderings have become an essential tool for architects, developers, and interior designers. Let’s explore the key benefits of outsourcing architectural rendering services, and how it can enhance efficiency, creativity, and business growth. 1. Access to Expertise and Advanced Tools Professional architectural rendering companies employ experienced designers, architects, and visual artists who specialize in creating high-quality renderings. They bring a level of expertise that may not always be available in-house, ensuring that every project benefits from top-tier skills and creativity. Additionally, these companies use the latest software and technology for architectural 3D modeling and rendering, including tools like AutoCAD, SketchUp, and V-Ray. Outsourcing gives businesses access to these cutting-edge resources without the need for expensive investments in software or training. 2. Cost Efficiency Building an in-house rendering team can be costly. It requires hiring skilled professionals, purchasing software licenses, and maintaining powerful hardware for rendering tasks. By outsourcing to architectural rendering services, businesses can save significantly on overhead costs. Instead of managing full-time staff, companies pay only for the services they need, whether it’s a single project or ongoing support. This flexibility allows firms to allocate resources more effectively while still delivering high-quality visuals to clients. 3. Faster Turnaround Times Time is often a critical factor in architectural and real estate projects. Meeting tight deadlines can be challenging when handling rendering tasks internally. Architectural rendering companies are equipped to manage large workloads efficiently, ensuring timely delivery of projects without compromising on quality. Their streamlined workflows and dedicated teams allow businesses to focus on core activities like design and client engagement, while the rendering experts handle the technical aspects. 4. Enhanced Creativity and Innovation Collaborating with specialized 3D architectural visualization services brings fresh perspectives to your projects. These companies often work with diverse clients across various industries, which helps them stay updated on the latest trends and techniques. Outsourcing allows firms to benefit from this creative expertise, resulting in visually stunning and innovative renderings that captivate clients and stakeholders. Whether it’s experimenting with unique lighting effects or creating immersive virtual reality experiences, the possibilities are endless. 5. Scalability for Projects of All Sizes The flexibility of outsourcing makes it ideal for businesses that handle projects of varying scales. Whether you need renderings for a single-family home or a multi-story commercial complex, architectural rendering services can adapt to your requirements. Outsourcing also allows firms to scale their rendering capacity based on demand. For instance, during peak periods or large-scale projects, outsourcing ensures that deadlines are met without overburdening in-house teams. 6. Improved Client Communication Visual presentations play a crucial role in architectural projects. By outsourcing to architectural rendering companies, firms can deliver photorealistic visuals that help clients understand and engage with the design. Detailed renderings and architectural 3D modeling make it easier to explain concepts, showcase material choices, and demonstrate spatial layouts. This clarity fosters better communication, reduces misunderstandings, and builds trust with clients.