Team Initiatives Quotes

A fractured team is just like a broken arm or leg; fixing it is always painful, and sometimes you have to rebreak it to make it heal correctly. And the rebreak hurts a lot more than the initial break, because you have to do it on purpose P.37

A good Board Of Directors team is one where ideas are flowing fluidly - and where each idea is met with an initial welcome, an intellectual challenge, an expression of gratitude, a rigorous scrutiny and a readiness for action.

When a leader takes too much ownership, there is no ownership left for the team or subordinate leaders to take. So the team loses initiative, they lose momentum, they won't make any decision, they just sit around and wait to be told what to do.

Tell me what to do, not how to do it.' Decentralize command and allow subordinates to operate freely within the framework of the commander's intent. Train them as a team. Develop trust, loyalty, initiative.

Once you’ve engaged with an organization or a relationship or a community, you owe it to your team to start. To initiate. To be the one who makes something happen. To do less is to steal from them.

The details you don’t give in your orders are as important as the ones you do. With all hands aligned to your goals, their cunning and initiative unleashed, you need only transparent sharing of information (What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?) to orchestrate, as opposed to “control” or “synchronize,” a coordinated team.

Change management is a broad term for the many ways of preparing, supporting, and helping businesses, teams, and organizations adapt to, thrive through and initiate change.

When we sense that leaders aren’t being authentic—whether they’re intentionally misleading us or simply behaving in opposition to their values—we can smell it a mile away. This causes team members to avoid bringing up issues for fear of retribution, as Mulally’s executive team initially did, and reality gets buried under a torrent of excuses and finger-pointing.

A leaders job is to ELEVATE the team, not delegate the team. Elevate your team to take initiative because real leadership is when you can create a culture of self-leadership within your team

Don’t strive to be a well-rounded leader. Instead, discover your zone and stay there. Then delegate everything else. Admitting a weakness is a sign of strength. Acknowledging weakness doesn’t make a leader less effective. Everybody in your organization benefits when you delegate responsibilities that fall outside your core competency. Thoughtful delegation will allow someone else in your organization to shine. Your weakness is someone’s opportunity. Leadership is not always about getting things done “right.” Leadership is about getting things done through other people. The people who follow us are exactly where we have led them. If there is no one to whom we can delegate, it is our own fault. As a leader, gifted by God to do a few things well, it is not right for you to attempt to do everything. Upgrade your performance by playing to your strengths and delegating your weaknesses. There are many things I can do, but I have to narrow it down to the one thing I must do. The secret of concentration is elimination. Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great deal of yourself to nothing. My competence in these areas defines my success as a pastor. A sixty-hour workweek will not compensate for a poorly delivered sermon. People don’t show up on Sunday morning because I am a good pastor (leader, shepherd, counselor). In my world, it is my communication skills that make the difference. So that is where I focus my time. To develop a competent team, help the leaders in your organization discover their leadership competencies and delegate accordingly. Once you step outside your zone, don’t attempt to lead. Follow. The less you do, the more you will accomplish. Only those leaders who act boldly in times of crisis and change are willingly followed. Accepting the status quo is the equivalent of accepting a death sentence. Where there’s no progress, there’s no growth. If there’s no growth, there’s no life. Environments void of change are eventually void of life. So leaders find themselves in the precarious and often career-jeopardizing position of being the one to draw attention to the need for change. Consequently, courage is a nonnegotiable quality for the next generation leader. The leader is the one who has the courage to act on what he sees. A leader is someone who has the courage to say publicly what everybody else is whispering privately. It is not his insight that sets the leader apart from the crowd. It is his courage to act on what he sees, to speak up when everyone else is silent. Next generation leaders are those who would rather challenge what needs to change and pay the price than remain silent and die on the inside. The first person to step out in a new direction is viewed as the leader. And being the first to step out requires courage. In this way, courage establishes leadership. Leadership requires the courage to walk in the dark. The darkness is the uncertainty that always accompanies change. The mystery of whether or not a new enterprise will pan out. The reservation everyone initially feels when a new idea is introduced. The risk of being wrong. Many who lack the courage to forge ahead alone yearn for someone to take the first step, to go first, to show the way. It could be argued that the dark provides the optimal context for leadership. After all, if the pathway to the future were well lit, it would be crowded. Fear has kept many would-be leaders on the sidelines, while good opportunities paraded by. They didn’t lack insight. They lacked courage. Leaders are not always the first to see the need for change, but they are the first to act. Leadership is about moving boldly into the future in spite of uncertainty and risk. You can’t lead without taking risk. You won’t take risk without courage. Courage is essential to leadership.

It’s striking that so many of the great economic initiatives of the Clinton presidency led eventually to catastrophe. But what really makes this story poisonous is that liberals by and large convinced themselves for many years that nothing had gone wrong at all. Everything Clinton’s team had done was an act of professional-class consensus. Because most of the fuses lit by Clinton and Co. didn’t actually detonate until after he had left office—and by then some science-denying Republican was in the Oval Office—they found it easy to absolve the Democrat from blame.

To make the timing work and get Mark a slot onstage after the UN luncheon and the pop-up, I’d asked the festival organizers to move Big Bird. They initially said no, insisting that my Big Bird problem created issues for Malala and Beyoncé. Then they relented and moved Big Bird so he’s right before Mark. Big Bird’s fine with this, but the Facebook team does not think that this sets the right tone—Elliot doesn’t want Mark to follow a giant yellow Muppet—so I need Big Bird moved again.

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

Once you’ve engaged with an organization or a relationship or a community, you owe it to your team to start. To initiate. To be the one who makes something happen. To do less is to steal from them. If you hide your spark, bury your ideas, keep your questions and notions from the team, you have hurt them as badly as if you had stolen a laptop and fenced it on eBay.

Our restaurant fostered a sense of camaraderie in a number of ways besides sharing the same nickname of 'chef.' Initially, we bonded through training. Once we opened, we worked in teams each night, meaning that we not only knew our colleagues well, we depended on them. Most importantly, we all had 'family meal' together every night, just like President Bush recommended to all families so that their children would have good values and grow up to be gun-toting, pro-life, pro-death, gas-guzzling, warmongering, monolingual, homophobic, wiretapped, Bible-thumping, genetically engineered, stem-cell harboring, abstinent creationists. Oops, I think I just lost all of my red state readers. To make up for it, I'll let you lose my ballot.

Micromanagement fails because no one person can control multiple people executing a vast number of actions in a dynamic environment, where changes in the situation occur rapidly and with unpredictability. It also inhibits the growth of subordinates: when people become accustomed to being told what to do, they begin to await direction. Initiative fades and eventually dies. Creativity and bold thought and action soon die as well. The team becomes a bunch of simple and thoughtless automatons, following orders without understanding, moving forward only when told to do so. A team like that will never achieve greatness.

The strategies were often based on the idea that prices tend to revert after an initial move higher or lower. Laufer would buy futures contracts if they opened at unusually low prices compared with their previous closing price, and sell if prices began the day much higher than their previous close. Simons made his own improvements to the evolving system, while insisting that the team work together and share credit.

To figure out what students were carrying with them from kindergarten into adulthood, Chetty’s team turned to another possible explanation. In fourth and eighth grade, the students were rated by their teachers on some other qualities. Here’s a sample: Proactive: How often did they take initiative to ask questions, volunteer answers, seek information from books, and engage the teacher to learn outside class? Prosocial: How well did they get along and collaborate with peers? Disciplined: How effectively did they pay attention—and resist the impulse to disrupt the class? Determined: How consistently did they take on challenging problems, do more than the assigned work, and persist in the face of obstacles? When students were taught by more experienced kindergarten teachers, their fourth-grade teachers rated them higher on all four of these attributes. So did their eighth-grade teachers. The capacities to be proactive, prosocial, disciplined, and determined stayed with students longer—and ultimately proved more powerful—than early math and reading skills.

Grant says it makes sense that introverts are uniquely good at leading initiative-takers. Because of their inclination to listen to others and lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions. Having benefited from the talents of their followers, they are then likely to motivate them to be even more proactive. Introverted leaders create a virtuous circle of proactivity, in other words. In the T-shirt-folding study, the team members reported perceiving the introverted leaders as more open and receptive to their ideas, which motivated them to work harder and to fold more shirts.

Pair programmers: Keep each other on task. Brainstorm refinements to the system. Clarify ideas. Take initiative when their partner is stuck, thus lowering frustration. Hold each other accountable to the team's practices. Pairing

Commander’s intent empowers each person on a team to initiate and improvise as they’re executing the plan. It stops you from being the bottleneck, and it enables the team to keep each other accountable to the goal without your presence.

The Human Genome Project, the full sequence of the normal human genome, was completed in 2003. In its wake comes a far less publicized but vastly more complex project: fully sequencing the genomes of several human cancer cells. Once completed, this effort, called the Cancer Genome Atlas, will dwarf the Human Genome Project in its scope. The sequencing effort involves dozens of teams of researchers across the world. The initial list of cancers to be sequenced includes brain, lung, pancreatic, and ovarian cancer. The Human Genome Project will provide the normal genome, against which cancer’s abnormal genome can be juxtaposed and contrasted. The result, as Francis Collins, the leader of the Human Genome Project describes it, will be a “colossal atlas” of cancer—a compendium of every gene mutated in the most common forms of cancer: “When applied to the 50 most common types of cancer, this effort could ultimately prove to be the equivalent of more than 10,000 Human Genome Projects in terms of the sheer volume of DNA to be sequenced.

unsure whether we will be thrown to the wolves, we become almost immobilized. It is the rustle in the grass, the fear of what may be lurking, that initiates the flow of cortisol into our bloodstreams. It is the cortisol that makes us as paranoid and focused on self-preservation

In any organization, it’s all about selecting the right team. The two qualities I was taught to value most in selecting others for promotion or critical roles were initiative and aggressiveness. I looked for those hallmarks in those I served alongside. Institutions get the behaviors they reward

One of his first initiatives for the church, for instance, was to set up a “serious evangelistic campaign” that would be carried on throughout his first full year. “This campaign,” he wrote in a letter of recommendation, “shall be carried out by 25 evangelistic teams, each consisting of a captain and at least three other members. Each team shall be urged to bring in at least five new members within the church year. The team that brings in the highest number of members shall be duly recognized at the end of the church year. Each captain shall call his team together at least once a month to discuss findings and possibilities.

Within our Task Force, as in a garden, the outcome was less dependent on the initial planting than on consistent maintenance. Watering, weeding, and protecting plants from rabbits and disease are essential for success. The gardener cannot actually “grow” tomatoes, squash, or beans—she can only foster an environment in which the plants do so.

Encouragement during the early years is crucial because beginners are still figuring out whether they want to commit or cut bait. Accordingly, Bloom and his research team found that the best mentors at this stage were especially warm ans supportive: 'perhaps the major quality of these teachers was that they made the initial learning very pleasant and rewarding. much of the introduction to the field was as playful activity, and the learning at the beginning of this stage was like a game'. A degree of autonomy during the early years is also important. Longitudinal studies tracking learners confirm that overbearing parents and teachers erode intrinsic motivation. Kids whose parents let them make their own choices about what they like are more likely to develop interests later identified as a passion.

The CIA plan to capture bin Laden also had to accommodate another layer of American law governing covert action: the presidential ban on assassination by the CIA or its agents, a ban initiated by President Gerald R. Ford in 1976 and renewed by Reagan in the same Executive Order 12333. To comply with this part of the law, when they met with their agents to develop their plan, the CIA officers had to make clear that the effort to capture bin Laden could not turn into an assassination hit. The Afghans had to try to take bin Laden alive. CIA officers were assigned to sit down with the team leaders to make it as clear as possible. “I want to reinforce this with you,” station chief Gary Schroen told the Afghans, as he later described the meeting in cables to Langley and Washington. “You are to capture him alive.”9

The Mongols loved competitions of all sorts, and they organized debates among rival religions the same way they organized wrestling matches. It began on a specific date with a panel of judges to oversee it. In this case Mongke Khan ordered them to debate before three judges: a Christian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. A large audience assembled to watch the affair, which began with great seriousness and formality. An official lay down the strict rules by which Mongke wanted the debate to proceed: on pain of death “no one shall dare to speak words of contention.” Rubruck and the other Christians joined together in one team with the Muslims in an effort to refute the Buddhist doctrines. As these men gathered together in all their robes and regalia in the tents on the dusty plains of Mongolia, they were doing something that no other set of scholars or theologians had ever done in history. It is doubtful that representatives of so many types of Christianity had come to a single meeting, and certainly they had not debated, as equals, with representatives of the various Muslim and Buddhist faiths. The religious scholars had to compete on the basis of their beliefs and ideas, using no weapons or the authority of any ruler or army behind them. They could use only words and logic to test the ability of their ideas to persuade. In the initial round, Rubruck faced a Buddhist from North China who began by asking how the world was made and what happened to the soul after death. Rubruck countered that the Buddhist monk was asking the wrong questions; the first issue should be about God from whom all things flow. The umpires awarded the first points to Rubruck. Their debate ranged back and forth over the topics of evil versus good, God’s nature, what happens to the souls of animals, the existence of reincarnation, and whether God had created evil. As they debated, the clerics formed shifting coalitions among the various religions according to the topic. Between each round of wrestling, Mongol athletes would drink fermented mare’s milk; in keeping with that tradition, after each round of the debate, the learned men paused to drink deeply in preparation for the next match. No side seemed to convince the other of anything. Finally, as the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue.

UNDERSTANDING: Do you have a firm grasp on the situation? MATURITY: Are your motives right? CONFIDENCE: Do you believe in what you are doing? DECISIVENESS: Can you initiate action with confidence and win people’s trust? EXPERIENCE: Have you drawn upon wisdom from others to inform your strategy? INTUITION: Have you taken into account intangibles such as momentum and morale? PREPARATION: Have you done everything you must to set up your team for success?

1. Recruit the smallest group of people who can accomplish what must be done quickly and with high quality. Comparative Advantage means that some people will be better than others at accomplishing certain tasks, so it pays to invest time and resources in recruiting the best team for the job. Don’t make that team too large, however—Communication Overhead makes each additional team member beyond a core of three to eight people a drag on performance. Small, elite teams are best. 2. Clearly communicate the desired End Result, who is responsible for what, and the current status. Everyone on the team must know the Commander’s Intent of the project, the Reason Why it’s important, and must clearly know the specific parts of the project they’re individually responsible for completing—otherwise, you’re risking Bystander Apathy. 3. Treat people with respect. Consistently using the Golden Trifecta—appreciation, courtesy, and respect—is the best way to make the individuals on your team feel Important and is also the best way to ensure that they respect you as a leader and manager. The more your team works together under mutually supportive conditions, the more Clanning will naturally occur, and the more cohesive the team will become. 4. Create an Environment where everyone can be as productive as possible, then let people do their work. The best working Environment takes full advantage of Guiding Structure—provide the best equipment and tools possible and ensure that the Environment reinforces the work the team is doing. To avoid having energy sapped by the Cognitive Switching Penalty, shield your team from as many distractions as possible, which includes nonessential bureaucracy and meetings. 5. Refrain from having unrealistic expectations regarding certainty and prediction. Create an aggressive plan to complete the project, but be aware in advance that Uncertainty and the Planning Fallacy mean your initial plan will almost certainly be incomplete or inaccurate in a few important respects. Update your plan as you go along, using what you learn along the way, and continually reapply Parkinson’s Law to find the shortest feasible path to completion that works, given the necessary Trade-offs required by the work. 6. Measure to see if what you’re doing is working—if not, try another approach. One of the primary fallacies of effective Management is that it makes learning unnecessary. This mind-set assumes your initial plan should be 100 percent perfect and followed to the letter. The exact opposite is true: effective Management means planning for learning, which requires constant adjustments along the way. Constantly Measure your performance across a small set of Key Performance Indicators (discussed later)—if what you’re doing doesn’t appear to be working, Experiment with another approach.

We found it helpful to think of such cross-functional projects as a kind of tax, a payment one team had to make in support of the overall forward progress of the company. We tried to minimize such intrusions but could not avoid them altogether. Some teams, through no fault of their own, found themselves in a higher tax bracket than others. The Order Pipeline and Payments teams, for example, had to be involved in almost every new initiative, even though it wasn’t in their original charters.

To be clear, male leadership in marriage does not mean the husband does everything or even that he decides everything. Rather, it means he typically initiates and always leads those shared discussions with his wife by which the various aspects of marriage and family life are decided and planned. The wife's opinion is vitally important, and a godly couple should be a close-knit team. But there should be no area of family life in which the husband does not serve as leader, facilitator, and overseer.

