what was the most interesting thing you learned recently?

Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Ideas are critiqued so harshly in meetings at times that some workers fear speaking up. Don't settle. You've got to find what you love. I really like the Tarsiers. And I had research telling me that it was O.K. I'm curious if Elmer Fudd would want to hunt one of these guys. Amazon employees and family members attending a company picnic. WebRadio One and CBC Music. WebAn expertly curated, always-updated guide to New Yorks best restaurants and bars. Howabout doing a series on weird stuff and publishing a book, maybe an ebook? No big deal. (He also owns The Washington Post.). Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. There were ideas about clothing swaps. They said: "Of course." Noelle Barnes, who worked in marketing for Amazon for nine years, repeated a saying around campus: Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.. After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Googles teams. We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. WebCBS Sports has the latest NFL Football news, live scores, player stats, standings, fantasy games, and projections. Id been on some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy from the group. Rozovskys study group at Yale was draining because the norms the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique put her on guard. Can I just say, about 90% of all the animals on these types of website are endangered it is just SO DISGRACEFUL what we humans are doing to Mother Nature and the planet at this rate animals like tigers etc. Despite their disparate backgrounds, however, everyone clicked. No one knew what to say. WebThe place for everything in Oprah's world. When someone makes a side comment, the speaker stops, reminds everyone of the agenda and pushes the meeting back on track. After graduating from Yale, she was hired by Google and was soon assigned to Project Aristotle. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving. It will only change if the data says it must when the entire way of hiring and working and firing stops making economic sense., The retailer is already showing some strain from its rapid growth. Turns out the animal world isn't just about lions, giraffes, dogs, cows, and cats. He added that when he interviewed potential hires, he warned them, Its not easy to work here.. They are told to forget the poor habits they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. Its a horrible feeling., Mr. Galbato, the human resources executive, explained the companys reasoning for the annual staff paring. When a team member abruptly changes the topic, the rest of the group follows him off the agenda. The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers to this website may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. http://www.quora.com/Animals/What-are-some-newly-d Teresa Coppens from Ontario, Canada on February 08, 2012: Loved the article. As the newcomers acclimate, they often feel dazzled, flattered and intimidated by how much responsibility the company puts on their shoulders and how directly Amazon links their performance to the success of their assigned projects, whether selling wine or testing the delivery of packages straight to shoppers car trunks. Dolphins are also have importance since they behave as friends to human. Greensleeves Hubs from Essex, UK on June 24, 2011: Interesting stuff about interesting creatures; especially the ocean dwellers - we're discovering more and more oddball creatures in the ocean's depths, and they seem to be getting odder with each voyage of discovery. Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious or economic affiliations. Enter what Stefano, who co-produced the series, called the Bear, the thing that made The Outer Limits different than every other similar anthology series, the monster of the week. It plans a third next to that and has space for two more high-rises. WebYou can help us by making a donation. such beauties are revealed only when we bind with nature and study them . speeking so coz of zooooology. By contrast, her case-competition team was always fun and easygoing. Her case team, however, stuck together for the two years she was at Yale. We always want to arrive at the right answer, said Tony Galbato, vice president for human resources, in an email statement. WNBA star Brittney Griner, who had been sentenced to nine years in a Russian penal colony in August, has been released to the United States. Purposeful Darwinism, Robin Andrulevich, a former top Amazon human resources executive who helped draft the Leadership Principles, posted in reply to Mr. Hoofiens comment. Though the shell and head look extremely tough (and probably are), they are meant for camouflage; the matamata is said to resemble a chunk of bark with dead leaves. Great, I am now doing a research project on the octopus! Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. Did they have the same hobbies? 8: bias for action), performance that can be measured and an ability to defy limits (No. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking. On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. And that made a lot of sense to me, maybe because of my experiences at Yale, Rozovsky said. ratnaveera from Cumbum on April 29, 2014: Very interesting to learn about these animal species. of the company in bed with you at 3 a.m. breathing down your neck., Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years. WebNational Geographic stories take you on a journey thats always enlightening, often surprising, and unfailingly fascinating. But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.. The darwin bark spider eating, you guessed it, a dragonfly. