1: Why do some teams succeed and others fail?

The People Analytics team at Google had spent two years attempting to answer this question.

The initiative was code-named “Project Aristotle.”  The team gathered survey data, conducted hundreds of interviews, analyzed a mountain of data and statistics, ran regression models, and built software programs.

There were no clear patterns or trends on what makes teams perform at the highest … continue reading

1: What makes a great team great?

Is it simply a matter of intelligence? Do teams with the smartest people perform the best?

Is “group intelligence nothing more than the intelligence of the individuals making up the team?” Charles Duhigg asks in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.

Actually, no.

In 2008, psychologists from Carnegie Mellon and MIT recruited 699 people and divided them into 152 … continue reading

1: Back in 1991, Amy Edmondson, a first-year Harvard PhD student, began visiting two Boston hospital wards.

She was studying organizational behavior and was “on the prowl for a dissertation topic,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.

Her idea was that good teamwork would reduce medical mistakes. That “the units with the strongest sense of teamwork,” Charles notes, “would have the … continue reading

1: Google’s People Analytics group wanted to understand how to build the perfect team.

Google has consistently been ranked by Fortune magazine as one of America’s top workplaces.

This result was no accident. “Even as it had grown to fifty-three thousand employees, Google had devoted enormous resources to studying workers’ happiness and productivity,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.

The People Analytics … continue reading

1: When Diane Button was new to end-of-life care, so many questions flooded her mind.

“I wondered if I would ever get to a place where I would feel comfortable stepping into the home of a dying person with ease and grace,” she writes in her wonderful book What Matters Most: Lessons the Dying Teach Us About Living.

Fortunately, she had a mentor. “Hospice chaplain Clarence Liu was was … continue reading

1: Psychologist John Gottman can predict who will eventually get divorced a stunning 94 percent of the time.

In a pioneering 1992 study, John and his team interviewed fifty-two married couples.

They asked each couple “a variety of questions about how they met, why they decided to get married, and what changes their relationships had been through and observed them as they took part in a fifteen-minute discussion about a … continue reading

This week and next we are exploring Sahil Bloom’s concept of “Social Wealth” as outlined in his book The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life.

Today we turn to a list of “Social Wealth Hacks I Wish I Knew at Twenty-Two” which Sahil put together with Arthur C. Brooks, social scientist, Harvard Business School professor, and number one New York Times bestselling … continue reading

1: What we feel impacts what we see.  And hear.

“People who are scared take in a scene differently,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.

“Our ears, for example, immediately adjust to focus on high and low frequencies—a scream or a growl—rather than midrange frequencies, which include normal human speech,” David notes.  “Anxiety narrows … 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.

One of my goals for the year is to experiment with different approaches and tools to strengthen my relationships with the people I love and care about.  

We will revisit … continue reading

“A great conversation is between two people who think the other is wrong.  A bad conversation is between those who think something is wrong with you.” -Micah Goodman, Professor at Hebrew University

1: The person sitting across from us is angry.  

We are debating a new marketing strategy.  At first, both of our intentions are clear.  We both want what’s best for the firm.

But as the conversation unfolds, a … continue reading