Church

I'm always interested in things like ... why does the smell of Windex make me want to volunteer?  I came across this blog entry (and read the subsequent report that is referenced).  I pass it along simply for your consideration. ********** Use Lemon Windex at Your Next Gala, Raise More Money? Professors at Brigham Young University, Toronto University, and Northwestern University conducted a simple experiment and found that a room scented with Lemon Windex made test subjects more likely to volunteer for a charity and share more cash with partners in a trust-based exercise. Read their paper here. For charitable fundraisers I think it's worth your own test. And it wouldn't be terribly difficult. If you do multiple similar events in a year, try one with the room scented with lemon and one unscented as a control and compare the results both in terms of dollars raised and volunteers recruited.…

We all know hell is a messed up place (a tad bit of an understatement). But this graphic helps visualize it in a way old gamers will appreciate.

I'm passing on to you something I'm going to share with our ministry collaboration team at church.  It's from Patrick Lencioni. Five Dysfunctions of a Team Absence of Trust Trust is critical in building a high-performance team and lack of trust is very visible in a dysfunctional team. The most telltale sign of lack of trust is that no one would bring up any issue/problems which will show him/her weak or vulnerable. ‘Having the guard on all the time’ is a characteristic of a team member in a dysfunctional team. I remember my experience with a leadership team; even though the project was in very bad shape, the manager in charge would always talk about great things the team was accomplishing and any uttering by other team members to the contrary was termed by the leader as ‘lack of team work’! Needless to say, there was no trust in the…

Warning: a techie tip is about to follow.  For the non-geeks in the crowd, feel free to play Solitaire for a few minutes. Actually ... even the non-geeks will appreciate this.  Have you ever needed to edit a photo or image and not have Photoshop installed on your computer?  It happens to me on my work laptop on a regular basis (I have Adobe C3 installed at home). Pixlr is a free online image editor that looks pretty slick.  I took it for a test drive this afternoon and it will do two-thirds of what most people need to do (and maybe more).  Check it out!