While celebrating the US Postal cycling team’s Tour de France triumph, I discovered parallels I could apply to a major project at work. We have formed a cross-divisional team, whose team members come with different experiences and skills. We bring different processes but are learning one new unifying process, and have different personal goals to accomplish but have one over-arching unifying goal: the success of the project.

Take heed to the US Postal’s team success.

Without boring those who aren’t cycling fans, the US Postal team assembled a team of specialists with specific roles: Continue reading →

Ask these questions about the CEO that you work for:

With the number of business ethics violations appearing in the news, do you have faith in your CEO’s motives?
Does he weigh difficult decisions based on a “passion for people?”
Do you see his face on a regular basis, in the lunchroom, spontaneously at your table of friends?

In this business article, “Valine runs VSP on respect and innovation” see why I have the confidence to answer yes to all three questions.

A positive working environment stimulates creativity. A company’s corporate culture and environment nurtures creative problem solving.

By the way, “passion for people” is part of our company tag line.
I’ll leave you to ponder which came first: his passion or the company’s tagline.

“”Pick one thing that you’re good at and stick to it.”

Hah, like that’ll ever happen.

“I am, I’m afraid, a polymath. Specialisation is simply not possible for me, because there are too many interesting things in the world for me to get distracted by.”

Once I followed Suw Charman’s logic, I knew I was a kindred soul.A Polymath in an Age of Specialists explains it all.