Team Formation Quotes

If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent. You burn with hunger for food that does not exist. A U. S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.

Mark, some answers to your earlier questions: No, we will not tell our Botany Team to "Go fuck themselves." [...] The data transfer rate just isn't enough for the size of music files, even in compressed formats. So your request for "Anything, oh god, ANYTHING but Disco" is denied. Enjoy your boogie fever.

To master the virtual equation and make all the elements work together, you have to become the connector. In fact, your greatest role as a virtual manager is to link the various parts of his/her team to accomplish the goals that lead to its formation in the first place. You may need to shift gears, perform ream tune-ups, realign, and refuel your team's energy along the way.

The Murchison meteorite was found to be 4.5 billion years old, and it was studded with amino acids—seventy-four types in all, eight of which are involved in the formation of earthly proteins. In late 2001, more than thirty years after it crashed, a team at the Ames Research Center in California announced that the Murchison rock also contained complex strings of sugars called polyols, which had not been found off the Earth before.

Following their line of vision, he found the distraction. The damn tennis team, running the perimeter of the football field in some half-assed formation, following their fearless leader. They weren’t looking at the field, weren’t yelling or causing a scene. Just concentrating on keeping up with Chris. Having been a teenage boy himself, the draw was obvious. Teenage girls. Short shorts. No brainer. At thirty-four, he was past that. Except his eyes didn’t seem to get the “I’m Too Old For This” memo. They were tracking Chris like a hawk tracks a field mouse.

One day I was watching the cartoon She-Ra, and the episode that was on was called ‘She-Ra and the Mighty Rebellions.’ At that time, the gang was already formed and was on the move. We were already getting involved in territory fights. This was when the Syndicates was out [the Syndicates was the first street gang ever to be established in The Bahamas; however, they were put out of business by the Rebellions]. One day we were on the wall, and guys were throwing out different names. I told them that the best name for this gang would be the Rebellions. To this day, I’m sorry I ever came up with that name, because I’m getting tired of seeing that name on the walls throughout Nassau. Anthony ‘Ada’ Allen, one of the former leaders and founders of the Rebellion Raiders street gang.

This process yields a psychological gain. Firstly, the anxiety that previously roamed through society as a tenebrous fog is now linked to a specific cause and can be mentally controlled via the strategy put forward in the story. Secondly, through a common struggle with “the enemy,” the disintegrating society regains its coherence, energy, and rudimentary meaning. For this reason, the fight against the object of anxiety then becomes a mission, laden with pathos and group heroism (for example, the Belgian government’s “team of 11 million” going to war against the coronavirus). Thirdly, in this fight all latent brewing frustration and aggression is taken out, especially on the group that refuses to go along with the story and the mass formation. This brings an enormous release and satisfaction to the masses, which they will not let go of easily. Through this process,

Terminology, control measures and formats must all be learned. We must speak a common language if we are to continue to be the cohesive Corps that we are. The Basic School and subsequent schools must continue to stress a common language that is understood by all Marines so that we fight as a single team. Teamwork has long been our trademark. It is indispensable. But first the student must learn to think creatively, to innovate, and to do the things that will most quickly seek out the enemy’s weak spots and undo him. Learning to think in that fashion is fundamental. That is what this course is about: the fundamentals. Once these fundamentals are learned, that is, once the student has begun to think clearly about how best to undo his adversary, once he has been rewarded in the classroom or the field for creative thought, the careful weighing of alternatives and risks followed by boldness in decision-making, he will then be ready to study definitions, control measures and formats. He will grasp their meaning more rapidly, for he will have a context in which to place them. They will be more than mere words and symbols.

The chorus of criticism culminated in a May 27 White House press conference that had me fielding tough questions on the oil spill for about an hour. I methodically listed everything we'd done since the Deepwater had exploded, and I described the technical intricacies of the various strategies being employed to cap the well. I acknowledged problems with MMS, as well as my own excessive confidence in the ability of companies like BP to safeguard against risk. I announced the formation of a national commission to review the disaster and figure out how such accidents could be prevented in the future, and I reemphasized the need for a long-term response that would make America less reliant on dirty fossil fuels. Reading the transcript now, a decade later, I'm struck by how calm and cogent I sound. Maybe I'm surprised because the transcript doesn't register what I remember feeling at the time or come close to capturing what I really wanted to say before the assembled White House press corps: That MMS wasn't fully equipped to do its job, in large part because for the past thirty years a big chunk of American voters had bought into the Republican idea that government was the problem and that business always knew better, and had elected leaders who made it their mission to gut environmental regulations, starve agency budgets, denigrate civil servants, and allow industrial polluters do whatever the hell they wanted to do. That the government didn't have better technology than BP did to quickly plug the hole because it would be expensive to have such technology on hand, and we Americans didn't like paying higher taxes - especially when it was to prepare for problems that hadn't happened yet. That it was hard to take seriously any criticism from a character like Bobby Jindal, who'd done Big Oil's bidding throughout his career and would go on to support an oil industry lawsuit trying to get a federal court to lift our temporary drilling moratorium; and that if he and other Gulf-elected officials were truly concerned about the well-being of their constituents, they'd be urging their party to stop denying the effects of climate change, since it was precisely the people of the Gulf who were the most likely to lose homes or jobs as a result of rising global temperatures. And that the only way to truly guarantee that we didn't have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn't going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment, except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face; and in the absence of such a disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate legislation, since actually educating the public on long-term energy policy would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it. I didn't say any of that. Instead I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to "get this fixed." Afterward, I scolded my press team, suggesting that if they'd done better work telling the story of everything we were doing to clean up the spill, I wouldn't have had to tap-dance for an hour while getting the crap kicked out of me. My press folks looked wounded. Sitting alone in the Treaty Room later that night, I felt bad about what I had said, knowing I'd misdirected my anger and frustration. It was those damned plumes of oil that I really wanted to curse out.

