If you haven't watched Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat yet, do yourself a favour and fire it up this weekend on Amazon Prime. The premise is brilliantly simple: one unsuspecting employee thinks they're on a legit company retreat while everyone around them is an actor orchestrating increasingly absurd situations.
When you take the leap of faith to bring your vision, your idea, to life and start your company, you wear many hats and take on many tasks. You develop the business plan and deck pitch, help build a great product or service offering, create and implement the marketing strategies, make sales, handle customer service and get take-out for everyone during the late nights they're working.
Signs of things to come began in 2020 with the 12-year, $365 million contract awarded to Mookie Betts, but even this was a unique situation. Friedman might have been more willing to make this deal not only because of Betts' talent, but also because he had surrendered assets to acquire him and didn't want to make it a one-year rental.
"You guys have heard me talk enough by now to know that I see the game as very connected. So I think how well you defend and how good of a defensive team you are is directly connected to what you do when you have the ball, how you attack, how you press. When we talk about our football, our idea, it is about being a complete a team as possible. We're in the part of becoming a good team, building a team that can hold up on the hardest days. The season starts this weekend and we're all really excited, but building a team never stops."
It was me in the beginning that wanted a short-term contract only for 18 months because I was not sure what's coming in international football; how fast can I adapt and what is the job all about? But very soon, I fell in love with the job and the role and I was from the first day very committed and very proud.
It's unfortunate. Talked to them about the foundation I think that we've built. Much like a home, you build a home and then run out of things to do, so you continue to add on to it, you finish the basement, you make additions to it, and we'll try to do that to this football team. I like the foundation of it, and we'll try to improve on it.
Some are engaging and transformative, while others are incredibly boring. What exactly sets apart the ones where participants say, "Wow, we need to have these more often!" from those where participants are scrolling through their email, feeling pulled away from "real work?" While well-intended, there are subtle yet significant differences between mediocre retreats and those that truly deliver. Over the last decade-plus, I've designed and facilitated hundreds of retreats and training programs.
Under the soft Spanish sun, FC Bayern Women have been working hard at their winter training camp in Seville over the past few days, preparing themselves in the best possible way for the second half of the season. From 9 to 16 January, head coach José Barcala took advantage of the ideal conditions in Andalusia to get his team in the right frame of mind for the job ahead.
Most people tend to think safety and danger are opposites. But it's more useful to think of them as dance partners. Safety gives us solid footing; danger gives us movement. The emotional sweet spot between the two-where you feel safe but challenged enough to discover something new-is something I call Safe Danger. I base entire team-building and community-building workshops around moments of safe danger.
Workplace pressure is no stranger to London professionals. Targets rise. Expectations shift. Schedules tighten. Every sector feels it. Finance moves fast. Tech races forward. Health care strains each day. Creative industries chase constant deadlines. This pace often leaves people drained and searching for something that restores energy and motivation. Music-based activities are filling that gap. They offer relief, structure, and a genuine lift in mood.
Way back in May - ancient history now - the editorial and design teams assembled at the B Bar Ranch in Montana's Tom Miner Basin, on Yellowstone National Park's northern border. The ranch is owned by longtime HCN reader and supporter Maryanne Mott, whose late husband, Herman Warsh, a board member in the 1980s, seeded our internship endowment and other education programs. The B Bar runs an organic beef operation that practices regenerative ranching.
With his players in need of a refreshing change that would still allow them to compete, UCLA interim coach Tim Skipper took the Bruins to a bowling alley last week on one of their days off from practicing.
Instead, the thing that could make or break a product's success, they advised, is your team. "The people that you build with, who you're at the office until 1 a.m. with-even, it comes down to the summer intern you have. The people that you choose to build with every single day, whether that's your incredible co-founder, like I have Sophia-that's what's actually going to define, you know, whether the product succeeds,"
