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Sunday, December 31, 2017

Great Teams Share These Traits

An excerpt from INC -

Google Spent 2 Years Studying 180 Teams. The Most Successful Ones Shared These 5 Traits
Insights from Google's new study could forever change how teams are assembled.
By Michael Schneider

Over the years, Google has embarked on countless quests, collected endless amounts of data, and spent millions trying to better understand its people. One of the company's most interesting initiatives, Project Aristotle, gathered several of Google's best and brightest to help the organization codify the secrets to team effectiveness.

Specifically, Google wanted to know why some teams excelled while others fell behind.

Before this study, like many other organizations, Google execs believed that building the best teams meant compiling the best people. It makes sense. The best engineer plus an MBA, throw in a PhD, and there you have it. The perfect team, right? In the words of Julia Rozovsky, Google's people analytics manager, "We were dead wrong."

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Through Google's Re:Work website, a resource that shares Google's research, ideas, and practices on people operations, Rozovsky outlined the five key characteristics of enhanced teams.

1. Dependability.

Team members get things done on time and meet expectations.

2. Structure and clarity.

High-performing teams have clear goals, and have well-defined roles within the group.

https://www.inc.com/michael-schneider/google-thought-they-knew-how-to-create-the-perfect.html



Friday, December 29, 2017

The Tango - Scent of a Woman (4/8) Movie CLIP (1992) HD

Why do blood types matter? - Natalie S. Hodge

You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine

How does anesthesia work? - Steven Zheng

Polar Bear Fur Isn't White

Top 10 Things You Didn't Know Looked Totally Different Originally

Flipping the Script

An excerpt from OZY -

TRAP KITCHEN LA: WHERE FORMER GANG RIVALS COOK FOR KENDRICK AND KOBE
By Jemayel Khawaja



When I first talk to Malachi “Spankihanas” Jenkins, he’s cooking up pineapples and lobster at Snoop Dogg’s compound in Inglewood, California. He and his partner, Roberto “News” Smith, are two of the unlikeliest hot (and haute) chefs in American cuisine right now. Over the past few months, Jenkins and Smith have cooked for everyone from Kendrick Lamar to Kobe Bryant, seen their business triple in revenue in 2016 alone and become local celebrities in their south Los Angeles neighborhood.

Jenkins and Smith’s upstart, Trap Kitchen LA, is a plate-by-plate catering service started in 2013 in a cramped apartment kitchen in Compton. Alongside the likes of Bronx-based culinary upstarts Ghetto Gastro, Trap Kitchen is flipping the script on not just soul food, but the whole restaurant industry. They cook for locals and celebrities alike, charging $10 a plate and selling upward of 100 meals every day, all with a staff of just two and headquarters in home kitchens.

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A few years ago, Jenkins and Smith were on a very different path. After moving to south LA from the west side as a kid, Jenkins learned to cook by making dinner for his younger sister while their single mom worked late. Although officially in Crips territory, he skirted gang affiliation because of his mother, who earned Malachi the name “Spanky” — she would physically drag him home if he stayed out too late. As a youth, Jenkins made acquaintances with a kid named “Bad News” Smith, a distant relative from a friendlier branch of the opposing Piru Blood faction. As young adults, the guys bounced through uninspiring jobs as cashiers, auto detailers and ice cream men, and hustled everything from jewelry to hair weaves to drugs, racking up arrests for petty crimes and narcotics possession in the process.

At the same time, Jenkins had eyes set on a different future. He enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu in Las Vegas. But he couldn’t quite leave his ’hood. While visiting home in 2010, Malachi witnessed his friend’s murder by gunshot during a gang-related scuffle. It stuck with him. After a period of exile in Portland, he realized escaping LA wasn’t the answer — changing it was. In 2013, Jenkins reconnected with Smith, who was fresh out of jail for marijuana possession and looking for a way to turn his street hustle legitimate, even removing the “Bad” prefix from his street name as a signal of his intent. Together they formed Trap Kitchen; its name is an acronym for “Take Risks and Prosper.”

http://www.ozy.com/rising-stars/trap-kitchen-la-where-former-gang-rivals-cook-for-kendrick-and-kobe/72254?utm_source=weeklydose&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12292017&variable=e3bf1057d4e3c0988a79ae4bce515610



Unsung Hero

An excerpt from OZY -

THE FIRST BLACK FIGHTER PILOT
By Jack Doyle

You never know who you’re sharing an elevator with — and back when Rockefeller Center still had elevator operators, it was easy to ignore the elderly Black man in the corner. Neither Eugene Bullard nor his neat uniform commanded the same attention as the 1950s Manhattan elites who shared his little space every evening.

But little did they know that they were sharing a lift with an American who had been smack in the middle of the most dramatic twists and turns of the 20th century. Bullard was a boxer, World War I fighter pilot, Paris nightclub owner and World War II resistance fighter. He escaped the Gestapo and was beaten by police at a civil-rights demonstration. But even for many years after his death, his legacy remained that of an unnoticed, forgotten elevator operator.

Many details of Bullard’s life remain shrouded in myth, some of which was his own making. And who can blame him? He was born in rural Georgia to a large, poor Black family, and the odds were stacked against young Eugene. His family struggled to support themselves and, by Bullard’s recollection, faced violence with terrifying frequency. A lynch mob killed his older brother, Hector, and Eugene nearly lost his life on more than one occasion to racist attacks.

http://www.ozy.com/flashback/the-first-black-fighter-pilot/67003?utm_source=weeklydose&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12292017&variable=e3bf1057d4e3c0988a79ae4bce515610

How Much Do You REALLY Know About Autism?