Here is my six step process for how we will first start with ISIS and then build an international force that will fight terrorism and corruption wherever it appears. “First, in dedication to Lieutenant Commander McKay, Operation Crapshoot commenced at six o’clock this morning. I’ve directed a handpicked team currently deployed in Iraq to coordinate a tenfold increase in aerial bombing and close air support. In addition to aerial support, fifteen civilian security companies, including delegations from our international allies, are flying special operations veterans into Iraq. Those forces will be tasked with finding and annihilating ISIS, wherever they walk, eat or sleep. I’ve been told that they can’t wait to get started. “Second, going forward, our military will be a major component in our battle against evil. Militaries need training. I’ve been assured by General McMillan and his staff that there is no better final training test than live combat. So without much more expenditure, we will do two things, train our troops of the future, and wipe out international threats. “Third, I have a message for our allies. If you need us, we will be there. If evil raises its ugly head, we will be with you, arm in arm, fighting for what is right. But that aid comes with a caveat. Our allies must be dedicated to the common global ideals of personal and religious freedom. Any supposed ally who ignores these terms will find themselves without impunity. A criminal is a criminal. A thief is a thief. Decide which side you’re on, because our side carries a big stick. “Fourth, to the religious leaders of the world, especially those of Islam, though we live with differing traditions, we are still one people on this Earth. What one person does always has the possibility of affecting others. If you want to be part of our community, it is time to do your part. Denounce the criminals who besmirch your faith. Tell your followers the true meaning of the Koran. Do not let the money and influence of hypocrites taint your religion or your people. We request that you do this now, respectfully, or face the scrutiny of America and our allies. “Fifth, starting today, an unprecedented coalition of three former American presidents, my predecessor included, will travel around the globe to strengthen our alliances. Much like our brave military leaders, we will lead from the front, go where we are needed. We will go toe to toe with any who would seek to undermine our good intentions, and who trample the freedoms of our citizens. In the coming days you will find out how great our resolve truly is. “Sixth, my staff is in the process of drafting a proposal for the members of the United Nations. The proposal will outline our recommendations for the formation of an international terrorism strike force along with an international tax that will fund ongoing anti-terrorism operations. Only the countries that contribute to this fund will be supported by the strike force. You pay to play.

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Cards on a wall is a way of practicing transparency, valuing and respecting the input of each team member. The project manager has the task of translating the cards into whatever format is expected by the rest of the organization.

You should choose a set of simple rules that govern the format of your code, and then you should consistently apply those rules. If you are working on a team, then the team should agree to a single set of formatting rules and all members should comply.

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

DECISIONS Useful: Graphical Presentation Monitor Key Indicators Effective Measurements Wisdom Knowledge The Goal: Strategic Thinking Predictive Value Experience and Judgment Automated Exception Notification Information Structured: Voluminous Grouped and Summarized Relationships Not Always Evident Raw Data: Massive Fragmented Meaningless Data EVENTS Figure 1-01. The Pyramid of KnowledgeToyota, this begins with genchi genbutsu, or gemba, which means literally “go see it for yourself. ” Taiichi Ohno, a founding father of Lean, once said, “Data is of course important in manufacturing, but I place the greatest emphasis on facts. ” 2 A direct and intuitive understanding of a situation is far more useful than mountains of data. The raw data stored in a database adds value for decision-making only if the right information is presented in the right format, to the right people, at the right time. A tall stack of printout may contain the right data, but it’s certainly not in an accessible format. Massive weekly batch printouts do not enable timely and proactive decisions. Raw data must be summarized, structured, and presented as digestible information. Once information is combined with direct experience, then the incredible human mind can extract and develop useful knowledge. Over time, as knowledge is accumulated and combined with direct experience and judgment, wisdom develops. This evolution is described by the classic pyramid of knowledge shown in Figure 1-01. BACK TO CHICAGO So what happened in Chicago? We can speculate upon several possible perspectives for why the team and its change leader were far from a true Lean system, yet they refused any help from IT providers: 1. They feared wasteful IT systems and procedures would be foisted on them.

Gerard van der Lem, Van Gaal’s right-hand man at Ajax and Barcelona, explains: ‘The main principle was possession of the ball. We trained on this endlessly. In some European Cup and Dutch League games we had seventy per cent ball possession. Seventy per cent! You need a lot of technical skills to do that. We almost always had the ball and we were always trying to find solutions. People think our system was rigid, but it was not. It could not be rigid. We could play with three strikers, or with three in midfield, with or without a shadow spits [striker]; whatever you like. The thing was to understand what consequences these formations have for the team. The players must be tactically very skilful and they have to be thinking spatially in advance. When we won the European Cup, everything fitted. Everything fell like a puzzle. Every player knew the qualities of his fellow players. Each player knew how to play a ball to his fellow players. In defence, they knew exactly how to press. They all knew the distances… Yeah, it was like solving a puzzle.