In a company known for its inventiveness, separable, single-threaded leadership has been one of Amazon’s most useful inventions. We discuss it in chapter three. This is the organizational strategy that minimizes the drag on efficiency created by intra-organizational dependencies. The basic premise is, for each initiative or project, there is a single leader whose focus is that project and that project alone, and that leader oversees teams of people whose attention is similarly focused on that one project.

Although he wanted an element of democracy within the group, with players using their initiative, making suggestions and keeping an open mind to new ideas, Guardiola did not delay in imposing a number of strict rules in his first few days in charge: such as insisting upon the use of Castilian and Catalan as the only languages spoken among the group, arranging a seating plan at meal times to encourage the players to mix and to prevent the team forming up into different cultural or national groups and cliques.

Who knows what advantages you might find in a smaller home, even beyond what you were initially hoping for, after you move in? Maybe you'll be inspired to become a more creative person when you take up residence in a quaint older neighborhood and get out of that suburban tract where you can have a house of any color as long as it's beige. Maybe by putting your preadolescent kids in a bedroom together, they'll socialize better and develop closer bonds. Maybe you and your spouse will rediscover each other when you're actually spending time together instead of tag-teaming on chores.

On the day the company starts, there is very limited customer input to a product specification. The company doesn’t know who its initial customers are (but it may think it knows) or what they will want as features. One alternative is to put Product Development on hold until the Customer Development team can find those customers. However, having a product you can demonstrate and iterate is helpful in moving the Customer Development process along. A more productive approach is to proceed with Product Development, with the feature list driven by the vision and experience of the company’s founders.

One of the best-known studies of availability suggests that awareness of your own biases can contribute to peace in marriages, and probably in other joint projects. In a famous study, spouses were asked, “How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?” They also answered similar questions about “taking out the garbage,” “initiating social engagements,” etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%. The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency. The bias is not necessarily self-serving: spouses also overestimated their contribution to causing quarrels, although to a smaller contribution to causing quarrels, although to a smaller extent than their contributions to more desirable outcomes. The same bias contributes to the common observation that many members of a collaborative team feel they have done more than their share and also feel that the others are not adequately grateful for their individual contributions

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

The reason a bunch of employees who had no direct responsibility for ads, or culpability when they were lousy, spent their weekends transforming someone else’s problem into a profitable solution speaks to the power of culture. Jeff and gang had a clear understanding of their company’s priorities, and knew they had the freedom to try to solve any big problem that stood in the way of success. If they had failed, no one would have chastised them in any way, and when they succeeded, no one—even on the ads team—was jealous of their progress. But it wasn’t Google’s culture that turned those five engineers into problem-solving ninjas who changed the course of the company over the weekend. Rather it was the culture that attracted the ninjas to the company in the first place. Many people, when considering a job, are primarily concerned with their role and responsibilities, the company’s track record, the industry, and compensation. Further down on that list, probably somewhere between “length of commute” and “quality of coffee in the kitchen,” comes culture. Smart creatives, though, place culture at the top of the list. To be effective, they need to care about the place they work. This is why, when starting a new company or initiative, culture is the most important thing to consider.

Here are the commons symptoms that result from micromanagement: 1. The team shows a lack of initiative. Members will not take action unless directed. 2. The team does not seek solutions to problems; instead, its members sit and wait to be told about a solution. 3. Even in an emergency, a team that is being micromanaged will not mobilize and take action. 4. Bold and aggressive action becomes rare. 5. Creativity grinds to a halt. 6. The team tends to stay inside their own silo; not stepping out to coordinate efforts with other departments or divisions for fear of overstepping their bounds. 7. An overall sense of passivity and failure to react.

DevOps requires potentially new cultural and management norms and changes in our technical practices and architecture. This requires a coalition that spans business leadership, Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, Information Security, and even Marketing, where many technology initiatives originate. When all these teams work together, we can create a safe system of work, enabling small teams to quickly and independently develop and validate code that can be safely deployed to customers. This results in maximizing developer productivity, organizational learning, high employee satisfaction, and the ability to win in the marketplace.

Also renowned is the beautiful painting ceiling of the cave at Altamira, in Northern Spain. This was the first cave art to be discovered in 1879. The art at Altamira, which has been dated to around 19,000-11,000 years ago, comprises stunning representations of bison, horses, and other large animals, with extraordinary use of colors and shading to indicate depth. The quaint story of its discovery details that the paintings, which are on a low ceiling, were initially missed by the team of archaeologists, but were spotted by one of the team's 8-year-old daughter; she was the only individual small enough to stand erect and still look up at the ceiling.

Developing a culture of operating from commander’s intent demanded a higher level of unit discipline and self-discipline than issuing voluminous, detailed instructions. In drafting my intent, I learned to provide only what is necessary to achieve a clearly defined end state: tell your team the purpose of the operation, giving no more than the essential details of how you intend to achieve the mission, and then clearly state your goal or end state, one that enables what you intend to do next. Leave the “how” to your subordinates, who must be trained and rewarded for exercising initiative, taking advantage of opportunities and problems as they arise.

In 2006, the Vogelstein team revealed the first landmark sequencing effort by analyzing thirteen thousand genes in eleven breast and colon cancers. (Although the human genome contains about twenty thousand genes in total, Vogelstein’s team initially had tools to assess only thirteen thousand.) In 2008, both Vogelstein’s group and the Cancer Genome Atlas consortium extended this effort by sequencing hundreds of genes of several dozen specimens of brain tumors. As of 2009, the genomes of ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, melanoma, lung cancer, and several forms of leukemia have been sequenced, revealing the full catalog of mutations in each tumor type. Perhaps

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.

collaboration between teams at IBM and IIT Madras offered a quantum computing course on NPTEL, a popular MOOC platform in India. Despite minimal advertising, this course attracted 10,000 registrants, exemplifying the keen interest in quantum computing among Indian learners. Additionally, IBM’s Qiskit summer schools consistently see high participation from India, indicating a sustained enthusiasm and growing expertise in the field within the country. The registrations have to be closed early in India because the priority access slots on quantum computers are limited. This trend reflects the flourishing quantum learners community India, driven by educational initiatives and widespread engagement from students and professionals.

Among women, the Fort Worth initiative “tripled associate degree completion.”7 This is a huge finding. But as with free college in Kalamazoo, it had no impact on college completion for male students. Why? Again, the evaluators can only speculate. James Sullivan, one of the scholars who is examining the program, says, “We don’t know.”8 That phrase again. His research team does note that the case managers assigned to work with students, called “navigators” (great name by the way), were all women. When a program relies heavily on a close one-to-one relationship, matching the gender of the provider and recipient may be important. This is consistent with research showing that when the racial or gender identities of teachers and learners or mentors and mentees match, results are often better.9

Values constitute your personal “bottom line.” They serve as guides to action. They inform the priorities you set and the decisions you make. They tell you when to say yes and when to say no. They also help you explain the choices you make and why you made them. If you believe, for instance, that diversity enriches innovation and service, then you should know what to do if people with differing views keep getting cut off when they offer fresh ideas. If you value collaboration over individualistic achievement, then you’ll know what to do when your best salesperson skips team meetings and refuses to share information with colleagues. If you value independence and initiative over conformity and obedience, you’ll be more likely to challenge something your manager says if you think it’s wrong.

Minutes after Eve stepped into her office to coordinate her next move, Peabody rushed in. “I’ve got the initial sweeper’s report on the room the Lombards vacated—nothing,” Peabody said hurriedly. “Canvassing cops found the bar—one block east, two south of the hotel. Door was unlocked. Zana’s purse was inside on the floor. I have a team heading there now.” “You’ve been busy,” Eve said. “How did you manage to fit in sex?” “Sex? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I bet you want coffee.” She darted to the AutoChef, then whirled back. “How do you know I had sex? Do you have sex radar?” “Your shirt’s not buttoned right, and you’ve got a fresh hickey on your neck.” “Damn it.” Peabody slapped a hand to the side of her neck. “How bad is it? Why don’t you have a mirror in here?” “Because, let’s see, could it be because it’s an office?

After initial annoyance about the surprise drills, the Pentagon quickly saw value in the president’s interest. “It is the first time in years that they have a president who takes his role as Commander-in-Chief seriously,” a White House aide bragged. “They’re ecstatic.” Amid Vietnam, Watergate, and a relatively calm period of the Cold War in general, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford had shown little interest in the emergency procedures, which for the most part had continued to chug along far off the White House’s radar. Carter’s administration, on the other hand, ran the only full-scale activation of the Greenbrier congressional relocation facility—on cue, the Forsythe Associates team hauled hundreds of desks out of their warehouse on the resort grounds and—while the conference facilities were closed to the public—set up the exhibit hall as if Congress had successfully relocated there. Outside the small Forsythe Associates crew, none of the resort guests or staffers noticed. •

Here are some practical Dataist guidelines for you: ‘You want to know who you really are?’ asks Dataism. ‘Then forget about mountains and museums. Have you had your DNA sequenced? No?! What are you waiting for? Go and do it today. And convince your grandparents, parents and siblings to have their DNA sequenced too – their data is very valuable for you. And have you heard about these wearable biometric devices that measure your blood pressure and heart rate twenty-four hours a day? Good – so buy one of those, put it on and connect it to your smartphone. And while you are shopping, buy a mobile camera and microphone, record everything you do, and put in online. And allow Google and Facebook to read all your emails, monitor all your chats and messages, and keep a record of all your Likes and clicks. If you do all that, then the great algorithms of the Internet-of-All-Things will tell you whom to marry, which career to pursue and whether to start a war.’ But where do these great algorithms come from? This is the mystery of Dataism. Just as according to Christianity we humans cannot understand God and His plan, so Dataism declares that the human brain cannot fathom the new master algorithms. At present, of course, the algorithms are mostly written by human hackers. Yet the really important algorithms – such as the Google search algorithm – are developed by huge teams. Each member understands just one part of the puzzle, and nobody really understands the algorithm as a whole. Moreover, with the rise of machine learning and artificial neural networks, more and more algorithms evolve independently, improving themselves and learning from their own mistakes. They analyse astronomical amounts of data that no human can possibly encompass, and learn to recognise patterns and adopt strategies that escape the human mind. The seed algorithm may initially be developed by humans, but as it grows it follows its own path, going where no human has gone before – and where no human can follow.

In a famous study, spouses were asked, “How large was your personal contribution to keeping the place tidy, in percentages?” They also answered similar questions about “taking out the garbage,” “initiating social engagements,” etc. Would the self-estimated contributions add up to 100%, or more, or less? As expected, the self-assessed contributions added up to more than 100%. The explanation is a simple availability bias: both spouses remember their own individual efforts and contributions much more clearly than those of the other, and the difference in availability leads to a difference in judged frequency. The bias is not necessarily self-serving: spouses also overestimated their contribution to causing quarrels, although to a smaller extent than their contributions to more desirable outcomes. The same bias contributes to the common observation that many members of a collaborative team feel they have done more than their share and also feel that the others are not adequately grateful for their individual contributions.

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That trust takes time. But when you love each other, it shouldn't be scary to be vulnerable and it shouldn't be hard to compromise. I'd like to share with you what we like to call SACRED HEALING. We use it every day of our marriage, and it hasn't failed us yet! When you have something you need to communicate, those words are SACRED: 1. STOP when you register something's wrong. 2. ADMIT that you have an issue to discuss. 3. CALMLY express your feelings. 4. REFLECT on why you're feeling this way. 5. ENGAGE with your partner to actively fix the issue. 6. DEVOTE time after conflict to returning to a loving state. And when your partner is saying something SACRED, it's your job to get the leader of the HEALING: 1. HEAR your partner's words. 2. ENGAGE with your questions for clarification and understanding. 3. ACKNOWLEDGE that what they're saying is important. 4. LOOK BACK on your own role in the conflict. 5. INITIATE discussion without anger or defense. 6. NEGOTIATE a solution with pure intentions. 7. GROW as partners and individuals by fixing the problem as a team.

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

The tone of those negotiations was very contentious,” says Becky Sauerbrunn, who served on the national team’s CBA committee and participated in most of the negotiation sessions. “They didn’t go anywhere. We would go into those meetings and say we want equal pay and they would say you’re not really generating the revenue to deserve equal pay to the men. And it just went around and around like that.” But then on March 7, Rich Nichols saw something that caught him by surprise. It was an article by Jonathan Tannenwald of the Philadelphia Inquirer that broke down financial numbers contained in U.S. Soccer’s General Annual Meeting report. The report itself was released quietly on U.S. Soccer’s website without fanfare—Tannenwald was the only journalist for a major newspaper who picked up on it. What the U.S. Soccer report showed—and what in turn the Philadelphia Inquirer explained—was that U.S. Soccer initially budgeted a $420,000 loss for 2016 but changed their numbers to expect a profit of almost $18 million, based largely on the gate receipts and merchandise sales of the women’s national team during the 2015 Women’s World Cup victory tour.

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

Knowledgeable observers report that dating has nearly disappeared from college campuses and among young adults generally. It has been replaced by something called “hanging out.” You young people apparently know what this is, but I will describe it for the benefit of those of us who are middle-aged or older and otherwise uninformed. Hanging out consists of numbers of young men and young women joining together in some group activity. It is very different from dating. For the benefit of some of you who are not middle-aged or older, I also may need to describe what dating is. Unlike hanging out, dating is not a team sport. Dating is pairing off to experience the kind of one-on-one association and temporary commitment that can lead to marriage in some rare and treasured cases. . . . All of this made dating more difficult. And the more elaborate and expensive the date, the fewer the dates. As dates become fewer and more elaborate, this seems to create an expectation that a date implies seriousness or continuing commitment. That expectation discourages dating even more. . . . Simple and more frequent dates allow both men and women to “shop around” in a way that allows extensive evaluation of the prospects. The old-fashioned date was a wonderful way to get acquainted with a member of the opposite sex. It encouraged conversation. It allowed you to see how you treat others and how you are treated in a one-on-one situation. It gave opportunities to learn how to initiate and sustain a mature relationship. None of that happens in hanging out. My single brothers and sisters, follow the simple dating pattern and you don’t need to do your looking through Internet chat rooms or dating services—two alternatives that can be very dangerous or at least unnecessary or ineffective. . . . Men, if you have returned from your mission and you are still following the boy-girl patterns you were counseled to follow when you were 15, it is time for you to grow up. Gather your courage and look for someone to pair off with. Start with a variety of dates with a variety of young women, and when that phase yields a good prospect, proceed to courtship. It’s marriage time. That is what the Lord intends for His young adult sons and daughters. Men have the initiative, and you men should get on with it. If you don’t know what a date is, perhaps this definition will help. I heard it from my 18-year-old granddaughter. A “date” must pass the test of three p’s: (1) planned ahead, (2) paid for, and (3) paired off. Young women, resist too much hanging out, and encourage dates that are simple, inexpensive, and frequent. Don’t make it easy for young men to hang out in a setting where you women provide the food. Don’t subsidize freeloaders. An occasional group activity is OK, but when you see men who make hanging out their primary interaction with the opposite sex, I think you should lock the pantry and bolt the front door. If you do this, you should also hang up a sign, “Will open for individual dates,” or something like that. And, young women, please make it easier for these shy males to ask for a simple, inexpensive date. Part of making it easier is to avoid implying that a date is something very serious. If we are to persuade young men to ask for dates more frequently, we must establish a mutual expectation that to go on a date is not to imply a continuing commitment. Finally, young women, if you turn down a date, be kind. Otherwise you may crush a nervous and shy questioner and destroy him as a potential dater, and that could hurt some other sister. My single young friends, we counsel you to channel your associations with the opposite sex into dating patterns that have the potential to mature into marriage, not hanging-out patterns that only have the prospect to mature into team sports like touch football. Marriage is not a group activity—at least, not until the children come along in goodly numbers.

