WinWithBlue

Let me expand on that premise.... I am a alumnus of General Electric. Years ago, GE would have their division CEO's select a few of their team members (worldwide) to attend an Executive Training Seminar (week long) at their GE University in Croton, New York. The selection was fierce and about 70 individuals would arrive for the week's festivities, training exercises, and competitive team building events. Each participant was paired up with others who had various strengths they may not have. Groups of 5 for a total of 14 teams (appx). Microbiologists from Switzerland paired with telecommunication specialists from Germany paired with a manufacturing supply chain guru from South America paired with a real estate accountant from the USA. You get the idea.... Each team had strengths and weaknesses. GE broke everyone up the first day. The mission... beat the heck out of every other team.... while playing the biggest game of worldwide monopoly in the form of data driven spreadsheets, manufacturing widgets, weather disasters and labor related malfeasance one could think of. The GE program facilitators gave everyone a laptop, we kept our phone, and the rules of the game. Each day the various teams were sent to their own room to take in the day's changes, run their numbers based on the decisions made by the team, and tabulate the results to see how they were doing at this game.... The was one primary rule... do not try to break the code for software that the game was played with.... which was built into an Excel macro driven interface..... Did I mention I was a real estate accountant who specialized in excel software .... especially macros? By the end of day one I had figured out the primary drivers of the interface and decided that my strength was understanding how to map out various decision results prior to typing them into the interface and being "locked in" to that pathway. By end of day two I had broken the coding of the interface (I did not harm the original) and rebuilt it on my personal laptop so that I could determine the pros and cons of each scenario and show them in real time on the overhead screens for the entire team to see. I wasn't making any decisions.... I left that up to the experts. I was just recording data to show how the information trended.... We faced huricanes, fires, labor shortages, government stand-offs'... you name it... By the third day our team was winning. The GE monitor called into our "office" location and told the team that one member of our team would be switched with another member of another team (on down the line) so that every team would have a new member on board ("new hire"). I voluntered to move to a new team... after all... I was only an accountant and had never been in manufacturing... I was a duck out of water with those decisions.... Immediately one of the top individuals (decisions) stood up and said nope, you are not going anywhere. No other team needs to know the secrets this team has. He went instead. By day 5 our team had one of the highest scores possible for the GE University program. We didn't beat the best, be we came dang close. CODE CAN BE BROKEN, CODE CAN BE MANIPULATED, CODE CAN BE USED TO WIN.