You need to be receptive to feedback   Timeliness is of essence when working with Lean Six Sigma. As such, you need to break a few walls and let team members air their views freely. That is the only way you are going to learn things as they are. But if you insist on conventional protocol and formal language and format of feedback presentation, you may not learn enough authentic details to help you make effective decisions.   In any case, with a methodology like this that pushes for perfection, you need data and information that is as true and as real as it can be. After all, the reality always comes out in the results, when it is clear how far away from, or how close to, perfection your processes were. 

Mike, you ready?” he said. The coliseum-like, bowl-shaped CompStat conference room behind him was a pen pusher’s paradise, I knew. It was a place where innovative computer-model formats were used to illuminate detailed processes that were compared for effectiveness of indices of performance before implementations of flexible tactics to achieve the development of comprehensive solutions were discussed in a team-building environment. In plain English, it was a bureaucratic version of hell on earth.

The coliseum-like, bowl-shaped CompStat conference room behind him was a pen pusher’s paradise, I knew. It was a place where innovative computer-model formats were used to illuminate detailed processes that were compared for effectiveness of indices of performance before implementations of flexible tactics to achieve the development of comprehensive solutions were discussed in a team-building environment. In plain English, it was a bureaucratic version of hell on earth.

Today the Church has 220 data-gathering teams in forty-five countries that are making digital copies of new records. They are also converting 2.4 million microfilm records into a digital format.

If you want J. J. and I to take you through the Marketing Made Simple Checklist in video format, visit BusinessMadeSimple.com and register for our very inexpensive online platform. Use the code “Marketing” to get a buy-one-gift-one offer, allowing you and your entire team to use the platform for half the cost.

Ummer was humbled; it was a deep lesson indeed. He understood now why he was punished when he wasn’t the one smuggling pen drives and why his team-mates were penalised when he couldn’t maintain the squad formation.

Encourage teams to organize internal “yak days,” where teams get together to work on technical debt. These are great events because technical debt is so rarely prioritized. Hold regular internal DevOps mini-conferences. We’ve seen organizations achieve success using the classic DevOpsDays format, which combines pre-prepared talks with “open spaces” where participants self-organize to propose and facilitate their own sessions. Give staff dedicated time, such as 20% time or several days after a release, to experiment with new tools and technologies. Allocate budget and infrastructure for special projects.

Likewise, by expanding the size of their formation as far as the terrain and visibility would allow whenever they were out of actual contact with the enemy, they increased the likelihood that when they did make contact, the flanks of their formation would be wider than the enemy’s position. Like a rugby team playing a running game, their entire approach—the tempo and flow of the way they moved and fought—was designed around creating and exploiting a series of these overlaps.

You will decide if you will deliver your online curriculum in synchrony (in real time using a webinar format such as, Adobe Connect, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, & Google Classrooms, etc.) or asynchronous (learners work independently and submit their work to you on a specific day and time).

He then pointed to the right, and I turned to look. Exactly on cue, something massive came around the corner: a snaking, vehicular army that included a phalanx of police cars and motorcycles, a number of black SUVs, two armored limousines with American flags mounted on their hoods, a hazmat mitigation truck, a counterassault team riding with machine guns visible, an ambulance, a signals truck equipped to detect incoming projectiles, several passenger vans, and another group of police escorts. The presidential motorcade. It was at least twenty vehicles long, moving in orchestrated formation, car after car after car, before finally the whole fleet rolled to a quiet halt, and the limos stopped directly in front of Barack’s parked plane. I turned to Cornelius. “Is there a clown car?” I said. “Seriously, this is what he’s going to travel with now?” He smiled. “Every day for his entire presidency, yes,” he said. “It’s going to look like this all the time.” I took in the spectacle: thousands and thousands of pounds of metal, a squad of commandos, bulletproof everything. I had yet to grasp that Barack’s protection was still only half-visible. I didn’t know that he’d also, at all times, have a nearby helicopter ready to evacuate him, that sharpshooters would position themselves on rooftops along the routes he traveled, that a personal physician would always be with him in case of a medical problem, or that the vehicle he rode in contained a store of blood of the appropriate type in case he ever needed a transfusion. In a matter of weeks, just ahead of Barack’s inauguration, the presidential limo would be upgraded to a newer model—aptly named the Beast—a seven-ton tank disguised as a luxury vehicle, tricked out with hidden tear-gas cannons, rupture-proof tires, and a sealed ventilation system meant to get him through a biological or chemical attack.