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the hatred shown toward Hillary Clinton far outstripped even the most virulent criticisms that could legitimately be pinned on her. She was linked with “evil” and widely compared to a witch, which is to say that she was attacked as a woman, not as a political leader. After her defeat, some of those critics dug out the song “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead,” sung in The Wizard of Oz to celebrate the Witch of the East’s death—a jingle already revived in the UK at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013. This reference was brandished not only by Donald Trump’s electors, but also by supporters of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main rival in the primaries. On Sanders’ official site, a fundraising initiative was announced under the punning title “Bern the Witch”—an announcement that the Vermont senator’s campaign team took down as soon as it was brought to his attention. Continuing this series of limp quips, the conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh quipped, “She’s a witch with a capital B”—he can’t have known that, at the Salem witch trials in the seventeenth century, a key figure had already exploited this consonance by calling his servant, Sarah Churchill, who was one of his accusers, “bitch witch.” In reaction, female Democrat voters started sporting badges calling themselves “Witches for Hillary” or “Hags for Hillary.”48

Which would seem to be a good thing—proposing a solution to a problem that people are hungry to solve—except that my view of silos might not be what some leaders expect to hear. That’s because many executives I’ve worked with who struggle with silos are inclined to look down into their organizations and wonder, “Why don’t those employees just learn to get along better with people in other departments? Don’t they know we’re all on the same team?” All too often this sets off a well-intentioned but ill-advised series of actions—training programs, memos, posters—designed to inspire people to work better together. But these initiatives only provoke cynicism among employees—who would love nothing more than to eliminate the turf wars and departmental politics that often make their work lives miserable. The problem is, they can’t do anything about it. Not without help from their leaders. And while the first step those leaders need to take is to address any behavioral problems that might be preventing executive team members from working well with one another—that was the thrust of my book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team—even behaviorally cohesive teams can struggle with silos. (Which is particularly frustrating and tragic because it leads well-intentioned and otherwise functional team members to inappropriately question one another’s trust and commitment to the team.) To tear

The nudge movement spawned by Thaler and Sunstein has been spectacularly successful around the globe. A 2017 review in the Economist described how policy makers were beginning to embrace insights from behavioral science: In 2009 Barack Obama appointed Mr Sunstein as head of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. The following year Mr Thaler advised Britain’s government when it established BIT, which quickly became known as the “nudge unit”. If BIT did not save the government at least ten times its running cost (£500,000 a year), it was to be shut down after two years. Not only did BIT stay open, saving about 20 times its running cost, but it marked the start of a global trend. Now many governments are turning to nudges to save money and do better. In 2014 the White House opened the Social and Behavioural Sciences Team. A report that year by Mark Whitehead of Aberystwyth University counted 51 countries in which “centrally directed policy initiatives” were influenced by behavioural sciences. Nonprofit organisations such as Ideas42, set up in 2008 at Harvard University, help run dozens of nudge-style trials and programmes around the world. In 2015 the World Bank set up a group that is now applying behavioural sciences in 52 poor countries. The UN is turning to nudging to help hit the “sustainable development goals”, a list of targets it has set for 2030.32

Launching “Buy It Now” was a large change that touched every transaction, but the eBay team also innovated across the experience for both sellers and buyers as well. With an initial success, we doubled down on innovation to drive growth. We introduced stores on eBay, which dramatically increased the amount of product offered for sale on the platform. We expanded the menu of optional features that sellers could purchase to better highlight their listings on the site. We improved the post-transaction experience on ebay.com by significantly improving the “checkout” flow, including the eventual seamless integration of PayPal on the eBay site. Each of these innovations supported the growth of the business and helped to keep that gravity at bay. Years later, Jeff became a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he would kick off the firm’s success in startups with network effects, investing in Airbnb, Instacart, Pinterest, and others. I’m lucky to work with him! He recounted in an essay on the a16z blog that his strategy was to grow eBay by adding layers and layers of new revenue—like “adding layers to the cake.” You can see it visually here: Figure 12: eBay’s growth layer cake As the core US business began to look more like a line than a hockey stick, international and payments were layered on top. Together, the aggregate business started to look like a hockey stick, but underneath it was actually many new lines of business.

Many people find it hard to understand what it is about a mountain that draws men and women to risk their lives on her freezing, icy faces--all for a chance at that single, solitary moment on the top. It can be hard to explain. But I also relate to the quote that says: “If you have to ask, you will never understand.” I just felt that maybe this was it: my first real, and possibly only, chance to follow that dream of one day standing on the summit of Mount Everest. Deep down, I knew that I should take it. Neil agreed to my joining his Everest team on the basis of how I’d perform on an expedition that October to the Himalayas. As I got off the phone from speaking to Neil, I had a sinking feeling that I had just made a commitment that was going to change my life forever--either for the better or for the worse. But I had wanted a fresh start--this was it, and I felt alive. A few days later I announced the news to my family. My parents--and especially my sister, Lara--called me selfish, unkind, and then stupid. Their eventual acceptance of the idea came with the condition that if I died then my mother would divorce my father, as he had been the man who had planted the “stupid idea” in my head in the first place, all those years earlier. Dad just smiled. Time eventually won through, even with my sister, and all their initial resistance then turned into a determination to help me--predominantly motivated by the goal of trying to keep me alive. As for me, all I had to ensure was that I kept my promise to be okay. As it happened, four people tragically died on Everest while we were there: four talented, strong climbers. It wasn’t within my capability to make these promises to my family. My father knew that.

If that sounds cultish, I’m unapologetic. When organizations talk about creating an innovative business culture, a lot of people focus on the external symbols. The ping-pong and foosball tables in the office, the team-building Thursday beers after work, the company ski weekends, and the anything-goes dress code. At TMHQ we have all those things. But they are marginal to what we are really about. A culture is built up over months and years of good practice, questioning, and improvement. Of doing things the right way and having anyone who comes into the group or participates in an event recognize what that means. Culture is all the things that happen in an organization when the boss isn’t looking. Tony Hsieh describes, in his book Delivering Happiness, how he built his online shoe business Zappos by concentrating on service and integrity above all else. “Your personal core values define who you are,” he argued, “and a company’s core values ultimately define the company’s character and brand. For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny.” I think that’s true, and doubly so when you are “delivering happiness” as an experience that asks people to take on and display some of the virtues of that culture themselves. In this sense, we believed, in our initial phase of recruiting, that a candidate’s previous career path and qualifications were less important than his or her willingness to embrace our credo. Though we had no experience in event management, the plan was never to go out and hire people from the event industry. We had obstacles where participants jump through flames and we feared the first thing an outside event person might instinctively do was pull out a fire extinguisher.

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Fidel Castro, who always enjoyed sports, promoted programs that helped Cuba become a front-runner in Latin America. The island nation fields outstanding baseball, soccer, basketball and volleyball teams. It also excels in amateur boxing. Believing that sports should be available for everyone, not just the privileged few, the phrase “Sports for all” is a motto frequently used. When Castro took power, he abolished all professional sports. Only amateur baseball has been played in Cuba since 1961. An unexpected consequence of this initiative was that many players discovered that they could get much better deals if they left Cuba. As an attempt to prevent this, Fidel forbade players from playing abroad and if they did leave the island, he would prevent their families from joining them. Originally, many Cuban baseball players played for teams in the American Negro league. This ended when Jackie Robinson was allowed to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers during the late 1940’s. Afterwards, all Cuban baseball players played for the regular leagues regardless of their race. The Negro National League ceased after the 1948 season, and the last All-Star game was held in 1962. The Indianapolis Clowns were the last remaining Negro/Latin league team and played until 1966. Cuban players with greater skill joined the Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. If they defected to the United States directly, they had to enter the MLB Draft. However, if they first defected to another country they could become free agents. Knowing this, many came to the United States via Mexico. In all, about 84 players have defected from Cuba since the Revolution. The largest contract ever given to a defector from Cuba was to Rusney Castillo. In 2014, the outfielder negotiated a seven-year contract with the Boston Red Sox for $72.5 million. Starting in 1999, about 21 Cuban soccer players have defected to the United States. The Cuban government considers these defectors as disloyal and treats their families with disrespect, even banning them from taking part in national sports.

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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

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NBC News reporter David Gregory was on a tear. Lecturing the NRA president—and the rest of the world—on the need for gun restrictions, the D.C. media darling and host of NBC’s boring Sunday morning gabfest, Meet the Press, Gregory displayed a thirty-round magazine during an interview. This was a violation of District of Columbia law, which specifically makes it illegal to own, transfer, or sell “high-capacity ammunition.” Conservatives demanded the Mr. Gregory, a proponent of strict gun control laws, be arrested and charged for his clear violation of the laws he supports. Instead the District of Columbia’s attorney general, Irv Nathan, gave Gregory a pass: Having carefully reviewed all of the facts and circumstances of this matter, as it does in every case involving firearms-related offenses or any other potential violation of D.C. law within our criminal jurisdiction, OAG has determined to exercise its prosecutorial discretion to decline to bring criminal charges against Mr. Gregory, who has no criminal record, or any other NBC employee based on the events associated with the December 23, 2012 broadcast. What irked people even more was the attorney general admitted that NBC had willfully violated D.C. law. As he noted: No specific intent is required for this violation, and ignorance of the law or even confusion about it is no defense. We therefore did not rely in making our judgment on the feeble and unsatisfactory efforts that NBC made to determine whether or not it was lawful to possess, display and broadcast this large capacity magazine as a means of fostering the public policy debate. Although there appears to have been some misinformation provided initially, NBC was clearly and timely advised by an MPD employee that its plans to exhibit on the broadcast a high capacity-magazine would violate D.C. law. David Gregory gets a pass, but not Mark Witaschek. Witaschek was the subject of not one but two raids on his home by D.C. police. The second time that police raided Witaschek’s home, they did so with a SWAT team and even pulled his terrified teenage son out of the shower. They found inoperable muzzleloader bullets (replicas, not live ammunition, no primer) and an inoperable shotgun shell, a tchotchke from a hunting trip. Witaschek, in compliance with D.C. laws, kept his guns out of D.C. and at a family member’s home in Virginia. It wasn’t good enough for the courts, who tangled him up in a two-year court battle that he fought on principle but eventually lost. As punishment, the court forced him to register as a gun offender, even though he never had a firearm in the city. Witaschek is listed as a “gun offender”—not to be confused with “sex offender,” though that’s exactly the intent: to draw some sort of correlation, to make possession of a common firearm seem as perverse as sexual offenses. If only Mark Witaschek got the break that David Gregory received.

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.

Ellen Braun, an accomplished agile manager, noticed that different behaviors emerge over time as telltale signs of a team’s emotional maturity, a key component in their ability to adjust as things happen to them and to get to the tipping point when “an individual’s self interest shifts to alignment with the behaviors that support team achievement” (Braun 2010). It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. —James Thurber Team Dynamics Survey Ellen created a list of survey questions she first used as personal reflection while she observed teams in action. Using these questions the same way, as a pathway to reflection, an agile coach can gain insight into potential team problems or areas for emotional growth. Using them with the team will be more insightful, perhaps as material for a retrospective where the team has the time and space to chew on the ideas that come up. While the team sprints, though, mull them over on your own, and notice what they tell you about team dynamics (Braun 2010). • How much does humor come into day-to-day interaction within the team? • What are the initial behaviors that the team shows in times of difficulty and stress? • How often are contradictory views raised by team members (including junior team members)? • When contradictory views are raised by team members, how often are they fully discussed? • Based on the norms of the team, how often do team members compromise in the course of usual team interactions (when not forced by circumstances)? • To what extent can any team member provide feedback to any other team member (think about negative and positive feedback)? • To what extent does any team member actually provide feedback to any other team member? • How likely would it be that a team member would discuss issues with your performance or behavior with another team member without giving feedback to you directly (triangulating)? • To what extent do you as an individual get support from your team on your personal career goals (such as learning a new skill from a team member)? • How likely would you be to ask team members for help if it required your admission that you were struggling with a work issue? • How likely would you be to share personal information with the team that made you feel vulnerable? • To what extent is the team likely to bring into team discussions an issue that may create conflict or disagreement within the team? • How likely or willing are you to bring into a team discussion an issue that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view? • If you bring an item into a team discussion that is likely to have many different conflicting points of view, how often does the team reach a consensus that takes into consideration all points of view and feels workable to you? • Can you identify an instance in the past two work days when you felt a sense of warmth or inclusion within the context of your team? • Can you identify an instance in the past two days when you felt a sense of disdain or exclusion within the context of your team? • How much does the team make you feel accountable for your work? Mulling over these questions solo or posing them to the team will likely generate a lot of raw material to consider. When you step back from the many answers, perhaps one or two themes jump out at you, signaling the “big things” to address.

Think about it,” Obama said to us on the flight over. “The Republican Party is the only major party in the world that doesn’t even acknowledge that climate change is happening.” He was leaning over the seats where Susan and I sat. We chuckled. “Even the National Front believes in climate change,” I said, referring to the far-right party in France. “No, think about it,” he said. “That’s where it all began. Once you convince yourself that something like that isn’t true, then…” His voice trailed off, and he walked out of the room. For six years, Obama had been working to build what would become the Paris agreement, piece by piece. Because Congress wouldn’t act, he had to promote clean energy, and regulate fuel efficiency and emissions through executive action. With dozens of other nations, he made climate change an issue in our bilateral relationship, helping design their commitments. At international conferences, U.S. diplomats filled in the details of a framework. Since the breakthrough with China, and throughout 2015, things had been falling into place. When we got to Paris, the main holdout was India. We were scheduled to meet with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Obama and a group of us waited outside the meeting room, when the Indian delegation showed up in advance of Modi. By all accounts, the Indian negotiators had been the most difficult. Obama asked to talk to them, and for the next twenty minutes, he stood in a hallway having an animated argument with two Indian men. I stood off to the side, glancing at my BlackBerry, while he went on about solar power. One guy from our climate team came over to me. “I can’t believe he’s doing this,” he whispered. “These guys are impossible.” “Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s an argument about science. He loves this.” Modi came around the corner with a look of concern on his face, wondering what his negotiators were arguing with Obama about. We moved into the meeting room, and a dynamic became clear. Modi’s team, which represented the institutional perspective of the Indian government, did not want to do what is necessary to reach an agreement. Modi, who had ambitions to be a transformative leader of India, and a person of global stature, was torn. This is one reason why we had done the deal with China; if India was alone, it was going to be hard for Modi to stay out. For nearly an hour, Modi kept underscoring the fact that he had three hundred million people with no electricity, and coal was the cheapest way to grow the Indian economy; he cared about the environment, but he had to worry about a lot of people mired in poverty. Obama went through arguments about a solar initiative we were building, the market shifts that would lower the price of clean energy. But he still hadn’t addressed a lingering sense of unfairness, the fact that nations like the United States had developed with coal, and were now demanding that India avoid doing the same thing. “Look,” Obama finally said, “I get that it’s unfair. I’m African American.” Modi smiled knowingly and looked down at his hands. He looked genuinely pained. “I know what it’s like to be in a system that’s unfair,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn’t happen. But I can’t let that shape my choices, and neither should you.” I’d never heard him talk to another leader in quite that way. Modi seemed to appreciate it. He looked up and nodded.

Throughout the history of the church, Christians have tended to elevate the importance of one over the other. For the first 1,500 years of the church, singleness was considered the preferred state and the best way to serve Christ. Singles sat at the front of the church. Marrieds were sent to the back.4 Things changed after the Reformation in 1517, when single people were sent to the back and marrieds moved to the front — at least among Protestants.5 Scripture, however, refers to both statuses as weighty, meaningful vocations. We’ll spend more time on each later in the chapter, but here is a brief overview. Marrieds. This refers to a man and woman who form a one-flesh union through a covenantal vow — to God, to one another, and to the larger community — to permanently, freely, faithfully, and fruitfully love one another. Adam and Eve provide the clearest biblical model for this. As a one-flesh couple, they were called by God to take initiative to “be fruitful . . . fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Singles. Scripture teaches that human beings are created for intimacy and connection with God, themselves, and one another. Marriage is one framework in which we work this out; singleness is another. While singleness may be voluntarily chosen or involuntarily imposed, temporary or long-term, a sudden event or a gradual unfolding, Christian singleness can be understood within two distinct callings: • Vowed celibates. These are individuals who make lifelong vows to remain single and maintain lifelong sexual abstinence as a means of living out their commitment to Christ. They do this freely in response to a God-given gift of grace (Matthew 19:12). Today, we are perhaps most familiar with vowed celibates as nuns and priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Church. These celibates vow to forgo earthly marriage in order to participate more fully in the heavenly reality that is eternal union with Christ.6 • Dedicated celibates. These are singles who have not necessarily made a lifelong vow to remain single, but who choose to remain sexually abstinent for as long as they are single. Their commitment to celibacy is an expression of their commitment to Christ. Many desire to marry or are open to the possibility. They may have not yet met the right person or are postponing marriage to pursue a career or additional education. They may be single because of divorce or the death of a spouse. The apostle Paul acknowledges such dedicated celibates in his first letter to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 7). Understanding singleness and marriage as callings or vocations must inform our self-understanding and the outworking of our leadership. Our whole life as a leader is to bear witness to God’s love for the world. But we do so in different ways as marrieds or singles. Married couples bear witness to the depth of Christ’s love. Their vows focus and limit them to loving one person exclusively, permanently, and intimately. Singles — vowed or dedicated — bear witness to the breadth of Christ’s love. Because they are not limited by a vow to one person, they have more freedom and time to express the love of Christ to a broad range of people. Both marrieds and singles point to and reveal Christ’s love, but in different ways. Both need to learn from one another about these different aspects of Christ’s love. This may be a radically new concept for you, but stay with me. God intends this rich theological vision to inform our leadership in ways few of us may have considered. Before exploring the connections between leadership and marriage or singleness, it’s important to understand the way marriage and singleness are commonly understood in standard practice among leaders today.

