Random Articles

• How to Stifle Teamwork - Part 3 The news reports that US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfled had an opportunity to inspire, motivate the US troops during a recent question and answer session in Kuwait. Based on this exchange, I can’t say he succeeded in addressing the troops concerns let alone inspire them to go back into battle. That is unfortunate. “Why do we soldiers
• How Not To Hire Someone A while back, Fast Company published Keith Hammonds’ Why We Hate HR. Like myself, I’m sure you have some remarkable ‘Everything was going great, then HR…’ stories. Whether it’s ridiculous, time-wasting hoops (asking candidates to complete an application even though you have their resume) or just not doing a simple Google search on a candidate
• Yes, and - not But Improvisational comedy, like all team sports is about effective, high-energy, spontaneous collaboration. One of the seven major tenets of Improv is building off each person’s comment and suggestion with “Yes, and…” rather than dismissing it with a “but…”. “Yes, and…” extends, explores, and enhances the previous suggestion - building trust among all the team members, moving
• Want Better Collaboration - Improvise The earlier collaboration techniques post (Stop Asking Questions) was based a key to successful improvisation. This post digs further into the relationship between improv and collaboration. Good improvisational comedy teams believe a group of individuals working together can start with nothing and quickly create something engaging, desireable, useful, and valuable. From this perspective, the keys for
• When Brand is the Bottleneck Recently, a collegue and I went to lunch at Pancheros, a 14-year old burrito chain started in Iowa City, IA. I’ve spoken about the power of lunch before as well as the lunch experience. Always enlightening. This time was no exception. I’m a big fan of Chipotle, they’ve taken the Subway model and transferred it to