From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker Pebbles, Rocks & Mountains Rocks can be formed in many different ways and are found in just about every corner of our planet, the Moon, up in space and who knows where else. Now pebbles are the mini-me’s of rocks and generally are about one to three inches in size. Geologists will tell you that they are about 5 millimeters in diameter, but who’s counting? In fact there are two beaches that are made up entirely of pebbles such as the Shingle Beach in Somerset, England. Generally pebbles are found along rivers, streams and creeks whereas mountains are usually a part of a chain that was created along geothermal fault lines. The process of Mountain formation is associated with movements of the earth's crust, which is referred to as plate tectonics. See; now that I looked it up, I know these things! What I’m about to say has absolutely nothing to do with geology and everything to do about human nature. In the course of events we never trip over mountains and seldom over rocks, but tripping over pebbles is another thing. Marilyn French, a writer and feminist scholar is credited with saying, “Men (she should have included Women) stumble over pebbles, never over mountains.” She was the lady (I should have said woman) whose provocative 1977 novel, “The Women's Room” captured the frustration and fury of a generation of women fed up with society's traditional conceptions of their roles (and this is true). However, this has nothing to do with the feminist movement and is simply a metaphor. Of course we’re not going to trip over mountains, not unless we are bigger than the “Jolly Green Giant!” and so it’s usually the little things that trip us up and cause us problems. What comes to mind is found on page 466 of The Exciting Story of Cuba. This is a book that won two awards by the “Florida Authors & Publishers Association” and yet there are small mistakes. They weren’t even caused by me or my team and yet there they are, getting bigger and bigger every time I look at them. Now I’m not about to tell you what they are, since that would take the fun out of it, but if you look hard enough in the book, you’ll succeed in discovering them! I will however tell you that one of these mistakes was caused by a computer program called “Word.” It’s wonderful that this program has a spell check and can even correct my grammar, but it can’t read my mind. In its infernal wisdom, the program was so insistent that it was right and that I was wrong that it changed the spelling of, in this case, the name of a person in the middle of the night. It happened while I was sleeping! I would have seen it if it had been as big as a mountain, however being just a little pebble it escaped my review and even escaped the eagle eyes of Lucy who still remains the best proof reader and copy editor that I know. When you discover what I missed please refrain from emailing me, although, normally, I would really enjoy hearing from you! I unfortunately already know most of the errors in the book, for which I take full responsibility. The truth of it is that my mistakes leave me feeling stupid and frustrated. Now, you may disagree with me however I don’t think that I am really all that stupid, but when you write hundreds of thousands of words, a few of them might just slip between the cracks. None of us are infallible and we all make mistakes. I sometimes like to say that “I once thought that I had made a mistake, but then found out that I was mistaken.” And so it is; if you think about it, it’s the pebbles that create most of our problems, not the rocks and certainly not the mountains. I’ll let you know as soon as my other books, Suppressed I Rise – Revised Edition; Seawater One…. And Words of Wisdom, “From the Bridge” are available. It’s Seawater One that has the naughty bits in it… but that just spices it up. Now with that book you can really tell me what you think….

For A Sales Team I encourage clients to generally set up their dashboards in a three column format, including: Left: Current month activity (amount of stuff going on). Center: current month results/deals. Right: Long-term results (year-to-date). Example screenshot, blurred for privacy: Example Sales Development Rep Dashboard Every sales rep should set up their own personal dashboard, so they can see the state of their own business at a glance (and it makes it easier for their manager to coach/help them). Below, I have laid out a three-column dashboard

As we’ve seen, up to 25 percent of employed seniors from our top universities are heading to financial services each year. Our financial services industry (and to a lesser extent its attendant legal industry) plays an equivalent role to the oil industry in Saudi Arabia in terms of talent attraction. You can see a similar dynamic at work in other fields with fixed slots. There were 682 orthopedic surgery residents in the United States in 2012. That number is set because there are only so many funded residency slots in teaching hospital programs throughout the country.4 If I were to kick butt in medical school and get one of these residencies, I would be on the way to becoming an orthopedic surgeon, probably the most coveted residency due to money, lifestyle, low morbidity of patients, gratification from restoring mobility, and other factors. But let’s say that I didn’t make it and fell short—there would still be 682 orthopedic surgeons five years from now because the next guy would have gotten that slot. We’re all competing to fit through the same finite gate. The value difference if I perform really strongly and get one of these coveted spots is not one more surgeon—it’s the gap between me and the 683rd person who didn’t get it (and perhaps went into a less prestigious or less lucrative specialty). From a value creation standpoint, it’s not ideal for a massive level of talent to be going to existing enterprises that have captured large economic rents or where people are fighting for a set of finite slots. The rents and slots will stay essentially constant. Contrast this with new business formation. If I were to say, “There are only going to be 682 new successful businesses started in the United States next year,” people would instantly regard that as ridiculous. It’s unknown and unknowable. But we all know that if another enterprising team comes along and starts a cool company, that number goes up by one.

On the field of play, in the heat of the action, it enabled Guardiola’s Barcelona to switch formations or positions as many as five or six times in the same game. When players understand why, it is easy to react to what is being shouted from the touchline in the heat of battle. However, Guardiola also drilled patience into his sides, because, despite that ability to get his team to react, he and his players also had enough faith in their strategy to know when to avoid a knee-jerk reaction to a tough passage of play or an opposition goal.

Business Plan Writers If you need a business plan in less than a week, our consulting service can help! Our business plan consultants will create a business strategy that will impress your investors. We looked at all the best business plan writing services and compared their features and pricing. Here is our in depth comparison and recommendations. A business plan writing service is a team of business experts that take your ideas & numbers, combine it with some of their own research and produce a professional, well-formatted business plan. We looked at the 3 top business plan writing services and compared their features and pricing. From start-up guidance to operations consulting, your company can become more successful with the support of one of our business consultants. First, let our team learn more about your business and listen to your needs. Then, we’ll identify key areas of opportunity, and help you to implement the right business plan and strategy for the growth of your company. It was a good startup. It had a good idea and, much more important, a market window, differentiation and experience to make it happen. One of my first engagements in business planning was as business plan consultant to a startup with three experienced founders. I met with them several times, listened always, and did their business plan. I built the financial model, wrote the text, and produced the document as a business plan document. But I wasn’t part of the team.