The trainers at Uberversity, where new employees underwent a three-day initiation, began schooling everyone on this scenario: a rival company is launching a carpooling service in four weeks. It’s impossible for Uber to beat them to market with a reliable carpool service of its own. What should the company do? The correct answer at Uberversity—and what Uber actually did when it learned about Lyft Line—was “Rig up a makeshift solution that we pretend is totally ready to go so we can beat the competitor to market.” (Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm where I work, invested in Lyft and I am on its board, so I was keenly aware of the dynamic between the companies—and I am decidedly biased.) Those, including the company’s legal team, who proposed taking the time to come up with a workable product, one far better than Uber Pool 1.0, were told “That’s not the Uber way.” The underlying message was clear: if the choice is integrity or winning, at Uber we do whatever we have to do to win. This competitiveness issue also came up when Uber began to challenge Didi Chuxing, the Chinese market leader in ride-sharing. To counter Uber, Didi employed very aggressive techniques including hacking Uber’s app to send it fake riders. The Chinese law on the tactic wasn’t entirely clear. The Chinese branch of Uber countered by hacking Didi right back. Uber then brought those techniques home to the United States by hacking Lyft with a program known as Hell, which inserted fake riders into Lyft’s system while simultaneously funneling Uber the information it needed to recruit Lyft drivers. Did Kalanick instruct his subordinates to employ these measures, which were at best anticompetitive and at worst arguably illegal? It’s difficult to say, but the point is that he didn’t have to—he had already programmed the culture that engendered those measures.

Teams led by a directive leader initially outperform those led by an empowering leader. However, despite lower early performance, teams led by an empowering leader experience higher performance improvement over time because of higher levels of team-learning, coordination, empowerment and mental model development.

One of the biggest challenges implementing agile is the reward system. For example, individual salary scales and rewards can be decoupled from the function and substituted by group valuation rewards linked to the capacity of both the employee and/or the team. Or, it is possible to make a distinction between the fixed salary and flexible performance bonus, detached from the annual budget and not considered a personnel expense. The reward system is always the last to change, but it is crucial to include this subject in the initial conversations with the different stakeholders around agile projects.

From that vision comes this year’s annual plan. What will you do this coming year to make progress on your vision? What projects will you undertake that will bring you closer? What initiatives will you start or stop? What products will you create or retire? The clearer your Vision Script, the more apparent the answers to these questions will be.

this is where the Ripple team ran into contentious territory, even if the concept was born of good intentions. Since there was no mining process, there was no means to distribute XRP. Instead, 100 billion units of XRP were created and initially held by Ripple Labs (at that time, OpenCoin). While there was, and still is, intent to distribute all this XRP to seed use, as of writing the majority of XRP is still under the control of Ripple Labs.

Focus, young padawan.” Being the only guy in the male dorm who actually didn’t mind my company, Eric and I had ended up spending quite a bit of time together this first week at Valcav. I decided that if he was going to be even a junior member of our current team, he really needed to work on his powers a bit more, and so I suggested meditation to help him out. It had worked for me initially while gaining better control over my own and seemed a great idea at the time. But getting Eric to focus on anything for more than two-to-three minutes was a real challenge. He didn’t really understand the concept of inner peace, either. Eric rolled his eyes again and snarked, “Yes, Master Gateon.

Ethereum initially planned to issue 18 million ether each year in perpetuity. The thinking was that as the underlying base of ether grew, these 18 million units would become an increasingly small percentage of the monetary base. As a result, the rate of supply inflation would ultimately converge on 0 percent. The Ethereum team is currently rethinking that issuance strategy due to an intended change in its consensus mechanism. Choosing to change the issuance schedule of a cryptoasset from the plan at time of launch is more the exception than the norm, though since the asset class is still young we are not surprised by such experimentation.

The LBDQ-VII is one of the earliest and most widely used instruments of leadership behavior. It emerged from the Ohio State leadership research teams and evolved to its present form to cover 12 aspects of leadership behavior. These were representation, demand reconciliation, tolerance of uncertainty, persuasiveness, initiating structure, tolerance of freedom, role assumption, consideration, production emphasis, predictive accuracy, integration, and superior orientation.

Think big, start small, and scale fast”: Initiate the transformation with the definition of a multi-year, company-wide vision, roadmap, and business case. These plans need to be flexible and adaptable. Then, “start small” with the implementation of a pilot, and take the time to learn from this first experience. Finally, implement the broader scope in stages to manage the risks. Gradually increase the speed and scale of the transformation, and as a result, generate high impact. “IA is a business transformation, not a technology project”: The perspective of business benefits should guide the transformation. This transformation involves not only technology, but more importantly, people – with change management, and retraining – and processes – with redesigns. “IA is a journey, not a destination”: IA is not a one-off exercise; it is a never-ending transformation journey. It continually brings additional benefits to the organization by applying evolving concepts, methods, and technologies. Hence, building teams with the right skills to guide the company in this transformation is critical. “Infusing IA into the culture of the company”: Implementing IA with siloed, isolated teams does not work. Automation needs to be infused into the company. Change management, education, empowerment, and incentivization of everyone in the company is vital. Every employee should know what IA is and what its benefits are, and be empowered and incentivized to identify use cases and build automation.

The most cited experiment in this field was conducted a quarter-century ago. Researcher Benjamin Libet asked subjects to choose a random moment to perform a hand motion while hooked up to an electroencephalograph (EEG) monitor in which the so-called “readiness potential” of the brain was being monitored. Naturally, electrical signals always precede actual physical actions, but Libet wanted to know whether they also preceded a subject’s subjective feeling of intention to act. In short, is there some subjective “self ” who consciously decides things, thereby setting in motion the brain’s electrical activities that ultimately lead to the action? Or is it the other way ’round? Subjects were therefore asked to note the position of a clock’s second hand when they first felt the initial intention to move their hand. Libet’s findings were consistent, and perhaps not surprising: unconscious, unfelt, brain electrical activity occurred a full half second before there was any conscious sense of decision-making by the subject. More recent experiments by Libet, announced in 2008, analyzing separate, higher-order brain functions, have allowed his research team to predict up to ten seconds in advance which hand a subject is about to decide to raise. Ten seconds is nearly an eternity when it comes to cognitive decisions, and yet a person’s eventual decision could be seen on brain scans that long before the subject was even remotely aware of having made any decision. This and other experiments prove that the brain makes its own decisions on a subconscious level, and people only later feel that “they” have performed a conscious decision. It means that we go through life thinking that, unlike the blessedly autonomous operations of the heart and kidneys, a lever-pulling “me” is in charge of the brain’s workings. Libet concluded that the sense of personal free will arises solely from a habitual retrospective perspective of the ongoing flow of brain events.

We encourage you to follow the changes occurring within your microbiota by participating in the American Gut Project. Although we are not involved in this crowd-funded science project, it is run by a team of well-respected scientists and has provided thousands of people with information about their microbiota. You can have your gut microbiota sequenced before and during your process of microbiota improvement to witness the changes to the new aspects of your diet and lifestyle. You will be provided with a report specifying the types of microbes that make up your microbiota and how it compares with others who have participated as well as to people living in developing regions of the world (Malawi and Venezuela). This information will not only allow a better view of your microbiota and how it compares with others, but will also contribute to the scientific understanding of these communities. To guide you in your journey of microbiota revitalization, we recommend submitting multiple samples—an initial sample to document where your microbiota started out, then one or more after you have made dietary and lifestyle adjustments in order to see how these changes are impacting your gut community over time. This will not only be informative but may also motivate you to keep improving the health of your microbiota.

I’m Jay Powers, the circulating nurse”; “I’m Zhi Xiong, the anesthesiologist”—that sort of thing. It felt kind of hokey to me, and I wondered how much difference this step could really make. But it turned out to have been carefully devised. There have been psychology studies in various fields backing up what should have been self-evident—people who don’t know one another’s names don’t work together nearly as well as those who do. And Brian Sexton, the Johns Hopkins psychologist, had done studies showing the same in operating rooms. In one, he and his research team buttonholed surgical staff members outside their operating rooms and asked them two questions: how would they rate the level of communications during the operation they had just finished and what were the names of the other staff members on the team? The researchers learned that about half the time the staff did not know one another’s names. When they did, however, the communications ratings jumped significantly. The investigators at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere had also observed that when nurses were given a chance to say their names and mention concerns at the beginning of a case, they were more likely to note problems and offer solutions. The researchers called it an “activation phenomenon.” Giving people a chance to say something at the start seemed to activate their sense of participation and responsibility and their willingness to speak up. These were limited studies and hardly definitive. But the initial results were enticing. Nothing had ever been shown to improve the ability of surgeons to broadly reduce harm to patients aside from experience and specialized training. Yet here, in three separate cities, teams had tried out these unusual checklists, and each had found a positive effect. At Johns Hopkins, researchers specifically measured their checklist’s effect on teamwork. Eleven surgeons had agreed to try it in their cases—seven general surgeons, two plastic surgeons, and two neurosurgeons. After three months, the number of team members in their operations reporting that they “functioned as a well-coordinated team” leapt from 68 percent to 92 percent. At the Kaiser hospitals in Southern California, researchers had tested their checklist for six months in thirty-five hundred operations. During that time, they found that their staff’s average rating of the teamwork climate improved from “good” to “outstanding.” Employee satisfaction rose 19 percent. The rate of OR nurse turnover—the proportion leaving their jobs each year—dropped from 23 percent to 7 percent. And the checklist appeared to have caught numerous near errors. In

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

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.

A scientific discovery in our time is likely to be not the work of a solitary researcher or a small team working with improvised equipment, but the product of a big team in an expensive lab operating with government funds. In such conditions the scientist is less and less likely to speak out against government policies. Today, for example, there is scarcely a physicist who thinks the Strategic Defense Initiative or its successor, National Missile Defense, can be made to work in anything like the way the Defense Department claims. Some disbelievers, however, accept government funds for the project in hopes of making an ancillary contribution to science, and cover their doubts with silence. The public has been lied to as a result, and billions of dollars have been wasted on an illusion.

Fasal is an online system that connects farmers in rural India directly with market agents and other buyers. Via Fasal, farmers can quickly learn the price of goods at a number of nearby markets, choose the sales location most advantageous to them, and use the data to negotiate a better deal, a challenge that exists around the world.2 Sangeet Choudary, one of the authors of this book, led the commercialization and launch of the Fasal initiative. One of the challenges facing Choudary and his team was figuring out what kind of communications infrastructure they could use to enable producers and consumers to share value units. They realized that the big advantage working in their favor was cell phones. More than half of Indian farmers, even the poorest, own and use cell phones. In fact, as in much of the developing world, cell phone use in rural India has spread rapidly. Cellular telephony, with its instant communications capability, became the conduit for the market data the small farmers so desperately needed.

Weaning Your Baby Off Breast Milk The paediatrician in Sector 62 Mohali recommends the following tips for weaning your baby off breast milk: Recognize the Signs Your baby starts giving signs showing that they are ready for weaning. The signs include: Sitting with support. Holding their head in an upright position. Expressing interest in what you are eating. Losing their active tongue-thrust reflex. Acting cranky during feeding sessions. Apart from your child showing signs, you can also be the one to stop breastfeeding. You can check with your best paediatrician in Mohali to see if you are ready to start weaning. Set a Schedule Once you prepare yourself to start weaning, give yourself at least a month to move through the process. Giving some time to yourself and the baby gives you time for obstacles. If, however, your child is going through teething, you can wait for some time before weaning. Start Slowly Easing into weaning gives you and your baby some time to adjust to the change. You may start it slowly by dropping one breastfeeding session per week. Once you notice that both you and your baby are comfortable with the change, you can start dropping more sessions until your baby is having solids. Provide Physical Comfort Breastfed babies are used to skin contact with their mothers. Hence, when you are into weaning, you must give them the physical connection in other ways. For instance, you can cuddle them while singing a song reading a book or give them a massage. Let Your Baby Decide Some babies wean on their own when they are given the control. If you are comfortable with your child taking the lead, rely on one rule “Don’t offer, don’t refuse”. You nurse them when they show interest and do not initiate it when they don’t want it. Resistance is Normal If you are the one to start weaning, it will be normal for your babies to resist weaning. Once they become normal with it, they will start showing interest in solid foods and drinking liquids from a bottle. Take Care of Yourself Your baby is not only the one who will be adjusting to weaning. As a mother, you must also deal with a whole range of emotions. Some mothers may even feel rejected when their baby does not show interest in feeding. You may also feel nostalgia about your baby getting older. Accustom yourself to the routine and know that this is necessary. At Motherhood Hospitals, we have a team of experienced super specialists backed by the latest in infrastructure and facilities. We have the best Paediatricians in Mohali that consists of a team of paediatric specialists that cater to all the needs of children, across age groups, and provide the best care for your child’s development.

While Jepsen was groaning that his team members took no initiative, they were wringing their hands about Jepsen’s lack of leadership: “We are just waiting for a little bit of direction!

When an internal service is used extensively by internal customers and is growing fast, you should probably feed it more budget. But without an equalizing scorecard across your initiatives, it wouldn’t necessarily be clear what teams need more investment. So that’s why adding a pricing function, even for internal customers, is tremendously useful.

What the U.S. Soccer report showed—and what in turn the Philadelphia Inquirer explained—was that U.S. Soccer initially budgeted a $420,000 loss for 2016 but changed their numbers to expect a profit of almost $18 million, based largely on the gate receipts and merchandise sales of the women’s national team during the 2015 Women’s World Cup victory tour. That’s not all the report showed, though. The women’s team was projected in 2017 to earn more than $5 million in revenue for the federation. The men’s team, meanwhile, was projected to lose about $1 million. That was even as U.S. Soccer planned to spend about $1.5 million more on the men’s team.

Amid the fight over whether the team would play a real schedule in 2005, the team’s contract expired, bringing both issues to a head. Contract negotiations were ongoing throughout the back-and-forth over the schedule, and they were highly contentious. In the end, the national team ended up playing only nine games in 2005, which included the Algarve Cup and a few friendlies in the United States. That was better than what had been initially proposed by the federation, but it still fell well short of what had, by now, become the team’s usual schedule. As part of the contract negotiations, the federation gave the players a retroactive payment of around $50,000 each to make up for the quiet schedule they played. It was tantamount to an admission that the federation was wrong to “go dark” in 2005.

In November 2003, for example, police raided Stratford High School in Goose Creek, South Carolina. The raid was recorded by the school’s surveillance cameras as well as a police camera. The tapes show students as young as fourteen forced to the ground in handcuffs as officers in SWAT team uniforms and bulletproof vests aim guns at their heads and lead a drug-sniffing dog to tear through their book bags. The raid was initiated by the school’s principal, who was suspicious that a single student might be dealing marijuana. No drugs or weapons were found during the raid and no charges were filed. Nearly all of the students searched and seized were students of color.

Changes are not like for like, it already has an extra weight for the context switch & let’s not forget about the time already invested in the initial thought path that will no longer be valid.

Ganesh Chaturthi is one of the major festivals in India and is celebrated on a large scale in many states of India. This popular festival is approaching and these celebrations are done all over with a lot of enthusiasm. During the pandemic, the celebrations are set to be different as the mode of celebrations has become somehow reformed. The widespread celebrations across 11 days of the festival might turn out to be great for you. The good times might bring the best for your life. The government has insisted on various measures for safeguarding the general health and well-being of people and with this approach, the virtual world has become quite open to new ways of getting various services. There are some of the important tips to follow for finding your best match during this phase. Find your soulmate The people planning to get the best matches for their life can find this as the most auspicious phase to search for the prospective match and make proceeding to have them in their life. Lord Ganesha gets the prime worshipping place and this festival will allow growing your life’s scope with finding the most loving soulmate. TruelyMarry can make the occasion of Ganesh Pooja to accomplish the most important event in your life, i.e., your marriage. · Virtual Selection In this Covid struck phase, the virtual selection of your life partner could be done with the sophisticated website platform and application. There is no longer any worry and you can choose the best matches by shortlisting the different matches. It is no longer difficult to find your better half as the online platform can make it obtain with ease. · Following social norms TruelyMarry platform assures that there are only valid profiles available on their platform. They make sure that the social norms are followed and you get the most amazing matches for the distant relationships. You can choose your interests and the profiles with similar matches will be revealed to you. This Ganesh Chaturthi can bring a lot of happiness to your life. It is the motive of every person to find the perfect life partner and TrulyMarry.com will be your assistance in becoming your associate for the same. You can find every profile with details through the enhanced research and the membership assures being capable of knowing all the details in the most responsible way. The list of handpicked profiles will be presented to you to make the right selection. The initial registration is free of cost followed by an option to choose the membership plans. There are several ways for making the selection, by applying filters or making the selection based on community, religion, caste, and profession. TruelyMarry.com majorly focuses on the Indian community Matrimonial Services and is a unique portal for finding the perfect soulmate. May the blessings of the Lord on Ganesh Chaturthi make you successful in obtaining your best match through online or offline consultation. Our team is highly efficient and would assure you meeting your life partner at our matrimony platform. Bappa will be with you for every new beginning in life..!! Wishing you & your family a very Happy Ganesh Chaturthi.

