A book about teams to help teams become more positive, united and connected. Worldwide bestseller — the author of The Energy Bus and The Power of Positive Leadership shares the proven principles and practices that build great teams - and provides practical tools to help teams overcome negativity and enhance their culture, communication, connection, commitment and performance. Jon Gordon doesn’t just research the keys to great teams, he has personally worked with some of the most successful teams on the planet and has a keen understanding of how and why they became great. In The Power of a Positive Team, Jon draws upon his unique team building experience as well as conversations with some of the greatest teams in history in order to provide an essential framework, filled with proven practices, to empower teams to work together more effectively and achieve superior results. Utilizing examples from the writing team who created the hit show Billions, the National Champion Clemson Football team, the World Series contending Los Angeles Dodgers, The Miami Heat and the greatest beach volleyball team of all time to Navy SEAL’s, Marching bands, Southwest Airlines, USC and UVA Tennis, Twitter, Apple and Ford, Jon shares innovative strategies to transform a group of individuals into a united, positive and powerful team. Jon not only infuses this book with the latest research, compelling stories, and strategies to maintain optimism through adversity... he also shares his best practices to transform negativity, build trust (through his favorite team building exercises) and practical ways to have difficult conversations—all designed to make a team more positive, cohesive, stronger and better. The Power of a Positive Team also provides a blueprint for addressing common pitfalls that cause teams to fail—including complaining, selfishness, inconsistency, complacency, unaccountability—while offering solutions to enhance a team’s creativity, grit, innovation and growth. This book is meant for teams to read together. It’s written in such a way that if you and your team read it together, you will understand the obstacles you will face and what you must do to become a great team. If you read it together, stay positive together, and take action together you will accomplish amazing things TOGETHER.

All over the world, there are individuals who want to go to work-who are excited to go in on Mondays. They love their jobs because the environment they work in is free of fear and emotional toxicity; and they are unimpeded and able to focus on their work. They do their part to help achieve organizational goals. I work with people like this everyday, and I help them create the kind of workplace they have always wanted-one that delivers a sense of belonging, personal satisfaction, and job enrichment. I make this happen by working with business leaders who know that businesses and organizations are only as good as the people in them, and they recognize the importance of winning the hearts and minds of their people. I build high-performance teams: in businesses, government agencies, churches, non-profits, and even families. I have witnessed astounding personal, financial, and organizational growth accelerate when the environment is free of fear and supercharged with Synergy Team Power. This book is for all employees-from entry level all the way up to the executive suite-who are looking for a way to create a meaningful workplace that delivers continuous job satisfaction. It demonstrates that adopting the value of teamwork and service, along with the importance of treating fellow workers with courtesy and respect-as one does with a customer-makes all the difference. You will find helpful stories, examples, anecdotes, and checklists that have grown out of many years of building and working with high-performance business teams. These stories are about real people who have found a way to create satisfying, fun jobs, and at the same time, build safe, secure, and highly-profitable work environments. There are 5 Synergy Team Power success habits: Building Trust Right Mental Attitude (R.M.A.) Make It Fun Be a "First-Giver" Be a Synergist Within each of the success habit chapters, I have sprinkled humorous and relevant examples, quotes, and anecdotes to make your reading experience pleasurable and meaningful. My vision is that you will find a special message that resonates with you on a personal and professional level, and that it helps you recognize the important role you and all of us play in creating emotionally secure, profitable work environments. My larger vision is that as more and more of us recognize the value of Synergy and its profound benefits, we will work together to expand its application to build stronger families, better schools, profitable businesses, safe cities, and peaceful nations.

Team Umizoomi players use Pattern Power, Super Shapes, and the computing power of your mind and Bot's belly screen to solve a variety of puzzles and complete projects.