Success comes with an inevitable problem: market saturation. New products initially grow just by adding more customers—to grow a network, add more nodes. Eventually this stops working because nearly everyone in the target market has joined the network, and there are not enough potential customers left. From here, the focus has to shift from adding new customers to layering on more services and revenue opportunities with existing ones. eBay had this problem in its early years, and had to figure its way out. My colleague at a16z, Jeff Jordan, experienced this himself, and would often write and speak about his first month as the general manager of eBay’s US business. It was in 2000, and for the first time ever, eBay’s US business failed to grow on a month-over-month basis. This was critical for eBay because nearly all the revenue and profit for the company came from the US unit—without growth in the United States, the entire business would stagnate. Something had to be done quickly. It’s tempting to just optimize the core business. After all, increasing a big revenue base even a little bit often looks more appealing than starting at zero. Bolder bets are risky. Yet because of the dynamics of market saturation, a product’s growth tends to slow down and not speed up. There’s no way around maintaining a high growth rate besides continuing to innovate. Jeff shared what the team did to find the next phase of growth for the company: eBay.com at the time enabled the community to buy and sell solely through online auctions. But auctions intimidated many prospective users who expressed preference for the ease and simplicity of fixed price formats. Interestingly, our research suggested that our online auction users were biased towards men, who relished the competitive aspect of the auction. So the first major innovation we pursued was to implement the (revolutionary!) concept of offering items for a fixed price on ebay.com, which we termed “buy-it-now.” Buy-it-now was surprisingly controversial to many in both the eBay community and in eBay headquarters. But we swallowed hard, took the risk and launched the feature . . . and it paid off big. These days, the buy-it-now format represents over $40 billion of annual Gross Merchandise Volume for eBay, 62% of their total.65

It all made for a mixed first impression. When I watched training with the new draftees, I could see this was an AFL team with some seriously good players. But the infrastructure around the team was relatively scant, felt amateurish and was not what I expected from an AFL club. It was all by virtue of not having a home; we had a nomadic existence in those formative years. At that point most Victorian clubs too still had to be satisfied with unprofessional working environments at suburban grounds, but it is fair to say that Fremantle was at the extreme end of the scale.

Lean into the inherent flexibility of the remote format. Instead of monitoring team members obsessively, encourage their autonomy. They will gain confidence, agency, and efficiency. The result is a more productive team.

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The cleverness of this hack cannot be understated. Because Craigslist did not offer any sanctioned way for Airbnb (or anyone) to post new listings, the team had to reverse engineer how Craigslist managed new listings, and then re-create those steps with their own program. This meant understanding how the Craigslist posting system worked, which categories vacation rentals were posted in in different cities, figuring out the limitations of what could be posted on Craigslist, such as rules around images and formatting the listings, and much more.

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The Axios audience team found that roughly 6 words is the optimal subject line for emails—short enough to show all words in a mobile phone format.

He laid out the defining characteristics, workflow, and management as follows. A two-pizza team will: Be small. No more than ten people. Be autonomous. They should have no need to coordinate with other teams to get their work done. With the new service-based software architecture in place, any team could simply refer to the published application programming interfaces (APIs) for other teams. (More on this new software architecture to follow.) Be evaluated by a well-defined “fitness function.” This is the sum of a weighted series of metrics. Example: a team that is in charge of adding selection in a product category might be evaluated on: a)  how many new distinct items were added for the period (50 percent weighting) b)  how many units of those new distinct items were sold (30 percent weighting) c)  how many page views those distinct items received (20 percent weighting) Be monitored in real time. A team’s real-time score on its fitness function would be displayed on a dashboard next to all the other two-pizza teams’ scores. Be the business owner. The team will own and be responsible for all aspects of its area of focus, including design, technology, and business results. This paradigm shift eliminates the all-too-often heard excuses such as, “We built what the business folks asked us to, they just asked for the wrong product,” or “If the tech team had actually delivered what we asked for and did it on time, we would have hit our numbers.” Be led by a multidisciplined top-flight leader. The leader must have deep technical expertise, know how to hire world-class software engineers and product managers, and possess excellent business judgment. Be self-funding. The team’s work will pay for itself. Be approved in advance by the S-Team. The S-Team must approve the formation of every two-pizza team.

The phase-out thread is based on the notion that the team begins with its end in mind. The team intentionally plans to remove itself physically from the new church, even before they arrive on the field. In light of such thinking, the team allows their end desire (that is, a local church engaged in mission with its own leaders) to influence everything they do from the pre-entry stage to the church formation/leadership development stage. If phase-out shapes their thinking, then the team will be careful to develop their strategy with methods that are simple, highly reproducible and imitable so that the gospel may ring out from the new church (1 Thess 1:6-8).

Be led by a multidisciplined top-flight leader. The leader must have deep technical expertise, know how to hire world-class software engineers and product managers, and possess excellent business judgment. Be self-funding. The team’s work will pay for itself. Be approved in advance by the S-Team. The S-Team must approve the formation of every two-pizza team.

