Quotes About Handoff

Everyone's lives are sort of a succession, almost like handing the baton of your life off from one person to the next to the next to the next. And hopefully, that goes on for a long time, and the changes are healthy and interesting and not, like, spiraling into darkness.

These days, we listen to our children, not they to us. Given what we've done to the planet, perhaps they have a point. Tasked with passing the baton, like hundreds of generations before us, my team has fumbled the handoff.

The way out of this dilemma is to manage the four kinds of work differently, allowing strong cross-functional teams to develop around each area. When products move from phase to phase, they are handed off between teams. Employees can choose to move with the product as part of the handoff or stay behind and begin work on something new. Neither choice is necessarily right or wrong; it depends on the temperament and skills of the person in question.

If You Respect Their Preparation, You never Drop the Baton

What does the quarter-back do after handing off? He runs to the perimeter and blocks. Or tries to block. I tried to throw a block at the cornerback but his knee got me right on the temple. I remember thinking, 'boom.'

Even under the best circumstances, some knowledge is inevitably lost with each handoff. With

I like to work at the beginning of projects. Once they get stable, I'll hand them off.

If you run well but are unable to pass the baton to another runner, you lose the race.

In both designing and evaluating processes, these teams would pay particular attention to passing the "process baton." Processes should be designed to facilitate the exchange of the baton, the movement of responsibility from one person to another.