Orienteering has been the impetus for the Treasure Hunt Adventure since 1988 and still remains my number one sport and love. When I can get a weekend off, and the calendar is right, I try to participate as much as I can. Last weekend was off the charts: the US Orienteering Championships at beautiful Ward…
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Ace Frehley, 360 Virtual Reality and R’n’R Team Builders
If you don’t know by now, Ace Frehley and I are old friends. If not for a simple twist of fate (and he having better hair than me) I could have auditioned at that Wicked Lester rehearsal hall in 1972. Oh yeah, and he is a monster player and was the perfect guy for the…
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Leaders As Coaches: A Google President’s Advice
We can quote the old Chinese proverb until blue in the face, but it always rings true: Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime. More and more successful companies are successful because they teach their employees to be leaders. Amit Singh, president of Google…
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Patriots and the Bengals: Team Effectiveness vs. a Bunch of Egos
What a contrast. Last weekend during the AFC Playoffs the New England Patriots put on a seminar on team effectiveness. Arguably not the best Patriot team of recent years, Brady’s Bunch executed, executed and executed, like a machine to win their spot in the AFC Championship Game on Jan 24 (quite an admission for a Giants fan.)…
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Amazing Wolfpack Teamwork
We can learn a lot from nature: Those three wolves at the front are the sick and elderly. Their pace sets the tempo for the rest of the twenty-five member pack. They are followed by five strong wolves, the “marines” who are the real tough ones. Then the rest of the pack, followed by another…
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Active Shooter Defense: Survival in Life and Business
Fortune favors the prepared mind. Louis Pasteur For me, Mumbai was my tipping point. The coordinated terror attacks across the city in November of 2008 (has it been that long?) jarred me and many more into a new awareness for this world of terrorism as the norm: 164 slaughtered with 308 wounded.Then massacre the Westgate Mall…
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Virtual Reality is Changing Everything
My better half gave it to me and I said, “Ah, they’re just trying to sell you something.” She got the last laugh as the “it” was a Google Cardboard headset, free in the Sunday NY Times. For reasons yet explainable I started to assemble the viewer by folding the corrugated cardboard as per the…
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Procul Harum is Some Team
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. Lao Tzu I’ve been hammering home the lessons of effective team unity for the last year and that’s a good thing. SEAL Team Six, Mt. Everest climbers, even brainstorming at…
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Escape Rooms At Any Meeting
You are locked in a room with up to nine other people. They could be known to you but chances are they are strangers. The group is given 60 minutes to find the key to the door by discovering clues that lead to puzzles that reveal “meta-puzzles.” Solve those larger brain teasers and you…
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Group Creativity with Espresso
Fascinating. In his “Where Good Ideas Come From,” Steve Johnson‘s TED talk is a must-watch (multiple times at that) as he explains the environment that suits creativity: tight spaces that allow our “hunches to collide” with others. His thesis is that the Enlightenment was propelled by the tight seating in the emerging English coffee houses…
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