Five Teamwork Lessons from Geese

These facts have been attributed to numerous individuals including a pastor, a biologist, a Buddhist monk, and an environmentalist. The source is not important, the lessons are:


Geese Teamwork Fact 1: As each goose flaps its wings it creates an "uplift" for the birds that follow. By flying in a "V" formation, the whole flock adds 71% greater flying range than if each bird flew alone.

Lesson: People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going quicker and easier because they are traveling on the thrust of one another.


Geese Teamwork Fact 2: When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of flying alone. It quickly moves back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front of it.

Lesson: If we have as much sense as a goose we stay in formation with those headed where we want to go. We are willing to accept their help and give our help to others.


Geese Teamwork Fact 3: When the lead goose tires, it rotates back into formation and another goose flies to the point position.

Lesson: It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing leadership. As with geese, people are interdependent on each other's skills, capabilities and unique arrangements of gifts, talents or resources.


Geese Teamwork Fact 4: The geese flying in formation honk to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.

Lesson: We need to make sure our honking is encouraging. In groups where there is encouragement, the production is much greater. The power of encouragement is the quality of honking we seek.


Geese Teamwork Fact 5: When a goose gets sick, wounded or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it to help and protect it. They stay with it until it dies or is able to fly again. Then, they launch out with another formation or catch up with the flock.

Lesson: If we have as much sense as geese, we will stand by each other in difficult times as well as when we are strong.

The Five Diversity Myths Still Alive and Well in Corporate America

Martin Davidson holds post-graduate degrees from both Harvard and Stanford and is a professor and Chief Diversity Officer at the Darden School of Management at the University of Virginia. His latest work delves into why diversity initiatives are so faulty in the American workplace. Here he presents five of the most common diversity myths that still rule most American businesses:

Myth 1: Having diversity will increase performance and profits

Why it’s a myth: Having greater diversity in your team and in your organization only helps if you understand what to do with it. Bringing together people of different ethnicities, genders, or sexual orientations and saying “go to work” is a blueprint for failure and several studies bear this out. The key is being strategic about what kind of diversity you need to get the job done and going after it.


Myth 2: If you increase the number of women and people of color, you have increased your diversity

Why it’s a myth: Of course gender and ethnicity play a role in the way people see things. But the value of diversity doesn’t come from the appearance of a person. Rather, it comes in taking advantage of diverse perspectives to create business results. You can have a group that very much looks like the rainbow, but thinks pretty much the same -- and in that case, you haven’t increased your diversity at all.


Myth 3: Diversity efforts always benefit women and people of color

Why it’s a myth: White males are the generally the dominant group in the U.S. workplace and often believe they have the most to lose -- jobs, promotions, status -- when it comes to diversity. But women, people of color, and other people who are different also resist when diversity rhetoric and norms of behavior single them out and put them under a microscope. If diversity is only about counting heads, neither the organization nor “diverse” employees benefit in the long run.


Myth 4: A diverse workplace is ideally a harmonious and integrated workplace

Why it’s a myth: When diversity is working at its best, people are constantly bumping up against new ideas and perspectives that challenge long-held beliefs about how they see the world. I don’t know about you, but that activity usually unsettles me. A workplace in which differences are being leveraged is dynamic, energized, emotional and rarely boring. If you think that the ultimate vision for true diversity is constant harmony, think again.


Myth 5: Corporate leaders who want to increase race and gender diversity will make it happen

Why it’s a myth: Leaders constantly juggle the need to meet business goals with the need to meet diversity goals -- often causing them to choose between either increasing race and gender diversity, or focusing on corporate performance. Because diversity is not well-linked to performance, they have to choose that which will take precedent -- corporate performance. An added cost: these leaders -- who really want to do the right thing -- end up worried that they will be seen as biased because they aren’t making progress with diversity. The only solution to this is to make diversity efforts and corporate performance one in the same. Leveraging difference, not managing diversity, can do just that.

Thoughts, reactions, ideas?

Five Things You Didn't Know About the Aravind Eye Hospital

This eye hospital in South India manages to provide world-class eye care to millions despite the fact that the overwhelming number of their patients are poor and cannot pay. The story of Aravind can be read in the book Infinite Vision.