Management becomes more complex, too, because the staff has to reach across the organization at a level and consistency you never had to before: different departments, groups, and business units. For example, analytics and business intelligence teams never had to have the sheer levels of interaction with IT or engineering. The IT organization never had to explain the data format to the operations team. From both the technical and the management perspectives, teams didn’t have to work together before with as high of a bandwidth connection. There may have been some level of coordination before, but not this high. Other organizations face the complexity of data as a product instead of software or APIs as the product. They’ve never had to promote or evangelize the data available in the organization. With data pipelines, the data teams may not even know or control who has access to the data products. Some teams are very siloed. With small data, they’ve been able to get by. There wasn’t ever the need to reach out, coordinate, or cooperate. Trying to work with these maverick teams can be a challenge unto itself. This is really where management is more complicated.

where a = accumulated future value, p = principal or present value, r = rate of return in percentage terms, and n = number of compounding periods. All too often, management teams focus on the r variable in this equation. They seek instant gratification, with high profit margins and high growth in reported earnings per share (EPS) in the near term, as opposed to initiatives that would lead to a much more valuable business many years down the line. This causes many management teams to pass on investments that would create long-term value but would cause “accounting numbers” to look bad in the short term. Pressure from analysts can inadvertently incentivize companies to make as much money as possible off their present customers to report good quarterly numbers, instead of offering a fair price that creates enduring goodwill and a long-term win–win relationship for all stakeholders. The businesses that buy commodities and sell brands and have strong pricing power (typically depicted by high gross margins) should always remember that possessing pricing power is like having access to a large amount of credit. You may have it in abundance, but you must use it sparingly. Having pricing power doesn’t mean you exercise it right away. Consumer surplus is a great strategy, especially for subscription-based business models in which management should primarily focus on habit formation and making renewals a no-brainer. Most businesses fail to appreciate this delicate trade-off between high short-term profitability and the longevity accorded to the business through disciplined pricing and offering great customer value. The few businesses that do understand this trade-off always display “pain today, gain tomorrow” thinking in their daily decisions.

formative experiences of those on your team are dissimilar.

the plan for the changes, not the transitions. The plan we are talking about outlines the steps and schedule in which people will receive the information, training, and support they need to make the transition. It lays out the nature and timing of key events that mark the phases of the transition: a ceremony marking the disbanding of a group, the formation of a transition monitoring team, the scheduling of a visit to another site, an all-hands question-and-answer session with the site manager, and the start of a training program.

One of the early tasks facing founders at the formation stage of the startup is deciding the equity ownership split between multiple co-founders. Many teams are tempted to divide the company ownership into equal parts—that is, two founders equals a 50/ 50 ownership split or three founders results in a 33.3% share for each founder. Other situations demand a more thoughtful approach. For example, one founder might be bringing the core technology and associated expertise to the startup and would therefore request a larger equity stake. Regardless of your equity split decision, once all the co-founders reach an agreement, log the equity split in the cap table. The “Founders’ Round” section below walks through this beginning entry.

In the previous chapter, we saw the power of working together within and across disciplines. But traditional collaboration tends to involve teams with limited and tightly focused membership. Only a select few are invited to work on projects at Le Laboratoire or conduct research in those open-format labs at Columbia and Princeton. Crowdsourcing means taking a problem normally tackled by the few and putting it to the many. In the wrong hands, it might only deliver a quick blast of publicity or some cheap market research. Used properly, however, the crowd can be a powerful ally in the battle to solve hard problems. You can ask the crowd to gather or mine data. You can invite it to test and judge solutions.

A good campaign usually deploys multiple tactics: paid media (TV ads, digital ads, radio ads, print ads), earned media (which is just jargon for public relations), opposition research (a euphemism for digging up dirt on someone), field (canvassing, door knocking, flyers, lit drops, posters, phone calls), lobbying (personal connections in one way or another), and today, perhaps more than anything else, social media. We went at it on every front. I convened a meeting of our senior team every morning at 8 a.m. to discuss what we could to do to drive Anthony from the race. Here’s the best of what we did: Earned media: I kicked things off by saying, on the front page of the New York Times, that if Anthony ran, I’d add an extra $20 million to our campaign budget to ensure that we destroyed his reputation so thoroughly, he’d never be able to run for anything ever again. In retrospect, the threat probably landed harder than I realized because Anthony was already starting to self-destruct. (It wasn’t like what he got caught doing on Twitter didn’t exist in other, pre-Twitter formats before then.) We started exactly where anyone would when it comes to Anthony Weiner: sex. In his time as a member of the House, Anthony had passed all of one bill. And that one illustrious piece of legislation was to give more visas to models. Yep, protecting the rights of hot women was Anthony’s sole achievement in office. That was a good point to make but not an exposé in and of itself. But then our research team noticed something: Anthony had also received campaign contributions from many of the models who received highly coveted H1B visas. Not only was this pay-to-play (give contributions, get government favors), it was illegal.

Ken Uston (1935–87). Uston’s books Million Dollar Blackjack and The Big Player inspired the formation of other teams as well as intensified casino efforts to stop them. Ken Uston was one of the more colorful characters in blackjack history. One-quarter Asian, with a Japanese grandfather, he was born Kenneth Senzo Usui. Starting his career in the securities business, he became the youngest senior vice president ever at the Pacific Stock Exchange. Drawn by the allure of blackjack he then left the securities industry to play professionally.

