Quotes About Teamwork

come-to-Jesus meeting in

Someone like me, with a D personality, is probably going to have trouble working with a C personality, because my personality type tends to be impatient, overbearing, and judgmental, and C personalities tend to be lazy nitwits.

I think positive. I always think we're going to score. Two minutes is a lot of time if you have timeouts and you're throwing every down. You have to make the right decisions. I've always had great receivers, which helps. It's not just me doing it.

Some lead by example, like Rand Fishkin of Moz (formerly SEOmoz), who says his goal is to create a hundred new millionaires — then issued additional stock grants for every Moz employee as a part of the Series B funding, directly out of his personal holdings, to ensure that a financing round wouldn't be dilutive.

The CEO's greatest influence on the company isn't her contributions to the product, the strategy, or even getting the company funded. The CEO's greatest contribution to the company is the wizardry required to hire a team that is going to be amazingly effective at executing the company's strategy. Great CEOs hire teams that are far better than they have any right to expect. Put succinctly, a core competency for a CEO is to "date up." This

talking about, just look at the Celtics.

I tried to go out for theater or theater arts, but I was too scared or too intimidated. But I had a lot of friends on the cross country team that had great senses of humor.

My big philosophy is: Try and work with good people, because the process is your life. That's going to be really, really hard. I'm glad I learned the lesson, 'Failure is OK.'

I love being a part of Aqua Teen.

No matter how good you are, how brave you are or anything, it comes down to that car so many times. Not every time, but so many times.

Building purpose is...] not as simple as carving a mission statement in granite or encouraging everyone to recite a hymnal of catchphrases. It's a never-ending process of trying, failing, reflecting and above all learning. High-purpose environments don't descend on groups from on high; they are dug out of the ground, over and over, as a group navigates it's problems together and evolves to meet the challenges of a fast-changing world.

Create Safe, Collision-Rich Spaces:

One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together.

Give a mediocre idea to a good team, and they'll find a way to make it better. The goal needs to be to get the team right, get them moving in the right direction, and get them to see where they are making mistakes and where they are succeeding.

We focus on what we can see—individual skills. But individual skills are not what matters. What matters is the interaction.

Creative skills, on the other hand, are about empowering a group to do the hard work of building something that has never existed before.

The kindergartners succeed not because they are smarter but because they work together in a smarter way. They are tapping into a simple and powerful method in which a group of ordinary people can create a performance far beyond the sum of their parts.

The mechanism of cooperation can be summed up as follows: Exchanges of vulnerability, which we naturally tend to avoid, are the pathway through which trusting cooperation is built.

They did not rely on any outside structure or safety net. They were the structure, and if any of them failed, the group would fail.

Building habits of group vulnerability is like building a muscle. It takes time, repetition, and the willingness to feel pain in order to achieve gains. And as with building muscle, the first key is to approach the process with a plan.

Eliminate Bad Apples:

This group performed well no matter what he did. Nick said it was mostly because of one guy. You can see this guy is causing Nick to get almost infuriated—his negative moves aren't working like they had in the other groups, because this guy could find a way to flip it and engage everyone and get people moving toward the goal.

Make Sure Everyone Has a Voice:

This approach extended to the raucous all-employee street hockey games in the parking lot ("No one held back when fighting the founders for the puck," recalled one player) and to the all-company Friday forums, where anyone could challenge the founders with any question under the sun, no matter how controversial—and vice versa. Like the hockey games, the Friday forums often turned into collision-filled affairs.