1: That they are happy, lighthearted places.

Highly successful workplace cultures “are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together,” Daniel Coyle writes in The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups.

High-performing teams embrace “many moments of high-candor feedback” and “uncomfortable truth-telling,” Daniel writes. 

Exhibit one: The San Antonio Spurs and their Head Coach … continue reading

1: The team of researchers from Stanford, Yale, and Columbia discovered something surprising.

They ran an experiment with middle school students who were instructed to write an essay. Afterward, teachers provided different types of feedback to improve their work, Daniel Coyle writes in The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups.

There was “one particular form of feedback boosted student effort and performance so immensely that they deemed … continue reading

1: The San Antonio Spurs are the most successful team in American sports in the past 25 years, Daniel Coyle writes in The Culture Code.

They’ve won “five championships and a higher percentage of games than the New England Patriots, the St. Louis Cardinals, or any other storied franchise,” he notes.

When asked what was the greatest moment of team cohesion, Spurs players and coaches all agree on one … continue reading

1: That was all writer Neil Paine could think of to say.

Neil’s a numbers guy. He had formulated an algorithm to determine who was the best NBA coach ever, analyzing “player performance metrics to predict how many games a team should win,” Daniel Coyle writes in The Culture Code.

“The vast majority of NBA coaches win roughly the number of games they should win, given their players’ abilities,” … continue reading

1: Getting better at getting better is what RiseWithDrew is all about.

Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations. On Friday, I share something about myself or what we are working on at PCI.

There are two ways we can measure our progress, Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy tell us in their book The Gap and the Gain.

The first way is … continue reading

1: Remember the 1980s TV show MacGyver or the hilarious Saturday Night Live send-up of it?

The show’s central theme involved MacGyver’s creative ability to solve complex problems.

Turns out MacGyver’s creator Lee Zlotoff was also an excellent solver of problems himself. 

“To write episodic TV,” Lee explains, “I had to produce an enormous amount of creative material under very tight deadlines.  There was no time to get stuck.” 

Lee … continue reading

1: Author Steven Kotler starts his writing sessions each morning at 4 AM.

Why so early?

“‘Non-time’ is my term for it,” he writes in The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer: “That vast stretch of emptiness between 4:00 AM, when I start my morning writing session, and 7:30 AM, when the rest of the world wakes up. 

“This is non-time, a pitch blackness that belongs to no … continue reading

1: No matter our role or position, the ability to think creatively is a key driver of our success.

This week we are exploring strategies to boost our creativity as outlined by Steven Kotler in his powerful book The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer.

Yesterday, we looked at the impact our mood has on our creativity.  A good mood provides a necessary starting point.  A bad … continue reading

1: The answer is simpler than we think.

“When researchers talk about creativity,” Steven Kotler writes in The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer, “one of the most frequent topics of conversation is the phenomenon is known as insight.”

So what exactly is insight? 

“The experience of sudden comprehension,” he writes, “that aha moment when we get a joke, solve a puzzle, or resolve an ambiguous situation.”

The … continue reading

1: Getting better at getting better is what RiseWithDrew is all about.

Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations. On Friday, I share something about myself or what we are working on at PCI.

Twenty-five years ago, driving to and from work, I listened to a set of cassettes I had purchased from the Strategic Coach, the world’s #1 entrepreneurial coaching program founded … continue reading