A study asked fifteen thousand people around the world if they’d prefer a job in which individual initiative is encouraged or one in which no one is singled out for honor but everybody works as a team. More than 90 percent of American, British, Dutch, and Swedish respondents chose the individual initiative job. But fewer than 50 percent of Japanese and Singaporean respondents did.

better for the virus if a host not only continues walking around but also sheds a lot of the virus when exhaling, sneezing, coughing, perspiring, defecating or releasing other bodily fluids. The virus that hits the evolutionary jackpot is the one that spreads to other humans via the medium that runs the least interference: the air. A host can spread a virus via saliva, mucus and small moisture particles called aerosols that are produced when exhaling. The more forceful the breathing out, such as when singing, coughing or exercising, the more aerosols are produced. Covid is in this category and mainly spreads through the air into noses and lungs. It is very infectious and slow to cause notable symptoms. How do our bodies deal with an intruder like this? THE IMMUNE RESPONSE: HOW WE DEFEND OURSELVES AGAINST A VIRAL ATTACK Our bodies’ first line of defence against enemy viruses is the skin, which is normally impervious to them. The weak points are cuts, abrasions and areas of the body not covered in protective skin, including the eyes, ears, nose and other apertures. Once inside the gates, viruses can find exposed cells that grant them direct access to other parts of the body. The initial exposure is unavoidable because our bodies need these areas to be exposed for other reasons, such as to get oxygen, smell, hear, eat and get pregnant. Covid is a virus that attacks the human respiratory system through the nose and mouth. There it homes in on, and binds to, exposed cells coated with an enzyme called ACE2. Covid’s protein structure ‘fits’ with ACE2, and is able to invade the cells with the help of another enzyme, furin. It is a complicated process but one can think of the ACE2 and furin team as a kind of ‘keyhole’ into which covid fits to enter the cell.

If your team is setting their own outcome with no input from the product leader, try these tips to shift to a two-way negotiation: Before you set your own outcome, ask your product leader for more business context. Try these questions: What’s most important to the business right now? Try to frame this conversation in terms of business outcomes. Is there a customer segment that is more important than other customer segments? Are there strategic initiatives we should know about? Use the information you gain to map out the most important business outcomes and what product outcomes might drive those business outcomes. Get feedback from your leader. Choose a product outcome that your team has the most influence over.

Many initiatives try to bring about change in large organizations by intervening at the organizational level, but getting traction there is unbelievably difficult. Those with experience know that genuine culture change in a large organization could take a decade. Not so for teams. Just as soldiers don’t fight for their country but for their foxhole buddies, members of a team will make commitments and changes with and for one another at a speed that would be next to impossible in a larger system.

I’ve watched girls drop off varsity tennis teams, flunk out of school, and carve initials or tattoo cult figures onto their bodies—all to see if their dads will notice.

Sample Questions Describe a decision you made that wasn’t popular. How did you handle implementing it? Describe a time when you had to motivate employees or coworkers. Tell me about a time when you showed initiative. Tell me about a time when you had to give a presentation to people who disagreed with you. Tell me about a time when you had to make an unpopular decision. Tell me about a time when you had to sell another person or team on your idea Tell me about a time when you’ve built a team.

With what he called the 60–30–10 rule, Hackman concluded that 60 percent of team success depends on prework, or the way in which the team is designed; 30 percent depends on the initial launch; and only 10 percent depends on

Tinder would work with Justin’s younger brother to throw a birthday party for one of his popular, hyperconnected friends on campus, and use it to promote Tinder. The Tinder team would do all the work to make it an incredible party. The day of the party, students from USC were getting bused to a luxurious house in LA, where everything had been set up to pull you inside. Sean described how it worked: There was one catch with the party: First, you had to download the Tinder app to get in. We put a bouncer in the house to check that you had done it. The party was great—it was a success, and more importantly, the next day, everyone at the party woke up and remembered they had a new app on their phone. There were attractive people they hadn’t gotten to talk to, and this was their second chance. The college party launch tactic worked. For the Tinder team, this one party created the highest ever one-day spike of downloads, however modest it might seem in retrospect. It’s not just the number that matters here, but that it was “500 of the right people”—Sean would explain to me later. It was a group of the most social, most hyperconnected people on the USC campus, all on Tinder at the same time. Tinder started to work. Matches began to happen, as the students who met each other from the previous night started to swipe through and then chat. Amazingly, 95 percent of this initial cohort started to use this app every day for three hours a day.

Tinder would work with Justin’s younger brother to throw a birthday party for one of his popular, hyperconnected friends on campus, and use it to promote Tinder. The Tinder team would do all the work to make it an incredible party. The day of the party, students from USC were getting bused to a luxurious house in LA, where everything had been set up to pull you inside. Sean described how it worked: There was one catch with the party: First, you had to download the Tinder app to get in. We put a bouncer in the house to check that you had done it. The party was great—it was a success, and more importantly, the next day, everyone at the party woke up and remembered they had a new app on their phone. There were attractive people they hadn’t gotten to talk to, and this was their second chance. The college party launch tactic worked. For the Tinder team, this one party created the highest ever one-day spike of downloads, however modest it might seem in retrospect. It’s not just the number that matters here, but that it was “500 of the right people”—Sean would explain to me later. It was a group of the most social, most hyperconnected people on the USC campus, all on Tinder at the same time. Tinder started to work. Matches began to happen, as the students who met each other from the previous night started to swipe through and then chat. Amazingly, 95 percent of this initial cohort started to use this app every day for three hours a day. The Tinder team built one atomic network, but soon figured out how to build the next one—just throw another party. And then another, by going to other schools, and throwing even more parties. Each network was successively easier to start. Tinder quickly reached 4,000 downloads, then 15,000 within a month, and then 500,000 just a month after that—first by replicating the campus launch, but then letting the organic viral growth take over.

Uber’s app was initially outsourced to Mexico, so that when later engineers joined the company, they needed to be issued Spanish-to-English dictionaries to understand the comments and source code. In these cases it isn’t until later, as the product hits scale, that the engineering teams are upgraded.

This is the Rocketship Growth Rate—the precise pace at which a startup must grow to break out. How do you calculate this rate of growth? First, by setting a goal of exceeding a billion dollars of valuation—thus being in a position to achieve an IPO—and working backward. Hitting a $1 billion valuation generally requires at least $100 million in top-line recurring revenue annually, based on the rough market multiple of 10x revenue. You’d want to hit that in 7–10 years, to sustain the engagement of the key employees and also reward investors who often work in decade-long time cycles. These two goals—revenue and time—work together to create an overall constraint. Neeraj Agarwal, a venture capitalist and investor in B2B companies, first calculated this growth rate by arguing that SaaS companies in particular need to follow a precise path to reach these numbers:64 Establish great product-market fit Get to $2 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue) Triple to $6 million in ARR Triple to $18 million Double to $36 million Double to $72 million Double to $144 million SaaS companies like Marketo, Netsuite, Workday, Salesforce, Zendesk, and others have all roughly followed this curve. And the rough timing makes sense. The first phase, in which the team initially gets to product/market fit, takes 1–3 years. Add on the time to reach the rest of the growth milestones, and the entire process might take 6–9 years. Of course, after year 10, the company might still be growing quickly, though it’s more common for it to be growing 50 percent annualized rather than doubling. The argument is that products with network effects both can see higher growth rates as they tap into the various network forces I’ve discussed, and can compound these growth rates for a longer period of time—and looking at the data, I think that’s generally true.

Within a year, it was clear that YouTube’s growth in videos, comments, channels, and profiles rapidly exceeded the team’s expectations. Its rise was rapid, and blew through every milestone that the team set in its first year. Initially, they tried to get to 1,000 views per day. Then 10,000 views/day, and when they hit that, 100,000 views/day. In less than a year, YouTube hit 1 million views per day—the start of a massive growth trajectory. The YouTube team rolled out solution after solution to solve overcrowding, but focused on the simple ones first—displaying a list of recently uploaded videos, followed by a popularity-based sort, and eventually country segmentation. The evolution of YouTube’s solution to overcrowding evolved from manual curation to popularity rankings to algorithmic methods. This is a necessary transition that every networked product has to make to solve the overcrowding problem.

David versus Goliath Asymmetry lies at the heart of network-based competition. The larger or smaller network will be at different stages of the Cold Start framework and, as such, will gravitate toward a different set of levers. The giant is often fighting gravitational pull as its network grows and saturates the market. To combat these negative forces, it must add new use cases, introduce the product to new audiences, all while making sure it’s generating a profit. The upstart, on the other hand, is trying to solve the Cold Start Problem, and often starts with a niche. A new startup has the luxury of placing less emphasis on profitability and might instead focus on top-line growth, subsidizing the market to grow its network. When they encounter each other in the market, it becomes natural that their competitive moves reflect their different goals and resources. Startups have fewer resources—capital, employees, distribution—but have important advantages in the context of building new networks: speed and a lack of sacred cows. A new startup looking to compete against Zoom might try a more specific use case, like events, and if that doesn’t work, they can quickly pivot and try something else, like corporate education classes. Startups like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and many other products have similar stories, and went through an incubation phase as the product was refined and an initial network was built. Trying and failing many times is part of the startup journey—it only takes the discovery of one atomic network to get into the market. With that, a startup is often able to start the next leg of the journey, often with more investment and resources to support them. Contrast that to a larger company, which has obvious advantages in resources, manpower, and existing product lines. But there are real disadvantages, too: it’s much harder to solve the Cold Start Problem with a slower pace of execution, risk aversion, and a “strategy tax” that requires new products to align to the existing business. Something seems to happen when companies grow to tens of thousands of employees—they inevitably create rigorous processes for everything, including planning cycles, performance reviews, and so on. This helps teams focus, but it also creates a harder environment for entrepreneurial risk-taking. I saw this firsthand at Uber, whose entrepreneurial culture shifted in its later years toward profitability and coordinating the efforts of tens of thousands. This made it much harder to start new initiatives—for better and worse. When David and Goliath meet in the market—and often it’s one Goliath and many investor-funded Davids at once—the resulting moves and countermoves are fascinating. Now that I have laid down some of the theoretical foundation for how competition fits into Cold Start Theory, let me describe and unpack some of the most powerful moves in the network-versus-network playbook.

Anti-Network Effects Hit the Google+ Launch A charismatic executive from one of the most powerful technology companies in the world introduces a new product at a conference. This time, it’s June 2011 at the Web 2.0 Summit, where Google vice president Vic Gundotra describes the future of social networking and launches Google+. This was Google’s ambitious strategy to counteract Facebook, which was nearing their IPO. To give their new networked product a leg up, as many companies do, it led with aggressive upsells from their core product. The Google.com homepage linked to Google+, and they also integrated it widely within YouTube, Photos, and the rest of the product ecosystem. This generated huge initial numbers—within months, the company announced it had signed up more than 90 million users. While this might superficially look like a large user base, it actually consisted of many weak networks that weren’t engaged, because most new users showed up and tried out the product as they read about it in the press, rather than hearing from their friends. The high churn in the product was covered up by the incredible fire hose of traffic that the rest of Google’s network generated. Even though it wasn’t working, the numbers kept going up. When unengaged users interact with a networked product that hasn’t yet gelled into a stable, atomic network, then they don’t end up pulling other users into the product. In a Wall Street Journal article by Amir Efrati, Google+ was described as a ghost town even while the executives touted large top-line numbers: To hear Google Inc. Chief Executive Larry Page tell it, Google+ has become a robust competitor in the social networking space, with 90 million users registering since its June launch. But those numbers mask what’s really going on at Google+. It turns out Google+ is a virtual ghost town compared with the site of rival Facebook Inc., which is preparing for a massive initial public offering. New data from research firm comScore Inc. shows that Google+ users are signing up—but then not doing much there. Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage.86 The fate of Google+ was sealed in their go-to-market strategy. By launching big rather than focusing on small, atomic networks that could grow on their own, the teams fell victim to big vanity metrics. At its peak, Google+ claimed to have 300 million active users—by the top-line metrics, it was on its way to success. But network effects rely on the quality of the growth and not just its quantity

Identify Your Strengths With Strengths Finder 2.0 One tool that can help you remember your achievements is the ‘Strengths Finder’ "assessment. The father of Strengths Psychology, Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D, along with Tom Rath and a team of scientists at The Gallup Organization, created StrengthsFinder. You can take this assessment by purchasing the Strengths Finder 2.0 book. The value of SF 2.0 is that it helps you understand your unique strengths. Once you have this knowledge, you can review past activities and understand what these strengths enabled you to do. Here’s what I mean, in the paragraphs below, I’ve listed some of the strengths identified by my Strengths Finder assessment and accomplishments where these strengths were used. “You can see repercussions more clearly than others can.” In a prior role, I witnessed products being implemented in the sales system at breakneck speed. While quick implementation seemed good, I knew speed increased the likelihood of revenue impacting errors. I conducted an audit and uncovered a misconfigured product. While the customer had paid for the product, the revenue had never been recognized. As a result of my work, we were able to add another $7.2 million that went straight to the bottom line. “You automatically pinpoint trends, notice problems, or identify opportunities many people overlook.” At my former employer, leadership did not audit certain product manager decisions. On my own initiative, I instituted an auditing process. This led to the discovery that one product manager’s decisions cost the company more than $5M. “Because of your strengths, you can reconfigure factual information or data in ways that reveal trends, raise issues, identify opportunities, or offer solutions.” In a former position, product managers were responsible for driving revenue, yet there was no revenue reporting at the product level. After researching the issue, I found a report used to process monthly journal entries which when reconfigured, provided product managers with monthly product revenue. “You entertain ideas about the best ways to…increase productivity.” A few years back, I was trained by the former Operations Manager when I took on that role. After examining the tasks, I found I could reduce the time to perform the role by 66%. As a result, I was able to tell my Director I could take on some of the responsibilities of the two managers she had to let go. “You entertain ideas about the best ways to…solve a problem.” About twenty years ago I worked for a division where legacy systems were being replaced by a new company-wide ERP system. When I discovered no one had budgeted for training in my department, I took it upon myself to identify how to extract the data my department needed to perform its role, documented those learnings and that became the basis for a two day training class. “Sorting through lots of information rarely intimidates you. You welcome the abundance of information. Like a detective, you sort through it and identify key pieces of evidence. Following these leads, you bring the big picture into view.” I am listing these strengths to help you see the value of taking the Strengths Finder Assessment.

In any chain of command, the leadership must always present a united front to the troops. A public display of discontent or disagreement with the chain of command undermines the authority of leaders at all levels. This is catastrophic to the performance of any organization. As a leader, if you don’t understand why decisions are being made, requests denied, or support allocated elsewhere, you must ask those questions up the chain. Then, once understood, you can pass that understanding down to your team. Leaders in any chain of command will not always agree. But at the end of the day, once the debate on a particular course of action is over and the boss has made a decision—even if that decision is one you argued against—you must execute the plan as if it were your own. When leading up the chain of command, use caution and respect. But remember, if your leader is not giving the support you need, don’t blame him or her. Instead, reexamine what you can do to better clarify, educate, influence, or convince that person to give you what you need in order to win. The major factors to be aware of when leading up and down the chain of command are these: • Take responsibility for leading everyone in your world, subordinates and superiors alike. • If someone isn’t doing what you want or need them to do, look in the mirror first and determine what you can do to better enable this. • Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do. APPLICATION TO BUSINESS “Corporate doesn’t understand what’s going on out here,” said the field manager. “Whatever experience those guys had in the field from years ago, they have long forgotten. They just don’t get what we are dealing with, and their questions and second-guessing prevents me and my team from getting the job done.” The infamous they. I was on a visit to a client company’s field leadership team, the frontline troops that executed the company’s mission. This was where the rubber met the road: all the corporate capital initiatives, strategic planning sessions, and allocated resources were geared to support this team here on the ground. How the frontline troops executed the mission would ultimately mean success or failure for the entire company. The field manager’s team was geographically separated from their corporate headquarters located hundreds of miles away. He was clearly frustrated. The field manager had a job to do, and he was angry at the questions and scrutiny from afar. For every task his team undertook he was required to submit substantial paperwork. In his mind, it made for a lot more work than necessary and detracted from his team’s focus and ability to execute. I listened and allowed him to vent for several minutes. “I’ve been in your shoes,” I said. “I used to get frustrated as hell at my chain of command when we were in Iraq. They

Scorecards are your blueprint for success. They take the theoretical definition of an A Player and put it in practical terms for the position you need to fill. Scorecards describe the mission for the position, outcomes that must be accomplished, and competencies that fit with both the culture of the company and the role. You wouldn’t think of having someone build you a house without an architect’s blueprint in hand. Don’t think of hiring people for your team without this blueprint by your side. What becomes all too clear in many of our initial meetings with clients is that they don’t bother to define what they want before they go hire somebody. We recently worked with a global financial services institution interested in hiring a VP of strategic planning.