The collaborative team-building guidebook that takes Mining Group Gold one step further “Now more than ever before, organizations need to build and maintain a culture of trust and collaboration. This updated edition of Building Team Power brings Tom Kayser’s important concepts to a new generation of leaders. Read this book and take its lessons to heart—you can’t afford not to.” —Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The One Minute Manager® and Lead with LUV “A must-read for individuals wishing to build successful teams in today’s complex, highly interconnected, and global environments. Having worked directly with Tom over the years, I can confirm that his principles work!” —Jim Stoffel, Executive Partner, Trillium-Group, LLC, and previously Senior Vice President, Eastman Kodak and Vice President and General Manager, Xerox “A well-organized toolkit of ready-to-use techniques to enable fast, cross-silo, teambased problem solving and value creation—critical new capabilities in our increasingly competitive industry!” —Dr. Jean A. Dames, Senior Manager, Strategic Sales & Leadership Effectiveness, American Express “Tom Kayser is an author worth reading. His book, Building Team Power, is about how to help teams collaborate and win in today’s highly competitive marketplace. This is a significant addition to the existing business literature on work team collaboration. Read it and become a better leader.” —John Vester III, Principal, Ernst & Young Transaction Advisory Service “Tom Kayser delves into the intrinsic values that unleash the full potential of teams. Building Team Power is a must for every leader!” —Rose Fass, Founder and CEO, fassforward consulting group “Building Team Power is to your team what the owner’s manual is to your car: the onestop resource for how it works, how to maintain it, and what to do first if it breaks down.” —Ed Muzio, CEO, Group Harmonics, Inc.; author of Make Work Great After 30 years at Xerox and in the course of his consulting work, Tom Kayser discovered a major shift in how people work. The old school of rigid “command-and-control” management no longer gets results. To stay productive and competitive in today’s world, the key word is “collaboration.” By studying and isolating what makes teams succeed in the workplace, Kayser has developed a system of proven team-building techniques that anyone can apply to his or her own group situations. His step-by-step program shows you how to: Solve problems faster, smarter, and better Delegate work more effectively and efficiently Manage conflicts and interpersonal issues Build mutual trust among your people Make wiser decisions at every level Building Team Power is filled with clear examples and powerful exercises to help you put theory into practice. You’ll discover seven proven strategies for improving your team, key brainstorming techniques for group meetings, analytic tools for problem solving, and a six-step collaborative model for all occasions. You’ll learn how to capture your market, reduce costs, and improve quality by unleashing the untapped, collaborative genius of your people and your teams. You’ll find out how to do things right the first time, every time, adding value to your products and services while being more agile and responsive than your competitors. Plus, you’ll read a fascinating case study of one company dealing with budget cuts in today’s tough economy. This is how you unlock the collaborative power of the people around you.

What can possibly account for the strange state of affairs in professional sports today? There are billionaire owners and millionaire players, but both groups are constantly squabbling over money. Many pro teams appear to be virtual "cash machines," generating astronomical annual revenues, but their owners seem willing to uproot them and move to any city willing to promise increased profits. At the same time, mayors continue to cook up "sweetheart deals" that lavish benefits on wealthy teams while imposing crushing financial hardships on cities that are already strapped with debt. To fans today, professional sports teams often look more like professional extortionists. In Hard Ball, James Quirk and Rodney Fort take on a daunting challenge: explaining exactly how things have gotten to this point and proposing a way out. Both authors are professional economists who specialize in the economics of sports. Their previous book, Pay Dirt: The Business of Professional Team Sports, is widely acknowledged as the Bible of sports economics. Here, however, they are writing for sports fans who are trying to make sense out of the perplexing world of pro team sports. It is not money, in itself, that is the cause of today's problems, they assert. In fact, the real problem stems from one simple fact: pro sports are monopolies that are fully sanctioned by the U.S. government. Eliminate the monopolies, say Quirk and Fort, and all problems can be solved. If the monopolies are allowed to persist, so will today's woes. The authors discuss all four major pro team sports: baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Hard Ball is filled with anecdotes, case studies, and factual information that are brought together here for the first time. Quirk and Fort devote chapters to the main protagonists in the pro sports saga--media, unions, players, owners, politicians, and leagues--before they offer their own prescription for correcting the ills that afflict sports today. The result is an engaging and persuasive book that is sure to be widely read, cited, and debated. It is essential reading for every fan.

In his classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni laid out a groundbreaking approach for tackling the perilous group behaviors that destroy teamwork. Here he turns his focus to the individual, revealing the three indispensable virtues of an ideal team player. In The Ideal Team Player, Lencioni tells the story of Jeff Shanley, a leader desperate to save his uncle’s company by restoring its cultural commitment to teamwork. Jeff must crack the code on the virtues that real team players possess, and then build a culture of hiring and development around those virtues. Beyond the fable, Lencioni presents a practical framework and actionable tools for identifying, hiring, and developing ideal team players. Whether you’re a leader trying to create a culture around teamwork, a staffing professional looking to hire real team players, or a team player wanting to improve yourself, this book will prove to be as useful as it is compelling.

