A team can aggregate the intellects and elevate the nobility of the group as a whole to create a greatness of effect comparable to, or even surpassing, any individual genius.
Princeton University
My kid’s got a summer assignment for AP English — select and read two novels from a list of about 20.
I’ve been telling him since June that I’d be glad to go over the list with him and recommend books that he might enjoy reading but he’s put it off so long now that I’m limited to recommending short books that he might enjoy reading, and that leaves us with Ethan Frome, Wide Sargasso Sea and All the Pretty Horses.
He comes back from the bookstore with Frome and Sargasso, two books about men who marry crazy women.
He ruled out All the Pretty Horses because it’s 300 pages long and “I read the first sentence and it had like six adjectives.”
Baboons who live in the African plains spend about one-third of their life sleeping, and when awake they divide their time between traveling, finding and eating food, and free leisure time–which basically consists in interacting, or grooming each other’s fur to pick out lice. . . . And as the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has shown, in thirteenth century French villages–which were among the most advanced in the world at the time — the most common leisure pursuit was still that of picking lice out of each other’s hair. Now, of course, we have television.
Picking up my family at John Wayne Airport . . .
There’s a guy walking around the baggage claim area with a toy poodle on a leash.
I point this out to my son and say, “I didn’t know you could walk your dog around here. I would have brought Lightning.”
“Maybe it’s a bomb-sniffing dog,” he says.
“A bomb-sniffing poodle?”
“Yeah.”
In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don’t succeed are: they don’t work on important problems, they don’t become emotionally involved, they don’t try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don’t. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck.
Bias is particularly an issue on cross-boundary initiatives, where multiple groups of stakeholders work together on a project. Each stakeholder group has particular goals and is judged against metrics that may be unique to that group. Bias tends to be a substantial driver of project disruption in organizations where goals or metrics across groups are in conflict.
Good seats! Be alert for bats and/or balls!
My wife sent this next one from her phone with a note: “May be last picture for tonight. Can you tell from casey face.” The game hadn’t started yet!
- I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
- I wish I didn’t work so hard.
- I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
- I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
- I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Nearly 60% of the teenage readers of an online men’s magazine say they would punch a coworker in the face if they could get away with it, and nearly 40% would do the same to their bosses. The magazine, AskMen.com, says the number of positive responses to those statements declines steadily with respondents’ age, dropping to about 20% for readers 50 and older.