Here are five more things you probably didn't know about Aravind Eye Hospital:

1. They never close and they never slow down. Aravind keeps its surgical equipment in operation 24 hours a day, which reduces the cost-per-surgery significantly. Also, doctors focus only on performing surgeries and leave nurses to handle pre-op and post-op care, which increases doctor productivity. These actions allow the hospital to operate on the poor at no cost while still being profitable. From April 2009 to March 2010, Aravind treated over 2.5 million out-patients and performed over 300,000 surgeries for poor patients.

2. They have McDonalds to thank for their modus operandi. Aravind's founder (Dr. V) was inspired by McDonald’s restaurants and wanted to model the eye hospital on them. Dr. V. was fascinated by the service efficiency, speed, and consistency of McDonald's operations and wanted to transfer that same process to the Aravind system as a way to cope with the increasing numbers of patients who began turning up at the hospital's door.

3. It’s still a family business. Today Aravind's top management team of nine executives are all Dr. V's family members, and all but two are doctors. Twenty-four other relatives work at lower levels in the hospital system's hierarchy.

4. They're not a charity and don’t ask their doctors to forego healthy salaries in order to serve the poor. Aravind's administrators can afford to pay market rates and competitive salaries. They recruit doctors from their own training institute, which offers an internationally-recognized two-year postgraduate specialization in ophthalmology. While doctors at privately run hospitals face pressures to deliver revenues, Aravind encourages "honest medicine,” with a balance between clinical practice and community work.

5. They make their own lenses and instruments – which are of such high quality that they are imported to over 120 countries. Up until 1992, Aravind was importing lenses at almost $150 per unit. By adapting technology initially sourced from the U.S., Aravind was able to produce its own lenses within an affordable price range of $2 to $10 each. Today they manufacture 2 million lenses a year and export them to over 120 countries (and have 7% of the global market share for intraocular lenses by volume). Their product portfolio has expanded to include suture needles, microsurgical blades, lasers, and eye drops.

So, what are the lessons we in the United States could learn here?

Top Five Political WTFs of 2010

Thom Hartmann presents his video selection for the top five political trends and moments in 2010 that made so little sense that they bordered (and at times crossed over) into the absurd.

Five Alternate Tips for Establishing Personal Presence

Dianna Booher has been writing about professional presence and communications for decades and has a number of bestselling titles under her belt.

Here she lists five lesser-known techniques that are easy to remember and yet make all the difference when establishing presence and influence with others:

1. Take a stand: Stand to the left side of a group when you deliver laugh lines and you’ll get a better response (as opposed to the right side, where you should deliver emotional stories and appeals).

2. Observe the one-sentence rule: Recognize the importance of summarizing your concept or idea down to its core essence. If you can't summarize your idea in a single sentence, you're going to have a significantly more challenging time trying to convince the folks in the boardroom.

3. Talk to the back row: Project to those farther away from you rather than keeping your eyes on the friendly faces down front when you speak to a group. Talk to those seated in the back row, last seat. Your brain will automatically adjust your energy level, voice, and body language to project so that you can engage those people at a distance. Those even closer will engage with you as well.

4. Pause before you launch. Talking on trajectory makes you look nervous. Whether just leaving your seat to walk to the front of a meeting room, simply rising from your chair at the conference table, or joining a conversation when someone asks your opinion, pause before you begin will increase the impact and importance of what you say.

5. Stick to the facts. Prefer verbs and nouns to adjectives and adverbs. Verbs and nouns express facts (or what sounds like fact). Verbs motivate, persuade, and demand action. Adjectives and adverbs express opinions and therefore invite people to nitpick and argue.

Thoughts? Reactions? Other ideas?

Six Keys to True Prosperity

These are the six keys to a prosperous life, as outlined in Ethan Willis and Randy Garn's book, Prosper.

1. Locate Your Polaris Point. Everyone’s unique Polaris Point is their vision of what they want to become, to achieve, to contribute, to create. It also includes realistically determining the role money will play in those aspirations.

2. Live in Your Prosperity Zone. When your earnings are aligned with your Polaris Point, that's when you're living in your unique Prosperity Zone. If you have a Polaris Point that your earnings cannot support, or if your earnings overwhelm your Polaris Point, then you are not in the Prosperity Zone. The Prosperity Zone is when your Polaris Point and earnings are in balance.