Grouping the participants by the number of blocks they reported walking each week, the team studied participants’ initial physical assessments and then followed up with MRI scans nine years later. Four years after that, the team tested the participants for cognitive impairment and dementia. The results were impressive. Those who’d walked regularly—about six to nine miles a week—had significantly more grey matter in the frontal, occipital, and hippocampal regions than those who walked less. Checking in thirteen years after participants’ initial assessments, Erickson’s team found that those who’d logged six to nine miles a week were far less likely to be cognitively impaired than those who walked the least.

Consider, for example, the landmark 2004 study that followed several hundred patients treated with one of three popular antidepressants: Zoloft, Paxil, or Prozac. Among those who took the drugs as prescribed, only 23% were depression-free after six months of treatment. (As you might expect, patients who failed to take their meds did even worse.) And all three medications yielded roughly the same dismal results. A fluke result, perhaps? It’s actually pretty typical. The recovery rate with antidepressants in similar studies usually falls somewhere between 20% and 35%. Clinical researchers at forty-one treatment sites across the country have just completed the largest real-world study of antidepressants ever conducted, and the results fit the same overall pattern. This multimillion dollar project, sponsored by the National Institutes of Mental Health, followed about three thousand depressed patients who initially took the drug citalopram (marketed under the trade name Celexa) for about twelve weeks. By the end of that short-term treatment period, only 28% of study patients had fully recovered. The study’s 28% response rate might even be an overestimate of the medication’s true effectiveness, because patients received higher drug doses and had more frequent doctor’s visits than people do in everyday clinical practice. (In real life, insurance companies sharply restrict the frequency of “med check” follow-up appointments). Remarkably, the study’s authors—a veritable All-Star team of clinical researchers—noted that the observed 28% recovery rate was about what they had expected to see based on comparable studies. That’s right: They weren’t surprised to find that the majority of study patients failed to recover on an antidepressant. In the study’s published write-up, the researchers also raised a provocative question: What percentage of their patients might have recovered if they had received a sugar pill—a placebo—instead of the medication? Could it possibly have been as high as 28%?

Organizations that don't take the initiative to design their organizational culture professionally are leaving their goals to chance. How would one otherwise unify their team's goals with the mission and vision of the organization? Culture can build or break organizations no matter how small or large.

To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we’re better off shifting to a process called brainwriting. The initial steps are solo. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise.

Accelerate Your Learning with a Questionnaire QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT THE PAST Performance How well or poorly has the company performed in the past? What goals were set? What kind of benchmarks were employed? What actions were taken when goals were not reached? What initiatives for change were made in the past? Who was most responsible for change initiatives? How effective or ineffective were these attempts at change? What drivers have had a positive impact on performance? Why? What drivers have had a negative impact on performance? Why? How have the company’s strategy, structure, technical capabilities, culture, and politics impacted performance? QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT THE PRESENT Vision and Strategy Does the company have a clear vision statement? If so, what is it? Does the company have a clear articulation of strategy? If so, what is it? Is the company’s strategy being executed optimally? If not, why not? If so, will this strategy win? The Team Who is exceptional? Who is competent and capable? Who is not competent and capable? Who deserves the company’s total confidence? Who does not deserve the company’s total confidence? Who are the influencers on the team? What are the sources of their influence? Company Policies and Processes What are the company’s most significant practices and processes? Do the essential practices and processes promote value, productivity, and safety? What can be done to improve performance of practices and processes? Latent Risks and Hazards Are there latent risks and hazards that threaten the performance of the company? Is the company subject to cultural/political risks or peril? What are they? Easy Victories to Score Where and what are business areas in which easy and early wins can be scored? QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE Near-Future Challenges and Problems What challenges and problems will the business likely encounter in the coming year? How should we prepare to meet and overcome them? Near-Future Opportunities What unexploited opportunities lie ahead? What do we need to realize them? Obstacles What significant obstacles do we face ahead? What do we need to do now to prepare to overcome these obstacles? Company Culture Is the company culture in need of change? Which aspects of the company culture should be preserved? Which aspects should be changed?

To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we’re better off shifting to a process called brainwriting.26 The initial steps are solo. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options. By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, put the Soviet Union at risk of collapsing altogether. In this environment, the Soviet tendency to merge espionage and sabotage into a single mission came to the fore, strengthening practices Soviet intelligence and state security services had implemented from the beginning of the Soviet era. Soviet intelligence activities were divided into two lines: intelligence and diversion. Initially, the intelligence directorate, led during World War II by Pavel Fitin, was responsible for collecting intelligence about Germany and its allies. The diversionary directorate, led by Pavel Sudoplatov, dispatched "intelligence sabotage" teams behind German lines to disrupt Germany's supply lines, command and control, and rear areas and to assassinate German officers. According to Fitin, the intelligence directorate supplied intelligence for the diversionary directorate, and officers were regularly exchanged between the two. This crossover between intelligence and sabotage operations is a continuing characteristic of Russian intelligence services today.

Before you set your own outcome, ask your product leader for more business context. Try these questions: What’s most important to the business right now? Try to frame this conversation in terms of business outcomes. Is there a customer segment that is more important than other customer segments? Are there strategic initiatives we should know about? Use the information you gain to map out the most important business outcomes and what product outcomes might drive those business outcomes. Get feedback from your leader. Choose a product outcome that your team has the most influence over.

Paige Goepfert is a managing director of the Andersen Private Client Services team and works with ultra-high-net-worth families, family offices, business owners, and executives on tax planning and income tax compliance. Paige says that, “before considering the tax implications of a family office, family office principals are well served to think about the catalysts for and objectives of their family office. The structure, including how the management services are going to be provided and the type of entity formed for the management company, will determine the tax impact. “A common mistake I see is when families initially contemplate forming a family office solely because of the tax benefits they hope to obtain. While there may be tax benefits from a family office structure, anticipated tax benefits should not be the catalyst for setting up a family office . . . We [also] sometimes see families stuck in a certain mindset even when their goals and tax laws are constantly changing. For example, an older family member may feel like they have already given too much to the next generation or their grandchildren and, on principle, will not consider what they are leaving

This may sound like obvious common sense, and we’re sure there are teams functioning quite well in this regard. However, in our experience most teams could use a more rigorous examination of their members’ roles and associated accountabilities, even in some of the smallest projects and initiatives. “Were you going to handle this, or me?” is unfortunately a rather common fly in the ointment.

In a reverse pilot you test whether removing an initiative or activity will have any negative consequences. For example, when an executive I work with took on a new senior role in the company, he inherited a process his predecessor had gone to a huge effort to implement: a huge, highly visual report on a myriad of subjects produced for the other executives each week. It consumed enormous energy from his team, and he hypothesized that it was not adding a great deal of value to the company. So to test his hypothesis he ran a reverse pilot. He simply stopped publishing the report and waited to see what the response would be. What he found was that no one seemed to miss it; after several weeks nobody had even mentioned the report. As a result, he concluded that the report was not essential to the business and could be eliminated.

When people are connected to others through a shared purpose for the success of an organization, they often become capable of doing more than initially envisioned (Kotter, 2012).

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Of course, there is one obvious thing we could do to try to improve velocity: work longer hours. Working a lot of consecutive overtime might initially cause velocity to increase (see “Overtime” in Figure 7.14). Figure 7.14. The effect of overtime on velocity (based on a figure from Cook 2008) That increase will almost certainly be followed by an aggressive decline in velocity along with a simultaneous decline in quality. Even after the overtime period ends, the team will need some amount of time to recover before returning to its reasonable baseline velocity. I have seen examples of where the trough (decreased velocity area) during the recovery period is larger than the crest (increased velocity area) during the overtime period. The end result is that lots of overtime may provide some short-term benefits, but these are frequently far outweighed by the long-term consequences.

Success is the delivery of a product that meets expectation

they catch initials -- STD, PMS, OCD, HIV, etc., as if MTV teamed up with KFC and licensed the Latin alphabet to the pharmaceutical industry so OTCs could replace MDs. If Romeo and Juliet were alive today, they’d be put on antidepressants, sent for counseling, and bundled off to separate boarding schools to meet socially acceptable partners with money-back guarantees.

Knowing this, I have watched with great interest as Kim Barnas and her team at ThedaCare hospitals in Wisconsin worked at transforming their culture by redesigning the system of daily management. After two years of experimentation, discussion, and study, they found a more deliberative approach to leading a lean healthcare system. By changing the expectations of what managers and frontline supervisors actually do each day, Kim and her team pushed the roots of lean deeper into the organization. This encouraged new ways of thinking, which led to new behaviors. Instead of adding continuous improvement to the list of manager’s duties, improvement became the organizing principle of their work. Thus, a new management system emerged and it was clear that this was the secret sauce that so many had been seeking. Kim discovered that changing a leader’s work content changed the leader as well. From frontline supervisors to top executives, new management duties encouraged everyone to become more respectful, improvement focused, and process orientated. Instead of managing by exception—running after today’s unique emergency—they fixed processes. They standardized processes. In doing so, more improvements to clinical processes remained in place. Projects initiated by frontline caregivers were aligned with the hospital’s major initiatives and relevant to the unit or clinic. Continuous improvement became the working method instead of the extra task.

RICHARD NIXON AND his team of aides had carefully studied George Wallace’s presidential campaigns. They realized that his segregationist banter made him attractive only to “the foam-at-the-mouth-segregationists.” Nixon decided to appeal to these Wallace-type segregationists while also attracting all those Americans refusing to live in “dangerous” Black neighborhoods, refusing to believe that Black schools could be equal, refusing to accept busing initiatives to integrate schools, refusing to individualize Black negativity, refusing to believe that Black welfare mothers were deserving, and refusing to champion Black Power over majority-Black counties and cities—all those racists who refused to believe they were racist in 1968. Nixon framed his campaign, as a close adviser explained, to allow a potential supporter to “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by [the] racist appeal.” How would he do that? Easy. Demean Black people, and praise White people, without ever saying Black people or White people.1 Historians have named this the “southern strategy.” In fact, it was—and remained over the next five decades—the national Republican strategy as the GOP tried to unite northern and southern anti-Black (and anti-Latina/o) racists, war hawks, and fiscal and social conservatives. The

because he was wielding a stone axe and a wooden shield. He was obviously the guard for the second mining team.   “Do you favor axes over swords?” I asked him.   “Yeah! They do more damage, but are slower to swing.”   “I see. When does team #2 head out?”   “I think we’re supposed to leave the town about 6 days after the first team leaves.”   I nodded, then I talked to Emerson. “Have you ever mined before?”   “Never in my life,” replied Emerson.   “Oh, it isn’t hard.”   “Bob said it’s easy and that he will train us once we arrive.”   “I see. I guess Bob has it all planned out.”   Emerson nodded.   Then I talked to Jack. “Hey, I knew a guy named Jack once.”   “You did? I guess Jack is a popular name,” Jack replied.   “I guess so. How did you get into mining?”   “Er… I was placed here. Initially, I signed up for combat training to become a guard.”   “Really?”   “Yeah!

When the main engines cut off, I felt I was no longer chasing space. I had arrived. I had made it to that spacious habitation, the phrase that came to mind when I first looked down from space and saw our home, the Earth. A reporter asked me after the Atlantis mission what was it like to be up there. I initially spoke about floating and seeing things that weren’t attached to anything in the shuttle floating around us. The talk quickly turned to that magnificent view of Earth. I saw the planet for the first time without borders. I thought about all the places on Earth where there’s unrest and war, and here we were flying above all that, working together as one team to help advance our civilization. That

It seems no one is guaranteed a job anywhere anymore. These are troubled times for workers. The creeping sense that no one’s job is safe, even as the companies they work for are thriving, means the spread of fear, apprehension, and confusion. One sign of this growing unease: An American headhunting firm reported that more than half of callers making inquiries about jobs were still employed—but were so fearful of losing those jobs that they had already started to look for another.5 The day that AT&T began notifying the first of forty thousand workers to be laid off—in a year when its profits were a record $4.7 billion—a poll reported that a third of Americans feared that someone in their household would soon lose a job. Such fears persist at a time when the American economy is creating more jobs than it is losing. The churning of jobs—what economists euphemistically call “labor market flexibility”—is now a troubling fact of work life. And it is part of a global tidal wave sweeping through all the leading economies of the developed world, whether in Europe, Asia, or the Americas. Prosperity is no guarantee of jobs; layoffs continue even amidst a booming economy. This paradox, as Paul Krugman, an MIT economist, puts it, is “the unfortunate price we have to pay for having as dynamic an economy as we do.”6 There is now a palpable bleakness about the new landscape of work. “We work in what amounts to a quiet war zone” is the way one midlevel executive at a multinational firm put it to me. “There’s no way to give your loyalty to a company and expect it to be returned anymore. So each person is becoming their own little shop within the company—you have to be able to be part of a team, but also ready to move on and be self-sufficient.” For many older workers—children of the meritocracy, who were taught that education and technical skills were a permanent ticket to success—this new way of thinking may come as a shock. People are beginning to realize that success takes more than intellectual excellence or technical prowess, and that we need another sort of skill just to survive—and certainly to thrive—in the increasingly turbulent job market of the future. Internal qualities such as resilience, initiative, optimism, and adaptability are taking on a new valuation. A

In General Gray’s mind, the Corps needed to change how it would do business in this new battlespace. The impetus behind this initiative can be found in the post-Vietnam analysis of the effectiveness of the American campaign in Southeast Asia. Couple this with the bombing of the Marine 24th Amphibious Unit, Battalion Landing Team, HQ Barracks, Beirut, Lebanon in 1983, and it was obvious that serious and immediate battlespace changes needed to be implemented. 14

Brandon explained that initially his team was surprised to learn that when a sports or training coach is vocal, verbally encouraging a trainee—“do one more; come on, you can do it; keep up the energy”—performance is significantly lower than the results achieved with a quiet but attentive coach.6

To achieve market orientation, we won’t do a large, top-down reorganization, which often creates large amounts of disruption, fear, and paralysis. Instead, we will embed the functional engineers and skills (e.g., Ops, QA, Infosec) into each service team, or provide their capabilities to teams through automated self-service platforms that provide production-like environments, initiate automated tests, or perform deployments.

Uh-Oh . . . One year I was the guest speaker at an annual conference. The person who coordinated the agenda mistakenly typed my name as “Sue” rather than “Susan.” I felt odd and a little disrespected because they didn’t take the time to ask the spelling of my name. It felt awkward when I saw it on all the tables throughout the ballroom, to say the least. I asked, “Please make sure that you introduce me as Susan because I’ve never been called Sue.” The initial impression was sticky for an instant, but they quickly made it right. The correction was shared and everything turned out fine. Even an innocent and unintentional name error can impact your first impressions. Making a joke about it once I was on stage was a light-hearted way to confirm my real name.

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!

Kindness is a powerful bridge builder which unifies teams, bonds friends, supports loved ones, and spreads goodwill. Tending to your bridges will fortify your relationships in such way that you will keep your invitations coming and your options open for future opportunities.

How a person treats wait staff speaks volumes about their character and values. If they misbehave in this scenario, you can likely predict how they will react when cut off in traffic, when their luggage is lost, or when life doesn’t go their way. It is also an indicator to CEOs and hiring managers as to whether a person is a viable candidate for being a considerate team player.

When you are fully present and engaged in your workplace, you will demonstrate that you care about the success of your organization, are a team player, have a can-do attitude, and will go the extra mile to fulfill and exceed expectations.

These qualities make a great impression on your boss, your teams, and your customers. You will be more respected, noticed, and appreciated in the process. As your own "CEO of Self," projecting this positive level of engagement furthers your own personal reputation and interests for healthy communication, networking, and positive first impressions. An added bonus is that YOU will receive great benefits from putting forth this type of effort. Whether it be self-esteem, new training, cooperation, experience, or a raise or bonus, the rewards are extensive and many.

