Good Morning Vietnam! Lol. Always wanted to say that in a blog. Well technically it isn’t morning anymore but easing into afternoon. This morning I was conducting a training session with a new developer who joined our fold and if you have read any of my previous blog entries the first thing we work on here at Helix Innovative is team focus. During this session we were focusing on the fundamentals of what it means to be in a team, part of a team and how that affects those around you. As we went back and forth discussing what it means to be part of a team I called up an oldie but goodie from Rudyard Kipling. I loved reading Kipling as a kid, and especially loved the animated television adaptation by Chuck Jones, of Kipling’s famous tale Riki Tiki Tavi, which is the story of a boy and his pet mongoose who saves the family from murderous snakes.

I mean, you gotta love the fact that Orsen Welles handled the voice of Nag, the Not to mention the book my Dad used to read to me which was Kipling’s “Just So Stories,” especially my favorite “How the Elephant Got Its Trunk.” I can still hear my Dad’s voice reading to my sister and I…”The great green greasy Limpopo river all covered with fever trees.” Ok I have gone way off track here. So here is Kipling:

The Law of the Jungle
(From The Jungle Book)
by Rudyard Kipling

Now this is the Law of the Jungle –
as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk
the Law runneth forward and back –
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

The poem is quite longer then this and is well worth the read and contains many observations of how a wolf pack must conduct itself to prosper, all from Kipling and since we aren’t trying to encroach on the territory of literary criticism blogs we will move on.

So long story short we had a discussion about this particular section of this poem and I asked “What does this mean to you?”

The response was:

“We work as a team, each one makes up the team and our strength lies in our team work..”

Again our new developer summed it up and this is the magic of team play, once each member sees what can be accomplished as a unit they become better as an individual in turn. As Jim Collins at www.jimcollins.com and author of “Good to Great,” describes it is all about getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus and injecting a rigorous discipline and then figuring out where to drive the bus. You can drive to Mars with the right team in the correct seats. Well you can’t technically drive to Mars, but you get the idea and if you haven’t read any of Collin’s books they are good reads. I personally don’t know if I am as Collin’s describes a Hedgehog, who knows maybe in business but the thought of being a rolly polly little mammal with spines sticking out of me is giving me a rather alarming visual…Anyway, just read the book. Now time to go back and see how our young Padawan is doing. J

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 8:01 am and is filed under The Way of the Samurai. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.