Category: Teams

  • The Sportification of Politics and the Possibility of Governing

    Things have changed in the political arena. That’s the unavoidable conclusion we have to draw from the last year. No matter who or what you voted for, one thing we might be able to agree on is that things have changed. There are, to be sure, a number of troubling trends. The role of a […]

  • It’s Time For You to Think About Hiring Four-Dimensional People

    One of my posts from a few years ago keeps re-surfacing and in discussing it with someone a few days ago, I decided I should update it. In the original post, I made the case that you should hire three-dimensional people who have depth, breadth, and length. I am not a fan of the prevailing […]

  • Evil Geniuses Win $6.6 Million Playing Video Games: eSports May Be Good for You

    The prevailing parental narrative about video games is that they are likely to be an anti-social addictive waste of time or, at best, mind-numbing entertainment. It might be time to reconsider that narrative. Imagine an arena with tens of thousands of fans and millions watching online cheering for their favorite team in a team-based video […]

  • What Am I Missing Here? Five Ways to Make the Invisible Visible

    Have you ever been in a meeting where, based on what you see and hear, you expect the meeting to be playing out in one way but instead it is going in another direction entirely? You suspect something is going on beneath the surface and that you are missing something important that would make sense of […]

  • Great Teams Are Worth Watching, Learn Their Secret and Pass It On!

    I am a big fan of the perfect  pass. If you follow professional basketball in the US, you were treated to some perfect passing last week. In a pivotal game in the championship series, the Spurs passed the ball 113 times more than the Heat. Especially at the professional level, the teams tend to rely […]

  • A Learning Opportunity in Flexibility and Determination for You and Your Team

    Angela Duckworth’s presentations and research have spawned a lot of discussion over the last year on the dominant importance of sustained hard work in becoming successful. Her central conclusion is that perseverance (what she calls “grit”) is a better indicator of who will be successful than talent. Others have seized on her research as proof that the problem with […]

  • Searching for Alternatives to Death by Powerpoint: The Single Slide Strategy

    A friend sent me this link to an NPR story about the mind-numbing effects of powerpoint presentations. NPR interviewed various groups including physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider, CEOs at fortune 500 companies, and generals at the pentagon. Some of those interviewed have put an outright ban on powerpoint presentations at their meetings because they […]

  • Don’t Argue With Your Team, Argue FOR Your Viewpoint

    The best teams argue within a framework of collaboration. They understand the value of bringing different points of view to solving a problem and the importance of arguing in a way that builds trust rather than undermines it. Here are ten steps to building a collaborative environment for productive arguments.  Don’t argue WITH each other, […]