The List: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt Why: Especially because it will show you how to identify bad strategy The Five Dysnfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni Why: Learn most recognised tendencies of dysfunctional teams (in a storified format) Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks Why: Why storytelling matters in everything we do and how to tell a solid story Never Split the Difference by Christopher Voss Why: Learn the fundamentals of having a competitive edge in any discussion Understanding Michael Porter by Joan Magretta Why: The absolute fundamentals of organisational success - big or small Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore Why: If you are curious about what it takes to continue growing and scaling a technology company throughout its lifecycle 7 Powers by Hamilton Helmer Why: You can read it once every year. You can pick any failed venture/product and do a post-mortem of why it failed through the lens of this book (learning the value of building and sustaining moats) Build by Tony Fadell Why: This book can be a great friend as you navigate every fork/decision in your career Super Thinking by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann Why: You can pick your pet mental models from this book and apply in any situation in your life; the pet mental models can keep evolving as you evolve

Front-line Initial Assault Teams are the soldiers who are parachuted down to the battlefield first and it’s their job to hold the fort against ridiculous odds so that the rest of the army can sort itself out and get into fighting formation without being bothered by the enemy. I should hate to be in a front-line team, dropped from low orbit with nothing but a rifle, a cricket cup and a packet of Wurther’s Originals for energy.

collaborative teams think of common formative assessments as academic scrimmages or dress rehearsals.

Many of us spend hours filling out forms on computers—forms that require names, dates, addresses, telephone numbers, monetary sums, and other information in a fixed, rigid format. Worse, often we are not even told the correct format until we get it wrong. Why not figure out the variety of ways a person might fill out a form and accommodate all of them? Some companies have done excellent jobs at this, so let us celebrate their actions. Consider Microsoft’s calendar program. Here, it is possible to specify dates any way you like: “November 23, 2015,” “23 Nov. 15,” or “11.23.15.” It even accepts phrases such as “a week from Thursday,” “tomorrow,” “a week from tomorrow,” or “yesterday.” Same with time. You can enter the time any way you want: “3:45 PM,” “15.35,” “an hour,” “two and one-half hours.” Same with telephone numbers: Want to start with a + sign (to indicate the code for international dialing)? No problem. Like to separate the number fields with spaces, dashes, parentheses, slashes, periods? No problem. As long as the program can decipher the date, time, or telephone number into a legal format, it is accepted. I hope the team that worked on this got bonuses and promotions.

The indirectness of communication conceals the formation of schisms—different team members use terms differently but don’t realize it.

This book is divided into three parts. The first section focuses on how habits emerge within individual lives. It explores the neurology of habit formation, how to build new habits and change old ones, and the methods, for instance, that one ad man used to push toothbrushing from an obscure practice into a national obsession. It shows how Procter & Gamble turned a spray named Febreze into a billion-dollar business by taking advantage of consumers’ habitual urges, how Alcoholics Anonymous reforms lives by attacking habits at the core of addiction, and how coach Tony Dungy reversed the fortunes of the worst team in the National Football League by focusing on his players’ automatic reactions to subtle on-field cues.

maneuvers toward you). It was exciting for the two junior members, but also for those of us who were more seasoned, because we were building the team, adding to the experience of jumpers who’d later be capable of joining us for even bigger formations. I was to be the

Let’s call it the theory of receptivity. It’s the idea, often cited by young people in their case against the relevance of even marginally older people, that one’s taste—in music or film, literature or fine cuisine—petrifies during life’s peak of happiness or nadir of misery. Or maybe it’s not that simple. Maybe a subtler spike on the charts—upward, downward, anomalous points in between—might qualify, so long as it’s formative. Let’s say that receptivity, anyway, can be tied to the moments when, for whatever reason, a person opens herself to the things we can all agree make life worth living in a new and definitive way, whether curiosity has her chasing down the world’s pleasures, or the world has torn a strip from her, exposing raw surface area to the winds. During these moments—sleepaway camp right before your bar mitzvah; the year you were captain of the hockey team and the baseball team; the time after you got your license and before you totaled the Volvo—you are closely attuned to your culture, reaching out and in to consume it in vast quantities. When this period ends, your senses seal off what they have absorbed and build a sensibility that becomes, for better or worse, definitive: This is the stuff I like. These films/books/artists tell the story of who I am. There is no better-suited hairstyle. This is as good/bad as it gets for me. The theory suggests that we only get a couple of these moments in life, a couple of sound tracks, and that timing is paramount. If you came of age in the early eighties, for instance, you may hold a relatively shitty cultural moment to be the last time anything was any good simply because that was the last time you were open and engaged with what was happening around you, the last time you felt anything really—appallingly—deeply. I worry about this theory. I worry because it suggests that receptivity is tied closely to youth, and firsts, and also because as with many otherwise highly rejectable theories—Reaganomics and communism come to mind—there is that insolent nub of truth in it.

It seems perfectly reasonable to give the greatest weight to the longest series. South Africa were only offered a five-Test series in Australia and England when they were considered worthy opponents and when the authorities considered that sufficient crowds would allow such a series to be a viable financial option. This link between the duration of a Test series and the money it is likely to generate is a constant throughout the history of the game and has been made more complex over the last three decades by the introduction of the various one-day formats. The constant also remains that a five-Test series (six being a thing of the past) is the ultimate examination of the relative strength of two teams and the current fashion for a quick two-match ‘shoot-out’ can only harm the standing of Test cricket whatever the short-term financial rewards.