Greenfield DevOps projects are often pilots to demonstrate feasibility of public or private clouds, piloting deployment automation, and similar tools. An example of a greenfield DevOps project is the Hosted LabVIEW product in 2009 at National Instruments, a thirty-year-old organization with five thousand employees and $1 billion in annual revenue. To bring this product to market quickly, a new team was created and allowed to operate outside of the existing IT processes and explore the use of public clouds. The initial team included an applications architect, a systems architect, two developers, a system automation developer, an operations lead, and two offshore operations staff. By using DevOps practices, they were able to deliver Hosted LabVIEW to market in half the time of their normal product introductions.

13 Simple Ways to Deliver Service Beyond Self 1. Make it Easy for People to Do Business with You. 2. Be an Awesome, Sincere Listener. 3. Listen to Customers’ Words and tone of voice, body language, and how they feel. Ask questions, listen, and meet them on their level. Explain, guide, educate, assist and do what is necessary to help them get the information they need to fully understand regarding their question or issue. 4. Show Enthusiasm. Greet customers with genuine interest. Give them your best. Think, act, and talk with positive enthusiasm and you will attract positive results. Your attitude is contagious! 5. Identify and Anticipate Needs. Most customer needs are more emotional rather than logical. 6. Under Promise & Over Deliver. Apply the principle of “Service Beyond Self” . . . give more than expected. Meet and exceed their expectations. If you can’t serve their needs, connect them with whoever can. 7. Make them Feel Important. Our deepest desire is to feel important. People rarely care how much you know until they know how much you care. Use their names, find ways to compliment them—and be sincere. 8. Take Responsibility for their Satisfaction. Do whatever is necessary to help them solve their problems. Let them know that if they can’t find answers to their questions to come back to you for help. 9. Treat your TEAM well. Fellow colleagues are your internal customers and need a regular dose of appreciation. Thank them and find ways to let them know how important they are. Treat your colleagues with respect; chances are they will have a higher regard for customers. 10. Choose an Attitude of Gratitude. Gratitude changes your perspective and helps you appreciate the good rather than simply taking it for granted. 11. Perform, Provide and Follow-Up. Always perform or provide your service in a spirit of excellence and integrity. If you say you’re going to do something—DO IT! There is tremendous value in being a resource for your customer. If you can help them to succeed, they are more likely to help you succeed. 12. Use Gracious Words. "Thank you, thank you very much.

12 Simple Ways to Deliver Service Beyond Self 1. Make it Easy for People to Do Business with You. 2. Be an Awesome, Sincere Listener. 3. Listen to Customers’ Words and tone of voice, body language, and how they feel. Ask questions, listen, and meet them on their level. Explain, guide, educate, assist and do what is necessary to help them get the information they need to fully understand regarding their question or issue. 4. Show Enthusiasm. Greet customers with genuine interest. Give them your best. Think, act, and talk with positive enthusiasm and you will attract positive results. Your attitude is contagious! 5. Identify and Anticipate Needs. Most customer needs are more emotional rather than logical. 6. Under Promise & Over Deliver. Apply the principle of “Service Beyond Self” . . . give more than expected. Meet and exceed their expectations. If you can’t serve their needs, connect them with whoever can. 7. Make them Feel Important. Our deepest desire is to feel important. People rarely care how much you know until they know how much you care. Use their names, find ways to compliment them—and be sincere. 8. Take Responsibility for their Satisfaction. Do whatever is necessary to help them solve their problems. Let them know that if they can’t find answers to their questions to come back to you for help. 9. Treat your TEAM well. Fellow colleagues are your internal customers and need a regular dose of appreciation. Thank them and find ways to let them know how important they are. Treat your colleagues with respect; chances are they will have a higher regard for customers. 10. Choose an Attitude of Gratitude. Gratitude changes your perspective and helps you appreciate the good rather than simply taking it for granted. 11. Perform, Provide and Follow-Up. Always perform or provide your service in a spirit of excellence and integrity. If you say you’re going to do something—DO IT! There is tremendous value in being a resource for your customer. If you can help them to succeed, they are more likely to help you succeed. Use Gracious Words. "Thank you, thank you very much.

[Caryn Marooney] has led the global communications team and made it through radiation. On her first day of treatment, I gave her a necklace with the letters "YGT." She was confused at first since her initials are "CLM." I explained that it was a symbol of my faith in her and stood for "You've got this.

always accumulate more players than your rival right from the start of a move to gain the initiative. So, having three players near the ball if the other team have two, or four players if they have three.

Evan looked tired and miserable, his shoulders slumped in the chair, his eyes sullen and searching for the ground. “I regret inviting him to my house. I regret spending that time with him at my house. I regret giving him so many chances. He exploited my attempts at generosity … the generosity was giving Reggie an opportunity to work on something like this … for experience that he didn’t have.” “Do you regret Reggie sharing his idea with you?” There was no pause this time. “No.” These depositions did significant damage to Snapchat, both in the case and in the court of public opinion. Someone leaked videos of the depositions to Business Insider, making Evan and Bobby look bad for cutting Reggie out of the company and initially lying in response to deposition questions about Reggie’s level of involvement. After these disastrous depositions, Evan and Bobby replaced Cooley with David Quinn and the team at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, the same firm where Lee and his partners got their start. It was also the firm that represented the Winklevoss twins in their infamous suit against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. David Quinn was tenacious in and out of the courtroom, running Ironman triathlons in his free time. Evan and Bobby were convinced Quinn Emanuel could use their experience from the most infamous startup lawsuit of all time to help them defeat Reggie. Quinn Emmanuel was much more aggressive than Cooley had been. They filed a sea of requests for documents, depositions, and subpoenas. They tried to dismiss the case and remove it to federal court, and they sought contempt sanctions and a restraining order against Reggie and Lee Tran & Liang.

In the Acme Widgets problem, suppose your team decided that the key drivers were the sales force, the consumer marketing strategy, and production costs. You then came up with a list of actionable, top-line recommendations as your initial hypothesis: We can increase widget sales by: • Changing the way we sell our widgets to retail outlets. • Improving the way we market our widgets to consumers. • Reducing the unit cost of our widgets. Let’s begin with a closer look at the sales force. It’s organized geographically (Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, etc.) and sells primarily to three types of retail outlets: superstores, department stores, and specialty stores. The team believes that the sales force ought to be organized by customer type—that’s one issue.

What analyses could prove or disprove that belief? You could break out the sales by customer type for each region. If penetration of superstores in the Northeast is higher than in any other region and higher than for the other types of retail outlets, find out why. When you talk to the Northeast sales reps, you might find that they have a better feel for superstores than any other sales team. What if they were put in charge of all superstores across the country and achieved the same penetration? What would that mean for widget sales? The end product of this exercise is what McKinsey calls the issue tree. In other words, you start with your initial hypothesis and branch out at each issue. The result looks like the figure below. When you’ve completed your issue tree, you have your problem-solving map. That’s the easy part. The difficult part will come when you have to dig deep to prove your hypothesis.

The ACRC conducted its own evaluation on its major anticorruption initiatives by creating evaluation teams consisting of the ACRC’s staff in each division. As for the areas requiring

The McKinsey problem-solving process begins with research. Before a team can construct an initial hypothesis, before it can disaggregate a problem into its components and uncover the key drivers, it has to have information.

Strong leadership teams are already in place within cities. A natural order is already present, in governments and local business and philanthropic entities. Every city has strong, caring leaders working on numerous committees and initiatives to fuel their local economic growth — let’s call it the city GDP — and to create good jobs.

In the early 1990s, Target adopted some of Walt Disney’s staff training and customer service initiatives. It has since developed a variety of methods—from hiring to coaching to grading performance—to ensure “team members” embody the motto “fast, fun and friendly.” (See Chapter 5.)

D’aron the Daring, Derring, Derring-do, stealing base, christened D’aron Little May Davenport, DD to Nana, initials smothered in Southern-fried kisses, dat Wigga D who like Jay Z aw-ite, who’s down, Scots-Irish it is, D’aron because you’re brave says Dad, No, D’aron because you’re daddy’s daddy was David and then there was mines who was named Aaron, Doo-doo after cousin Quint blew thirty-six months in vo-tech on a straight-arm bid and they cruised out to Little Gorge glugging Green Grenades and read three years’ worth of birthday cards, Little Mays when he hit those three homers in the Pee Wee playoff, Dookie according to his aunt Boo (spiteful she was, misery indeed loves company), Mr. Hanky when they discovered he TIVOed ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ Faggot when he hugged John Meer in third grade, Faggot again when he drew hearts on everyone’s Valentine’s Day cards in fourth grade, Dim Dong-Dong when he undressed in the wrong dressing room because he daren’t venture into the dark end of the gym, Philadelphia Freedom when he was caught clicking heels to that song (Tony thought he was clever with that one), Mr. Davenport when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again more times than he cared to remember, especially the summer he returned from Chicago sporting a new Midwest accent, harder on the vowels and consonants alike, but sociable, played well with others that accent did, Faggot again when he cried at the end of ‘WALL-E,’ Donut Hole when he started to swell in ninth grade, Donut Black Hole when he continued to put on weight in tenth grade (Tony thought he was really clever with that one), Buttercup when they caught him gardening, Hippie when he stopped hunting, Faggot again when he became a vegetarian and started wearing a MEAT IS MURDER pin (Oh yeah, why you craving mine then?), Faggot again when he broke down in class over being called Faggot, Sissy after that, whispered, smothered in sniggers almost hidden, Ron-Ron by the high school debate team coach because he danced like a cross between Morrissey and some fat old black guy (WTF?) in some old-ass show called ‘What’s Happening!!’, Brainiac when he aced the PSATs for his region, Turd Nerd when he hung with Jo-Jo and the Black Bruiser, D’ron Da’ron, D’aron, sweet simple Daron the first few minutes of the first class of the first day of college.

Checklists and other formal processes of coordination are not enough because they cannot deal with unanticipated situations. Through Humble Inquiry teams can build the initial relationships that enable them to learn together. As they build higher levels of trust through joint learning, they become more open in their communication, which, in turn, enables them to deal with the inevitable surprises that arise in complex interdependent situations.7

The same year we also acquired Financial Network Services (FNS), an Australian company with a retail banking software package called Bancs24. We needed them because some of our competitors had begun to target that market segment with their own IP. Bancs24 was a very comprehensive package and we were able to successfully win the systems integration contract for the State Bank of India (SBI) Group for implementation of core banking. Since we had invested considerable effort in customizing and strengthening it we felt acquiring FNS would be strategic for our products business. During our initial dealings with FNS and its feisty owner Tony Ward we learned to our surprise that when the product was being developed in the early 1980s TCS had deputed its programmers to Sydney to work with Tony and his team to help develop the product. Since the acquisition we have been able to deploy the FNS software package, rechristened ‘Bancs’, extensively with a number of domestic clients. Today close to 50 per cent of the banking transactions in India are processed by Bancs, thereby justifying the acquisition we made.

Table 3 For each Initiative: Who needs to participate? (List all individuals and teams) Where will resources come from? How might the work get done? 1.     2.     3.    

In most cases, the answer was no; success was driven by decisions the team had made in the past. None of its current initiatives were having any impact. But this was obscured because the company’s gross metrics were all “up and to the right.

your initial team should be focused on building and selling your product.

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It was odd. She’d initially invited Naasir, Janvier, and Ash. The small team had become a tight unit during the fighting and she knew Naasir hadn’t yet had a chance to catch up with Ash. All three had accepted the invitation, but the weird thing was, suddenly every member of the Seven who was in the vicinity had the night off to join them.

Most change initiatives have token elements of “change management,” but these rarely address culture. They are mostly communications plans that inform but do not transform.

The entire death squad Operation 40, a strict secret team founded by George Bush, Richard Nixon and Allen Dulles initially formed to eliminate Fidel Castro, was present at Dallas’ Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.[87] Members of this death squad are also responsible for killing Che Guevara, Salvador Allende (President of Chile), Jaime Roldós (President of Ecuador) and Omar Torrijos (President of Panama). Later on, this death squad was also responsible for Operation Phoenix, the greatest murder scheme in Vietnam. Kennedy’s death was welcomed with relief by the FBI and CIA. Both organizations have always been an instrument of the global elite.

Although she initially can’t see Davis past her bias and views his brown skin as alien, she moves past prejudice and falls for him. The responsibility of repopulating Earth consumes her passion. Just as the two are about to consummate their love, they are discovered by a rescue team. To Davis’s dismay, the comet destroyed New York, but the rest of the world is the same.

There needs to be a process for moving people or whole teams across initiatives to ensure the right overall business priorities are being developed first.

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the legendary San Francisco-based ad agency behind such classic campaigns as “Got Milk” and the Foster Farm Chickens, had found itself in a funk—and felt increasingly irrelevant in an emerging, transmedia world of social networking, user-generated content, mobile, Internet video, and more. So a few years ago, the agency set an ambitious goal to completely revamp itself for the digital age. “Our goal is to be unrecognizable twelve months from now,” creative director Jamie Barrett said at the time. The idea: transform an agency known primarily for eye-popping television spots into one badass, multiplatform marketing machine. It was well worth the effort. In less than a year, Goodby saw revenues leap 20 percent to $102 million. At the start of its transformation effort, 80 percent of the twenty-five-year-old agency’s revenues came from traditional advertising campaigns, while less than 20 percent came from digital initiatives. Today, after three years of reinvention, those numbers are nearly flip-flopped, with 60 percent of revenues now coming from digital initiatives, and 40 percent from traditional. Now, a team once vexed by what it called “Crispin Envy”—for all the attention Crispin Porter + Bogusky receives for its groundbreaking work in digital media—has found its own footing, and then some. While many have driven the transformation, no one has received more credit as a catalyst for change than Derek Robson, forty-two, whom Goodby recruited from adverting agency powerhouse Bartle Bogle Hegarty in London.

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

Designing financial products that share the commitment features of the microfinance contracts, without the interest that comes with them, could clearly be of great help to many people. A group of researchers teamed up with a bank that works with poor people in the Philippines to design such a product, a new kind of account that would be tied to each client’s own savings targets. This target could be either an amount (the client would commit not to withdraw the funds until the amount was reached) or a date (the client would commit to leave the money in the account until that date). The client chose the type of commitment and the specific target. However, once those targets were set, they were binding, and the bank would enforce them. The interest rate was no higher than on a regular account. These accounts were proposed to a randomly selected set of clients. Of the clients they approached, about one in four agreed to open such an account. Out of those takers, a little over two-thirds chose the date goal, and the remaining one-third, the amount goal. After a year, the balances in the savings accounts of those who were offered the account were on average 81 percent higher than those of a comparable group of people who were not offered the account, despite the fact that only one in four of the clients who had been offered the account actually signed on. And the effects were probably smaller than they could have been, because even though there was a commitment not to withdraw any money, there was no positive force pushing the client to actually save, and many of the accounts that were opened remained dormant. Yet most people preferred not to take up the offer of such an account. They were clearly worried about committing themselves to not withdrawing until the goal was reached. Dumas and Robinson ran into the same problem in Kenya—many people did not end up using that accounts they were offering, some of the because the withdrawal fees were too high and they did not want to have their money tied up in the account. This highlights an interesting paradox: There are ways to get around self-control problems, but to make use of them usually requires an initial act of self-control.

Remember, Bish,” Vance growled, “this is a covert op. No blowing shit up or jazzing up the local law enforcement. If Dostiger realizes we’re onto him, he’ll just get the fuck out of Dodge. Keep this clean, not like that shitfight in the Philippines.” The recent Philippines operation that Vance was alluding to had started as a simple case of surveillance, followed by a precise assassination. Instead, Bishop and his team had taken it upon themselves to sink a people-smuggler’s ship, initiating a gunfight with the criminal’s guards and the local authorities. “OK, OK, I get it.

The reality is that an innovation initiative must be executed by a partnership that somehow bridges the hostilities—a partnership between a dedicated team and what we call the performance engine, the unit responsible for sustaining excellence in ongoing operations. Granted, such an arrangement seems, at first glance, improbable. But to give up on it is to give up on innovation itself.

These biases often include mirror imaging, in which analysts instinctively assume that their adversary would think in the same way that the analyst would under similar circumstances; anchoring, when analysts rely too heavily on initial information or impressions that make significant shifts in their judgments unlikely; or confirmation bias, in which analysts favor those findings that support their personal theories or beliefs.

The CIA uses its intelligence role as a cover mechanism for its operational activities. Furthermore it uses its own secret intelligence as an initiator for its own secret operations.