3. Earn from Your Core. Sustainable prosperity flows from your unique abilities. Make an inventory of what really motivates you. What do you do that feels more like play than work? The more you leverage the energy that flows from that kind of passion, the bigger the competitive advantage you can deliver, and the more income you can make.

4. Start with What You Already Have. You have hidden assets all around you to waiting to be discovered and put to use. The pursuit of prosperity is fueled by an awareness of the abundance you already have, not the abundance you believe you lack. The fullness of your plate when you start matters less than the fact that, however little your plate contains, you notice that your plate isn’t empty.

5. Commit to Your Prosperity Path. You have a prosperous life of your own creation and are now empowered by a clear direction (your personal Polaris Point). Apply your core abilities and resources, have metrics to measure your progress against, and make yourself accountable. Decide to live the life you really want.

6. Take Profound Action. Here’s where you implement the prosperity plan that marries personal satisfaction with a sustainable income stream. Persistence is required in taking the next step and the step after that, on the long-distance path to prosperity. There are no get-rich-quick schemes, only that law that stipulates that as you sow, so shall you reap.

Five Ways True North Groups Can Save Leaders

Bill George and Doug Baker argue for the value of True North Groups in their new book of the same title. Leaders and others need a small group of people with whom we can have in-depth discussions and share intimately about the most important things in their lives -- both personal professional.

Here are five traditional pitfalls all leaders encounter and how True North Groups help them avoid such scenarios:

Pitfall #1: No one for you and other leaders to talk to about challenges and dilemmas. The missing link for many leaders is having a safe place where they can share their experiences, challenges, and frustrations, and get honest feedback.

True North Groups provide small, intimate peer groups where people talk openly about their issues in confidential settings. There are not very many places left where a leader can voice his or her concerns and issues without getting tangled up in corporate politics, disclosure issues, or similar problems, and yet all humans need to communicate, share, and even vent. True North groups provide the arena for such exchanges.

Pitfall #2: Getting on the slippery slope to unethical behavior. All leaders face ethical dilemmas and doing the right thing is often not as easy as it sounds. Because group members maintain each other's trust, a leader who feels that he or she is veering too close to an ethical precipice and get support and advice from others who have also been in the same space.

In a True North Group where people share their deepest feelings and greatest difficulties, group members feel comfortable in challenging you when they think you are losing your bearings or deviating from your beliefs and values. Because they know your life story, they are able to perceive how prior events in your life or your motivations may be influencing your decisions today.

Pitfall #3: Having blind spots that keep you and other leaders from seeing their impact on others. Most leaders have blind spots – characteristics they are unaware of – that tend to get in the way of understanding how their leadership is impacting others. Effective leadership comes from a place of authenticity, which is the essential quality of leaders with high levels of emotional intelligence, or EQ. In our experience, we have not seen leaders fail for lack of IQ, but have observed many leaders fail who lacked EQ. The essence of EQ is having a high level of awareness of yourself and your impact on others.

True North Groups provide the feedback that enables leaders to understand their blind spots, open up hidden areas, and gain a deeper understanding of who they are. These groups offer a unique environment for people to develop self-awareness, self-compassion, authenticity and ultimately, self-actualization.

Pitfall #4: Trying to be someone different than who you are. An important part of leadership is accepting yourself -- your weaknesses as well as your strengths -- and having confidence that others will accept you for who you are. However, this is a lot easier said than done. Our natural inclination is to show strength and hide weaknesses -- even more so if you're in a leadership position.

The support and confidence the group will give you enables you to face difficult situations in your life and work and navigate them successfully. Many people report they discuss life experiences with their True North Group that they have shared with few people in their lives. Others report seeing their crucibles in entirely new ways. This can lead to a healthy reframing of one’s most difficult experiences. Revisiting painful and difficult times and exploring their dark sides can be a healing experience.

Pitfall #5: Not appreciating others for their differences and what can be learned from them. We are all prone to judgment of others based on their backgrounds and experiences because we tend to be wary of those who are different from us and don't readily trust them.

In a True North Group you learn to accept others, celebrate their differences, and learn from people whose life experiences differ from yours. This dynamic gives you the capacity for sharing yourself in intimate ways and for being more open with others. In learning about crucibles others have faced, you realize you are not alone in facing great challenges. Intimate sharing builds trust among group members and leads to higher levels of self-awareness and sensitivity to others.