Fragmentation of Time One of my clients is an agency of the Australian government. During one consulting call, I collected data indicating that the average worker there was involved in four or more different projects. I complained about this to the Commissioner. He said it was regrettable, but just a fact of life. People’s duties were fragmented because their skills and knowledge made them indispensable to efforts other than the principal ones they were assigned to. He said it was inevitable. I said it was nonsense. I proposed that he make it a specific policy that people be assigned to one and only one project at a time and that the policy be written down and widely distributed. He was game. A year later, when I returned, the average worker was assigned to fewer than two projects. —TDM Fragmentation is bad for team formation, but it’s also bad for efficiency. (Perhaps you’ve begun to pick up a trend here.) People can keep track of only so many human interactions. When they try to be part of four working groups, they have four times as many interactions to track. They spend all their time changing gears. No one can be part of multiple jelled teams. The tight interactions of the jelled team are exclusive. Enough fragmentation and teams just won’t jell.

Build a foundation for continuous growth What matters, then, is having a good education, good work habits, and a good attitude that gives you a foundation to build on. Popularity is about wanting people to like you, but happiness is about liking yourself. In most schools, the science fair is not the most popular event. Being in the math club isn’t nearly as cool as being on the football team. Some of my friends made fun of people on the debate team. But now they work for people who were on the debate team. Junior high and high school are critical times in our lives and our formative years. There’s so much emphasis on sports and not enough on studies. I love sports. I played sports growing up, still do. They teach discipline and teamwork and perseverance, and that’s all great. But we need to keep sports in perspective. Most of us are not going to play sports for a living. One in one million kids will play professional basketball. I don’t mean to depress you, but if you’re white it’s one in five million! The average professional football career is three and a half years. Even if you do make it, you still need a good foundation for life after football. When you study and learn, and take school seriously you may be called a bookworm, a geek, or a nerd, but don’t worry about those names. In a few years you’ll be called the boss. You’ll be called CEO, president, senator, pastor, or doctor. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Harvey Firestone had summer homes next to each other in Florida. They were close friends and spent much of their summers together. Who you associate with makes a difference in how far you go in life. If your friends are Larry, Curly, and Moe, you may have fun, but you may not be going anywhere. The scripture says, “We should redeem the time.” You need to see time as a gift. God has given us 86,400 seconds each today.

Careful thought here will serve the Church for years to come. Churches often find themselves disconnecting their strategic plans from their grievances with church culture. Leaders see a particular problem, but we want to move past repentance right into obedience. Leadership like this only glorifies our own wisdom and righteousness. Appropriate corporate repentance magnifies the Lord of mercy in the church. Not only this, but members of our churches see what we see. When major unbiblical deviations go unaddressed, it only serves to undermine the membership’s view of the care, courage, or competency of the leadership. If we want to see something in culture change, we need to get specific. Exposition. This next stage of managing change will begin a circular process. In this stage, new identified elements of needed cultural change will be added to the existing healthy elements of culture being maintained and reinforced. The leadership team will find itself running around the process circle from exposition to illustration to incorporation to evaluation and a back again to exposition. It may take more laps than a NASCAR race, but culture will change over time. And the process must never end because the culture must be continually cultivated. Exposition is the step in the process that gives Christ-followers a tremendous confidence in the possible future for any church. While formation is always challenging, who better to understand than those the Lord is sanctifying daily? Every single day, we must come to our Bible expecting God to change us, renew us, and cause us to repent. It should be no different for the Church of God. And the means that God uses to shape individuals is the same means He will use to change a church’s culture. The teaching and preaching of God’s Word is our hope and God’s power for change. This step in culture change is so important. The Word of God is powerful to renew hearts and produce fruit among God’s people.

In 1967 the broom world was galvanised by the formation of the Nimbus Racing Broom Company. Nothing like the Nimbus 1000 had ever been seen before. Reaching speeds of up to a hundred miles per hour, capable of turning 360 degrees at a fixed point in mid-air, the Nimbus combined the reliability of the old Oakshaft 79 with the easy handling of the best Cleansweeps. The Nimbus immediately became the broom preferred by professional Quidditch teams across Europe, and the subsequent models (1001, 1500, and 1700) have kept the Nimbus Racing Broom Company at the top of the field.

another true Death Valley Days story is presented for your entertainment by the Pacific Coast Borax Company, producers of that famous family of products—20 Mule Team Borax, 20 Mule Team Borax Soap Chips, and Boraxo. Well, Old Ranger, what’s your story about tonight?” Through many changes of format, it remained a hardy perennial, eventually becoming a filmed TV series with Ronald Reagan as host.

Looking back, a big reason we hit our goal early was that we decided to invest our time, money, and resources into three key areas: customer service (which would build our brand and drive word of mouth), culture (which would lead to the formation of our core values), and employee training and development (which would eventually lead to the creation of our Pipeline Team).

solutions to market saturation might sound straightforward—add new geographies, support more formats and business models, and other tips that sound like common sense. However, the challenge is in the execution, which can’t be underestimated. Launching in every major country around the world while simultaneously staying on top of a hypergrowth startup in a core market is not easy. Yet that’s exactly what eBay had to do, building one of the most valuable internet companies in the 1990s while simultaneously adding the international business, “Buy It Now,” and new product verticals. Once these obvious growth levers are mined, what’s next? Eventually new products have to be layered on. It’s hard to ask teams to start and build new products from scratch. It’s difficult enough as a startup, but trying to do this inside a larger company adds myriad of complexities—there’s internal politics, distractions, lack of resources, adverse selection of talent, and dozens of other challenges.