For the first time in my working life, I am going to be out of the office for three consecutive weeks. Planning for this time away has not only forced me to be as efficient as possible in the time leading up to my vacation, but also has gotten me thinking about the importance of a great team.
Bear with me a minute for a quick sports analogy. In professional cycling, there’s an event called the team time trial where an entire team (in this year’s Tour de France, 8 riders) works together by “drafting” in the aerodynamic slipstream of the riders in front of them, each rider taking a turn at the front and then rotating out of the line. If the team works well together and has a plan, it’s a beautiful event to watch. The first rider in the line does the hard work while the riders behind are able to save a ton of energy, and the team is able to go much faster than any individual rider could go on his or her own.
Alignment is a core guiding principle in the 
When I was an undergrad, my “intellectual conversation crutch” was bringing up something from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. After moving to Chicago, that crutch morphed into inserting something I read in The New York Times or New Yorker.
Recently I purchased a wheelchair for my mom on Amazon. I love shopping on Amazon. It’s quick, easy, and my packages come straight to the front door. I read the reviews to see what other buyers have to say about the product, and usually make up my mind whether or not to buy based on those reviews. Generally, I never have an issue.
I’ve always loved Rube Goldberg’s drawings. They lent a certain sense of the absurd to everyday tasks, creating a ridiculously complicated machine to handle something most of us could do without even thinking about it. Like many young people, I also delighted in building machines similar to Goldberg’s, using every toy at my disposal to produce something that, let’s be honest, may have been more satisfying to design and build than to actually deploy most of the time. A few hours’ work for ten seconds of payoff? Not a big deal, when you’re a kid.