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

Thankfully, over time, I have come to realize those skills initially dismissed as “soft”—communicating a vision, providing feedback, or leading a team—are fundamental to everything we try to do in business. You don't create a successful, sustainable, and scalable organization unless you can engage the people within the organization to work together. The “best friend at work” from the

Over the course of the year, the marketing and product teams would conceive one major initiative that would be rolled out just in time for tax season. Now they test over five hundred different changes in a two-and-a-half-month tax season. They’re running up to seventy different tests per week. The team can make a change live on its website on Thursday, run it over the weekend, read the results on Monday, and come to conclusions starting Tuesday; then they rebuild new tests on Thursday and launch the next set on Thursday night.

For example, consider one of Intuit’s flagship products. Because TurboTax does most of its sales around tax season in the United States, it used to have an extremely conservative culture. Over the course of the year, the marketing and product teams would conceive one major initiative that would be rolled out just in time for tax season. Now they test over five hundred different changes in a two-and-a-half-month tax season. They’re running up to seventy different tests per week. The team can make a change live on its website on Thursday, run it over the weekend, read the results on Monday, and come to conclusions starting Tuesday; then they rebuild new tests on Thursday and launch the next set on Thursday night. As Scott put it, “Boy, the amount of learning they get is just immense now. And what it does is develop entrepreneurs, because when you have only one test, you don’t have entrepreneurs, you have politicians, because you have to sell. Out of a hundred good ideas, you’ve got to sell your idea. So you build up a society of politicians and salespeople. When you have five hundred tests you’re running, then everybody’s ideas can run. And then you create entrepreneurs who run and learn and can retest and relearn as opposed to a society of politicians. So we’re trying to drive that throughout our organization, using examples which have nothing to do with high tech, like the website example. Every business today has a website. You don’t have to be high tech to use fast-cycle testing.” This kind of change is hard. After all, the company has a significant number of existing customers who continue to demand exceptional service and investors who expect steady, growing returns. Scott says, It goes against the grain of what people have been taught in business and what leaders have been taught. The problem isn’t with the teams or the entrepreneurs. They love the chance to quickly get their baby out into the market. They love the chance to have the customer vote instead of the suits voting. The real issue is with the leaders and the middle managers. There are many business leaders who have been successful because of analysis. They think they’re analysts, and their job is to do great planning and analyzing and have a plan.

A scouting craft soon entered our solar system. It detected several broadcast signals, and routed the strongest one (WABC-TV in New York) to a distant team of anthropologists—who then found themselves watching a first-run episode of the hit sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (the one in which Arnold Horshack joins a zany youth cult). Before I get into what happened next, I should mention that music is the most cherished of the forty so-called Noble Arts that Refined beings revere and dedicate their lives to. It is indeed viewed as being many times Nobler than the other thirty-nine Arts combined. And remember—their music sucks. The first alien Kotter watchers initially doubted that we had music at all, because everything about the show screamed that we were cultural and aesthetic dunderheads. Primitive sight gags made them groan. Sloppy editing made them chuckle. Wardrobe choices practically made them wretch. And then, it happened. The show ended. The credits rolled, and the theme music began. And suddenly, the brainless brutes that they’d been pitying were beaming out the greatest creative achievement that the wider universe had ever witnessed. Welcome back, Welcome back, Welcome back.

In the late 1990s, Parachute was the market leader with more than 50 per cent market share. Fresh from its success in taking market share in toothpaste away from Colgate using Pepsodent, HUL entered the coconut oil category to take on Marico. Dadiseth, the then chairman of HUL, had warned Mariwala to sell Marico to HUL or face dire consequences. Mariwala decided to take on the challenge. Even the capital markets believed that Marico stood no chance against the might of HUL which resulted in Marico’s price-to-earnings ratio dipping to as low as 7x, as against 13x during its listing in 1996. As part of its plans to take on Marico, HUL relaunched Nihar in 1998, acquired Cococare from Redcon and positioned both brands as price challengers to Parachute. In addition, HUL also increased advertising and promotion spends for its brands. In one quarter in FY2000, HUL’s advertising and promotional (A&P) spend on coconut oil alone was an amount which was almost equivalent to Marico’s full year A&P budget (around Rs 30 crore). As Milind Sarwate, former CFO of Marico, recalls, ‘Marico’s response was typically entrepreneurial and desi. We quickly realized that we have our key resource engine under threat. So, we re-prioritized and focused entirely on Parachute. We gave the project a war flavour. For example, the business conference on this issue saw Mariconians dressed as soldiers. The project was called operation Parachute ki Kasam. The leadership galvanized the whole team. It was exhilarating as the team realized the gravity of the situation and sprang into action. We were able to recover lost ground and turn the tables, so much so that eventually Marico acquired the aggressor brand, Nihar.’ Marico retaliated by relaunching Parachute: (a) with a new packaging; (b) with a new tag line highlighting its purity (Shuddhata ki Seal—or the seal of purity); (c) by widening its distribution; and (d) by launching an internal sales force initiative. Within twelve months, Parachute regained its lost share, thus limiting HUL’s growth. Despite several relaunches, Nihar failed against Parachute. Eventually, HUL dropped the brand Nihar off its power brand list before selling it off to Marico in 2006. Since then, Parachute has been the undisputed leader in the coconut oil category. This leadership has ensured that when one visits the hair oil section in a retail store, about 80 per cent of the shelves are occupied by Marico-branded hair oil.

Over the past few months, we have introduced a number of great benefits and tools to make us more productive, efficient and fun. With the introduction of initiatives like FYI, Goals and PB&J, we want everyone to participate in our culture and contribute to the positive momentum. From Sunnyvale to Santa Monica, Bangalore to Beijing—I think we can all feel the energy and buzz in our offices. To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo, and that starts with physically being together. Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo offices. If this impacts you, your management has already been in touch with next steps. And, for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration. Being a Yahoo isn’t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices. Thanks to all of you, we’ve already made remarkable progress as a company—and the best is yet to come. Jackie

When I first joined Facebook, I was working with a team to answer the critical question of how best to grow our business. The conversations were getting heated, with many people arguing their own positions strongly. We ended the week without consensus. Dan Rose, leader of our deal team, spent the weekend gathering market data that allowed us to reframe the conversation in analytics. His effort broke the logjam. I then expanded Dan’s responsibilities to include product marketing. Taking initiative pays off. It is hard to visualize someone as a leader if she is always waiting to be told what to do.

In a section titled “Performance Factors,” Clint had been asked to indicate areas in which I’d exhibited significant strengths, as well as any areas needing development. There were only two areas in which he felt I needed development—organization (probably because he’d ridden in my car) and working more closely with third parties—but he had indicated six major strengths. The first three were creativity, achievement of objectives, and quality of work. No surprises there. The next three strengths—adaptability, communication, and autonomy—seemed a bit ironic. I scrolled down and saw my overall score: Very Good. By definition, this score meant that I had “exceeded objectives in several areas and required only occasional supervision.” I didn’t appreciate the real irony of Clint’s assessment until I looked at my stakeholder map and considered how I might have scored had Kristen conducted a similar evaluation at home. What score would I have received for adaptability? The review form defined this as “being open to change with new circumstances.” Going with the flow. We had just begun to work on my openness to change at home, and I was still learning how to adjust to this new mind-set. Meanwhile, at work, I presented myself as nothing if not adaptable. “Sure, I’ll take a new position on the marketing team.” “Of course I can stay until midnight tonight. Whatever it takes.” “Certainly, Clint, I’ll travel to customers every week. Anything else?” At home, Kristen asked me to help fold laundry and my head almost exploded. I guessed that I would receive Needs Development for that one. How about autonomy and initiative? Clint seemed to think that I was bursting with it, but Kristen would have offered a different opinion. “Initiative? Please. How is me having to remind you to turn off the television and play with the kids initiative? I’ll put you down for a Needs Development,” I imagined her saying. Achievement of objectives would have gotten me a high mark with Kristen, until I scrolled down farther and read the definition, which included the phrase “gets things done efficiently and in a timely manner.” I thought of the Christmas decorations drooping from our eaves. I thought of the countless times Kristen and I had been late for an engagement and she’d found me standing in my boxers in front of the mirror making faces.

They were productively adversarial, like superforecasting team discussions. Managers grilled engineers and forced them to produce data to back up their assertions. The process had worked remarkably. The space shuttle was the most complex machine ever built, and all twenty-four flights had returned safely. But on the emergency conference call, that same quantitative culture led them astray. On their engineers’ advice, McDonald and two Thiokol VPs on the call initially supported a no-launch decision. The Challenger had already been cleared, so this was an eleventh-hour reversal. When NASA officials asked Thiokol engineers exactly what temperature range was safe for flight, they recommended setting a limit at 53 degrees, the lower bound of previous experience. NASA manager Larry Mulloy was flabbergasted. He thought the shuttle was supposed to be cleared to launch from 31 to 99 degrees. A last-minute 53-degree limit was setting an entirely new technical criteria for launches. It had never been discussed, was not backed by quantitative data, and meant that suddenly winter was off-limits for space exploration. Mulloy found it frustrating; he later called it “dumb.” How had the engineers arrived at that number? “They said because they had flown at 53 degrees before,” a NASA manager reflected, “which is no reason to me. That’s tradition rather than technology.” Boisjoly was asked again for data to support his claim, “and I said I have none other than what is being presented.” With the conference call at an impasse, a Thiokol VP asked for a five-minute “offline caucus,” during which Thiokol concluded that they had no more data to provide. They returned to the call a half hour later with a new decision: proceed with launch. Their official document read, “temperature data not conclusive on predicting primary O-ring blow-by.” When conference call participants from NASA and Thiokol later spoke with investigators and gave interviews, they repeatedly brought up the “weak engineering position,” as one put it. Their statements comprised a repetitive chorus: “Unable to quantify”; “supporting data was subjective”; “hadn’t done a good technical job”; “just didn’t have enough conclusive data.” NASA was, after all, the agency that hung a framed quote in the Mission Evaluation Room: “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.

Internal refinement: A cross-functional group of internal experts comes together to refine and pressure test the hypotheses. These discussions bring together teams like marketing, sales, pricing, and product design. Initial customer validation: The team then starts validating product-market fit, perceived value, and WTP with target markets. Methods used include value trade-offs, ideal package (i.e. product configuration) creation, unaided WTP, and purchase probability (as outlined in Chapter 4). This typically occurs prior to writing any code. The gut-check: The concept must then pass an internal “smell test.” The team typically pitches the product concept to LinkedIn

Given Mozilla’s small initial size, this growth necessitated hiring executives from the outside (“the graft”), which was particularly challenging because of the company’s strong engineering-driven culture (“the host”) that was already skeptical about outsiders. John was able to do this successfully by following the same three-step process that was used to hire him. Hire someone who is already a known quantity to at least one member of the team. John was hired by Mitchell Baker, his predecessor as CEO of Mozilla. The two had gotten to know each other by serving on a board together, and Mitchell’s personal endorsement of John carried weight with the team at Mozilla.

Bring the new executive in at a lower level initially and let the executive prove himself or herself. John gave himself the title “Director of Business Development and Operations” and only took on bigger titles after he had demonstrated his ability and value to existing teams. He employed the same technique when he hired Schrep, bringing him in as “Director of Engineering

I’d also designate twelve additional days as “growth days,” holding intensive sessions with leadership teams to help them think through various growth or operations initiatives.

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.

Russia was not waiting for rapprochement with the United States. They could see that Trump’s chaotic White House was creating numerous financial opportunities worldwide, and they were going to scoop them up. On December 5, 2018, the Middle East and North Africa representative for the Russian state atomic energy company Rosatom went to Riyadh to meet with MBS. Its representative, Alexander Voronkov, said Russia would supply Generation 3+ VVER-1220 reactors for the kingdom, which he said were the most advanced ones Russia offered.26 It’s worth noting here that in 1994 Russia built the first nuclear reactor in Iran, also a VVER model. The reactors in Bushehr nuclear station were to be the same VVER-1220 as those Russia promised to Saudi Arabia.27 Even more interesting, Russian arms exporter Rosobornexport, a sanctioned arms company, sold S-300 air defense systems to Iran to protect Iran’s reactors, and one could imagine this could be part of the package to Saudi Arabia as well.28 The Russians were brilliantly offering regional parity and stability to both Iran and Saudi Arabia if the reactors were bought. It came with a tacit guarantee neither side could attack the other since they would have the same air defense system. On January 22, 2019, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) delivered a report on what Saudi Arabia needed to do to stay within international norms if it pursued a nuclear power program. Mikhail Chudakov, a former head of Russian nuclear programs and IAEA deputy director, delivered the report that gave the kingdom the green light to move forward.29 The following day, the kingdom received offers from five nations for construction of the project: the United States, Russia, France, South Korea, and China.30 The Saudis originally wanted sixteen reactors but have scaled that back to two as part of a larger effort to diversify its energy grid.31 The “tilt” seems to be toward the Russians, with the Russian IAEA official paving the way and the Rosatom folks working over the royal family. Like their arms sales, the Russians promised a fairly cheap but stable deal that comes with massive long-term costs. But it was Team Trump that started this game, trying to cheat, abuse ethics, and lie its way into potentially gaining billions of Arab sheikdom money under the guise of a major foreign policy initiative. In the end, they got played by Russia, who knew corruption at a master-class level. Trump was a piker. And Russia ate America’s lunch… again.

Praise for Nurses and Health Professionals Back in 1976, Dr. Frank Speizer at the Channing Laboratory of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Public Health started the Nurses’ Health Study. Its initial aim was to investigate the potential long-term consequences of oral contraceptives, which were then being taken by millions of women. Nurses were chosen as the study population because of their knowledge about health and their ability to provide complete and accurate information about various diseases, thanks to their nursing education. The research team signed up 121,700 female registered nurses between the ages of thirty and fifty-five. Since then, the aims of the Nurses’ Health Study have broadened to look at the effects of diet and other lifestyle factors on cancer, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, mental health, and other conditions.

Throwing even more fuel on this fire was Alibaba’s record-breaking 2014 debut on the New York Stock Exchange. A group of Taobao sellers rang the opening bell for Alibaba’s initial public offering on September 19, just nine days after Premier Li’s speech. When the dust settled on a furious round of trading, Alibaba had claimed the title of the largest IPO in history, and Jack Ma was crowned the richest man in China. But it was about more than just the money. Ma had become a national hero, but a very relatable one. Blessed with a goofy charisma, he seems like the boy next door. He didn’t attend an elite university and never learned how to code. He loves to tell crowds that when KFC set up shop in his hometown, he was the only one out of twenty-five applicants to be rejected for a job there. China’s other early internet giants often held Ph.D.s or had Silicon Valley experience in the United States. But Ma’s ascent to rock-star status gave a new meaning to “mass entrepreneurship”—in other words, this was something that anyone from the Chinese masses had a shot at. The government endorsement and Ma’s example of internet entrepreneurship were particularly effective at winning over some of the toughest customers: Chinese mothers. In the traditional Chinese mentality, entrepreneurship was still something for people who couldn’t land a real job. The “iron rice bowl” of lifetime employment in a government job remained the ultimate ambition for older generations who had lived through famines. In fact, when I had started Sinovation Ventures in 2009, many young people wanted to join the startups we funded but felt they couldn’t do so because of the steadfast opposition of their parents or spouses. To win these families over, I tried everything I could think of, including taking the parents out to nice dinners, writing them long letters by hand, and even running financial projections of how a startup could pay off. Eventually we were able to build strong teams at Sinovation, but every new recruit in those days was an uphill battle. By 2015, these people were beating down our door—in one case, literally breaking Sinovation’s front door—for the chance to work with us. That group included scrappy high school dropouts, brilliant graduates of top universities, former Facebook engineers, and more than a few people in questionable mental states. While I was out of town, the Sinovation headquarters received a visit from one would-be entrepreneur who refused to leave until I met with him. When the staff told him that I wouldn’t be returning any time soon, the man lay on the ground and stripped naked, pledging to lie right there until Kai-Fu Lee listened to his idea.

We were ready to submit the bid documents in sealed folders on May 28, at 10 am, as stipulated by the Ministry. Luckily, someone did a final check of our output against the ‘Invitation to Tender’ once more, just to make absolutely sure we hadn’t forgotten anything. He discovered at the last minute that the bid team leader had to initial all pages by hand. Since systems like DocuSign didn’t exist yet, Richard and I spent the whole evening and night signing pages, with me turning the pages and Richard initialing each one. There were thousands. Richard’s arm was hurting badly at the end of it, but we got it done in time. We put the folders in sealed envelopes and delivered it all by hand. One minute late and we would have missed an opportunity that we had already spent over USD 10 million on.

When we talk about OKRs cascading, we often mean from the top-down, but the most effective method is to incorporate bottom-up initiatives that support the company’s overall strategy and are set by empowered teams.