team building and happiness - Here's a simple easy tip for team-building, motivation, and creating happy atmosphere:

Buy a big basket. Buy lots of sweets or candy, lollipops too, wrapped preferably (to stop them going all sticky overnight) and put them into the big basket. Put the big basket of sweets and lollies on the table before people arrive for work, or the meeting, or the training session.

And then watch people smile. Sweets and lollipops break down barriers. They are a universal language for feeling good and being happy.

After a week or two of different sweets throw in some bubblegum. Also some bubblegum with collectible cards.

This gesture is not restricted to the training room; you can put baskets of sweets all over the place. Even in the reception and the board room; and even in the finance director's office.

You can ask the receptionist if she (or he) would be so kind as to make sure that the sweet basket is always filled to the brim (at the company's cost of course), and to make sure she (or he) always invites every single visitor to dip their hand in and take a big handful for their kids. And you'll see how wonderfully well people react to being treated in this way.

Go spread the word - put a big basket of sweets on your table.

When you've firmly established the practice of having baskets of sweets everywhere, you can move on to fresh cut flowers.........

A little bunch of fresh cut flowers in a vase, on a table. It's worth a million words.

(Next of course you'll need to appoint a flower monitor, which every right-minded person will want to be, so you can have one per floor, or one per day of the week, or one per department, whatever...)

puzzles and trivia: for example, a quick phone number maths trick

1. Using a calculator, key in the first three digits of your phone number (not the area code)
2. Multiply by 80
3. Add 1
4. Multiply by 250
5. Add the last 4 digits of your phone number
6. Add the last 4 digits of your phone number again
7. Subtract 250
8. Divide the answer by 2

Recognize the answer?...

stories and analogies - aunt karen (relevance and reliability of lessons, morals and examples)

A teacher told her young class to ask their parents for a family story with a moral at the end of it, and to return the next day to tell their stories.

In the classroom the next day, Joe gave his example first, "My dad is a farmer and we have chickens. One day we were taking lots of eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the truck when we hit a big bump in the road; the basket fell off the seat and all the eggs broke. The moral of the story is not to put all your eggs in one basket.."

"Very good," said the teacher.

Next, Mary said, "We are farmers too. We had twenty eggs waiting to hatch, but when they did we only got ten chicks. The moral of this story is not to count your chickens before they're hatched.."

"Very good," said the teacher again, very pleased with the response so far.

Next it was Barney's turn to tell his story: "My dad told me this story about my Aunt Karen.... Aunt Karen was a flight engineer in the war and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory and all she had was a bottle of whiskey, a machine gun and a machete."

"Go on," said the teacher, intrigued.

"Aunt Karen drank the whiskey on the way down to prepare herself; then she landed right in the middle of a hundred enemy soldiers. She killed seventy of them with the machine gun until she ran out of bullets. Then she killed twenty more with the machete till the blade broke. And then she killed the last ten with her bare hands."

"Good heavens," said the horrified teacher, "What did your father say was the moral of that frightening story?"

"Stay away from Aunt Karen when she's been drinking..."

the cannibals (a story about management)

A big corporation hired several cannibals. "You are all part of our team now," said the HR manager during the welcome briefing. "You get all the usual benefits and you can go to the cafeteria for something to eat, but please don't eat any of the other employees." The cannibals promised they would not.

A few weeks later the cannibals' boss remarked, "You're all working very hard, and I'm satisfied with you. However, one of our secretaries has disappeared. Do any of you know what happened to her?" The cannibals all shook their heads, "No," they said.

After the boss left, the leader of the cannibals said to the others angrily, "Right, which one of you idiots ate the secretary?"

A hand rose hesitantly in admission. "You fool!" said the leader, "For weeks we've been eating managers and no one noticed anything, but noooooo, you had to go and eat someone important!..."