Sammy Perez has to make it to the big leagues. After his teammate's career-ending injury, the Roadrunners decided to play in a wood bat tournament to protect their pitchers. And while Sammy used to be a hotheaded, hard-hitting, home-run machine, he's now stuck in the slump of his life. Sammy thinks the wood bats are causing the problem, but his dad suggests that maybe he's not strong enough. Is Sammy willing to break the law and sacrifice his health to get an edge by taking performance-enhancing drugs? Can Sammy break out of his slump in time to get noticed by major-league scouts?

ghSMART, the bestselling team behind Who: The A Method for Hiring, returns with a breakthrough formula for how the best leaders and teams deliver results. “ghSMART is the world’s top firm for helping leaders hire talented teams and run them at full power. Nothing is more important.”—Marshall Goldsmith, bestselling author of Mojo and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There “The most useful book about leadership.” That is what we hope you and your team will say after finishing Power Score. Is your team running at full power? Only 10 percent of leaders run their teams at full power. The formula you are about to learn is based on the most extensive research of its kind, spanning more than 15,000 careers with over 9 million data points. The idea has been battle-tested for more than two decades by leaders in every major industry. It works. Successful leadership starts with three key questions: 1. Priorities—Do we have the right priorities? (Only 24 percent of leaders do.) 2. Who—Do we have the right people on the team? (Only 14 percent of leaders do.) 3. Relationships—Do we have the right relationships that deliver results? (Only 47 percent of leaders do.) Learn how to calculate your team’s Power Score, and how to improve each of the three key areas of leadership. Learn what to do, and what not do, from compelling statistics and inspiring stories of those leaders who have succeeded and those who have failed. You may be surprised how easy it is to read this little book. And you may be even more surprised by how fast this approach will boost your team’s results. When you dial up your team’s Power Score, you will make a greater impact as a leader, help your team earn more money for your cause (whatever your cause may be), and enjoy greater career success. Praise for Power Score “Shaking distrust out of an organization is hard. But the payoff is immense. Bravo to Smart, Street and Foster for sharing their ideas about how to make that happen.”—Forbes “[Power Score] offers insights on improving in each dimension and inspiration. It’s written briskly, in a question-and-answer format that keeps ideas clear and concise. The book’s a winner and maybe you will be too if you try its approach.”—The Globe and Mail “The power score is the secret sauce that gives the group the information needed to fix problems. The authors provide plenty of guidance presented in an accessible Q&A format.”—Success “I wouldn’t be surprised if Power Score became the new go-to guide for leadership. Effective teams are key in everything from healthcare to business to government to nonprofits, and this book will help organizations change the conversation about getting results.”—Atul Gawande, New York Times bestselling author of Being Mortal and The Checklist Manifesto “Smart, Street, and Foster have turned more than twenty years of research on leadership into a practical, systematic approach for getting results.”—Frederick W. Smith, chairman and chief executive officer of FedEx Corporation “My entire team applied the principles of Power Score and has enjoyed explosive growth as a result. Even better, I am having more fun as a leader than ever before.”—Jeff Booth, chief executive officer and founder of BuildDirect

Managing Your Scarcest Resources Business leaders know that the key to competitive success is smart management of scarce resources. That's why companies allocate their financial capital so carefully. But capital today is cheap and abundant, no longer a source of advantage. The truly scarce resources now are the time, the talent, and the energy of the people in your organization--resources that are too often squandered. There's plenty of advice about how to manage them, but most of it focuses on individual actions. What's really needed are organizational solutions that can unleash a company's full productive power and enable it to outpace competitors. Building off of the popular Harvard Business Review article "Your Scarcest Resource," Michael Mankins and Eric Garton, Bain & Company experts in organizational design and effectiveness, present new research into how you can liberate people's time, talent, and energy and unleash your organization's productive power. They identify the specific causes of organizational drag--the collection of institutional factors that slow things down, decrease output, and drain people's energy--and then offer a pragmatic framework for how managers can overcome it. With practical advice for using the framework and in-depth examples of how the best companies manage their people's time, talent, and energy with as much discipline as they do their financial capital, this book shows managers how to create a virtuous circle of high performance.