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. Project Aristotles researchers began searching through the data they had collected, looking for norms. The result looks something like a cat that has touched a power line, a cotton ball with a face, or a sheep that's been through a straightener. The team may seem inefficient to a casual observer. FullOfLoveSites from United States on March 14, 2013: Yes, they are indeed interesting and some are really cute, like the dumbo octopus. The email wasnt a big enough affront to justify a response. Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the tool was just another way to provide feedback, like sending an email or walking into a managers office. Were their educational backgrounds similar? He went first. It evolved into such a large and peaceful bird because of the former lack of mammalian predators in its island home in New Zealand. Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. Even as the company tests delivery by drone and ways to restock toilet paper at the push of a bathroom button, it is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" In other words, if you are given a choice between the serious-minded Team A or the free-flowing Team B, you should probably opt for Team B. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting, as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. Mother Earth contains many creatures that are just now being discovered by scientists, and not only at the bottom of the ocean. Carrie Lee Night from Northeast United States on June 25, 2014: Cute creatures and always interesting to see new life :). A classmate mentioned that some students were putting together teams for case competitions, contests in which participants proposed solutions to real-world business problems that were evaluated by judges, who awarded trophies and cash. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. At its best, some employees said, Amazon can feel like the Bezos vision come to life, a place willing to embrace risk and strengthen ideas by stress test. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. with moving through a lot of people to identify and retain superstars, said Vijay Ravindran, who worked at the retailer for seven years, the last two as the manager overseeing the checkout technology. One Amazon building complex is named Day 1, a reminder from Mr. Bezos that it is only the beginning of a new era of commerce, with much more to accomplish. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover. The derisive local nickname for Amazon employees is Amholes pugnacious and work-obsessed. You neglected to mention that octopodes/octopi/octopuses (all of which are correct) are believed to have been the first actually intelligent (as in probably conscious) lifeform. I think, until the off-site, I had separated things in my head into work life and life life, Laurent told me. For years, he and his team devoted themselves to improving the search capabilities of Amazons website only to discover that Mr. Bezos had greenlighted a secret competing effort to build an alternate technology. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. A lot of people who work there feel this tension: Its the greatest place I hate to work, said John Rossman, a former executive there who published a book, The Amazon Way.. Jason Merkoski, 42, an engineer, worked on the team developing the first Kindle e-reader and served as a technology evangelist for Amazon, traveling the world to learn how people used the technology so it could be improved. Yeah most of them weren't cute, but the Tarsiers were haha. I had two angora rabbits a long time ago. As the company has grown, Mr. Bezos has become more committed to his original ideas, viewing them in almost moral terms, those who have worked closely with him say. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5 deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. The team completed the survey, and a few weeks later, Sakaguchi received the results. At least it is fun to say their name. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to disagree and commit (No. Interesting creatures. As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as group norms. Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather: One team may come to a consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate; another team might develop a culture that encourages vigorous arguments and spurns groupthink. Others preferred a less hierarchical structure. Whereas the norms of her case-competition team enthusiasm for one anothers ideas, joking around and having fun allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized. Copyright ComplaintsTrademark Notice, Video: Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. Many a fisherman became a believer in sea monsters after catching one of these creatures just check out the picture above. One hundred eleven days later, she was in Brooklyn directing the start of the new service, Prime Now. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else. Another had the groups plan a shopping trip and gave each teammate a different list of groceries. In a recent recruiting video, one young woman warns: You either fit here or you dont. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this. This blind salamander of the limestone caves of southern Europe is not much like any other amphibian. There is no idle chitchat or long debates. He was 10 at the time. However, more than 100 current and former Amazonians members of the leadership team, human resources executives, marketers, retail specialists and engineers who worked on projects from the Kindle to grocery delivery to the recent mobile phone launch described how they tried to reconcile the sometimes-punishing aspects of their workplace with what many called its thrilling power to create. Explanations like were not totally sure or Ill get back to you are not acceptable, many employees said. We had just released our finest creation the Macintosh a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. They won the competition. Judicial Watch is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit They said they could lose out in promotions because of intangible criteria like earn trust (principle No. Im not going to be the kind of person who can work in this environment, he said he concluded. The review meeting starts with a discussion of the lower-level employees, whose performance is debated in front of higher-level managers. Googles research had identified dozens of behaviors that seemed important, except that sometimes the norms of one effective team contrasted sharply with those of another equally successful group. Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover. ratnaveera from Cumbum on April 29, 2014: Very interesting to learn about these animal species. One of the early backers of Workday was Jeff Bezos, in one of his many investments. Enjoy the latest tourism news from Miami.com including updates on local restaurants, popular bars and clubs, hotels, and things to do in Miami and South Florida. One ex-employees fianc became so concerned about her nonstop working night after night that he would drive to the Amazon campus at 10 p.m. and dial her cellphone until she agreed to come home. This team is efficient. The technology industry is not just one of the fastest growing parts of our economy; it is also increasingly the worlds dominant commercial culture. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" Yet many of todays most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers a practice known as employee performance optimization isnt enough. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. He wanted everyone to feel fulfilled by their work. Rozovsky, by then, had decided that what she wanted to do with her life was study peoples habits and tendencies. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like conversational turn-taking and average social sensitivity as aspects of whats known as psychological safety a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Psychological safety is a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up, Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. what really suprises me is that it was in a Kirby game made deckades ago. NOAA Ocean Exploration & Research from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. 13) to rip into colleagues ideas, with feedback that can be blunt to the point of painful, before lining up behind a decision. Maybe it will happen. Exhibitionist & Voyeur 07/01/16: Lunch Special (4.74) A pretty waitress rewards a regular customer Exhibitionist & Voyeur 06/22/17: Miss Villanueva (3.97) Maria endures an airport security screening. The official source for NFL news, video highlights, fantasy football, game-day coverage, schedules, stats, scores and more. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. they were all really interesting and fun to learn about! And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Darwin's Bark Spiders were a recent discovery (2009) for the world at large; here are some pictures and discussions (in National Geographic) from the scientists who first documented them. I think the Mantis shrimp should be added. They are so amazing. These animals are amazing and so interesting. Within Amazon, ideal employees are often described as athletes with endurance, speed (No. In recent years, companies like Facebook have opened large Seattle offices, and they benefit from the Amazon outflow. Im sorry, the work is still going to need to get done, she said her boss told her. Monday through Friday, host Pablo Torre brings you an inside look at the most interesting stories at ESPN, as told by the top reporters and insiders on the planet. The company holds orientation sessions on Mondays. Some groups had one strong leader. The behaviors that create psychological safety conversational turn-taking and empathy are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond. 10) or the emphasis on disagreeing with colleagues. By not being tasty. Others were made up of people who were basically strangers away from the conference room. But all the team members speak as much as they need to. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. Also it mentioned eco friendly cars in the "I think octopi are dumb" which (in my opinion) sways peoples votes, so many of these could be killed really easily. That's awesome about the tarsier. Team A may be filled with smart people, all optimized for peak individual efficiency. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyones interest to outperform everyone else. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. It doesn't even have to swim most of the time, as its body tissue is slightly less dense than water, allowing it to float effortlessly just off the bottom of the ocean, waiting for its dinner of microorganisms to float by. When Rozovsky arrived on campus, she was assigned to a study group carefully engineered by the school to foster tight bonds. jill of alltrades from Philippines on June 10, 2011: I like the way you wrote about these animals. Its olfactory system is so well-made that it can sense how many little living things surround it. Nonetheless, it is impressive what that spider and the mimic octopus are capable of. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. You love it or you dont. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." Thanks! L ike most 25-year-olds, Julia Rozovsky wasnt sure what she wanted to do with her life. But Googles data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work. This is awesome! Why would I walk away from that? Conflict brings about innovation, he said. WebOnly RFID Journal provides you with the latest insights into whats happening with the technology and standards and inside the operations of leading early adopters across all industries and around the world. It wasn't all romantic. My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. In Amazon warehouses, employees are monitored by sophisticated electronic systems to ensure they are packing enough boxes every hour. One study, published in The Harvard Business Review last month, found that the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more over the last two decades and that, at many companies, more than three-quarters of an employees day is spent communicating with colleagues. Many interesting species of birds and animals can also be found in Amazon rainforest. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. Consider also that humans as we know them have been on the face of the earth for MAYBE two to three million years. Tarsiers are interesting creatures. Betty Chu via Wikimedia Commons (CC-SA-BY 3.0), Strigops habroptilus (a domesticated variety). You can tell people to take turns during a conversation and to listen to one another more. They all liked him, just as they all liked one another. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. Matjazgregoric, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. She wanted her teammate to be sensitive to what she was feeling. Based on those studies, the researchers scrutinized the composition of groups inside Google: How often did teammates socialize outside the office? Thank you for sharing. They drew diagrams showing which teams had overlapping memberships and which groups had exceeded their departments goals. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. Several former high-level female executives, and other women participating in a recent internal Amazon online discussion that was shared with The New York Times, said they believed that some of the leadership principles worked to their disadvantage. It can mimic many underwater species, and mimics them very well indeed. The pressure to deliver far surpasses any other metric, she said. See how this article appeared when it was originally published on NYTimes.com. Several fathers said they left or were considering quitting because of pressure from bosses or peers to spend less time with their families. to follow my gut, she said. A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a performance improvement plan Amazon code for youre in danger of being fired because difficulties in her personal life had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Recently divorced, Peter makes nude friends. A customer was able to get an Elsa doll that they could not find in all of New York City, and they had it delivered to their house in 23 minutes, said Ms. Landry, who was authorized by the company to speak, still sounding exhilarated months later about providing Frozen dolls in record time. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. But many others said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being vocally self-critical is included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster. It was their farewell message as they signed off. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Last August, Stephenie Landry, an operations executive, joined in discussions about how to shorten delivery times and developed an idea for rushing goods to urban customers in an hour or less. 5 Blogs That Are Making Money in 2022 (and How You Can, Too) 16 comments. The process begins when Amazons legions of recruiters identify thousands of job prospects each year, who face extra screening by bar raisers, star employees and part-time interviewers charged with ensuring that only the best are hired. The only way to maximize the groups score was for each person to sacrifice an item they really wanted for something the team needed. these are interesting animals but the blobfish looks weird. The employees who stream from the Amazon exits are highly desirable because of their work ethic, local recruiters say. If youre a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot, said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system. If I cant be open and honest at work, then Im not really living, am I?. It is 10 times stronger than Kevlar (that stuff in bulletproof vests). Stay Foolish. I say this as a person afraid of snakes and spiders. THANK-YOU! This little guy can be found really, really deep in the ocean. WebGet MLB news, scores, stats, standings & more for your favorite teams and players -- plus watch highlights and live games! check the power of the tech industrys giants, trying to prevent Facebook parents company. New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter. At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one anothers ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are unreasonably high. The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one anothers bosses. Project Aristotles researchers began by reviewing a half-century of academic studies looking at how teams worked. However, as a purely hypothetical thought experiment, let us imagine that humans make weapons that, hmm, well, might be able to destroy entire cities. Some teams had a bunch of smart people who figured out how to break up work evenly, said Anita Woolley, the studys lead author. The only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them. It was only when they gathered as a team that things became fraught. Octopi is wrong, as it Octopii, it is either octopuses or octopodes. We don't know how they jump out of the water, why, or apparently even what color they are. Only one, Keith Ketzle, a freckled Texan triathlete with an M.B.A., lit up with recognition, explaining how he left his old, lumbering company for a faster, grittier one. In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative code-named Project Aristotle to study hundreds of Googles teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared. Employees, human resources executives and recruiters describe a steady exodus. Scientists recently confirmed that there is a flying squid known as the "red" or "neon" flying squid. The barreleye in the video above is one of the few ever seen alive with its distinctive transparent head. 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