Sublime

Beginning in my freshman year, I developed the concept of horizontal and vertical games. I made a distinction between the two that others had not done. The horizontal game meant how I played side to side. The vertical game was how I played up and down. I knew that if I could integrate the two games, our team could win. I would always be in a positi

Bill Walsh understood that it was really the Standard of Performance—the deceptively small things—that was responsible for the team’s transformation and victory. But that’s too boring for newspaper headlines. It’s why he ignored it when they called him “the Genius.”

CELTIC PRIDE IS a culture. It is not only a way you see yourself, it is a way you want others to see you. As I said in the introduction, Celtic Pride was the guts of how our organization, our coaches, and our team made decisions. It was created, nurtured, and developed for one goal . . . winning.

Unquestionably, Yokoi needed narrow specialists. The first true electrical engineer Nintendo hired was Satoru Okada, who said bluntly, “Electronics was not Yokoi’s strong point.” Okada was Yokoi’s codesigner on the Game & Watch and Game Boy. “I handled more of the internal systems of the machine,” he recalled, “with Yokoi handling more of the d

For example, they have learned there is a high correlation between how intensely someone played with Lego as a child and how well he or she will fit with the Vitsoe culture.

gang, others follow you based on the quality of your actions rather than the magnitude of your declarations.

The best teams—like the three snipers on the deck of the Bainbridge—know their coach (or commander or boss) trusts them to trust each other. Those horizontal anti-MECE bonds of trust and overlapping definitions of purpose enable them to “do the right thing.”

Like Steven Spear describing the Toyota environment as a community of scientists in The High-Velocity Edge, an organization that only Plans and Does can never really improve.