1. Gavin installed a Dish Cam to nail the team members who aren’t washing their dishes. It caught many a culprit, but mostly just catches Satish’s round-up of other peoples’ mess.

2. Satish shared the meetup group for the newly formed Lean Coffee Waterloo, mirrored after Lean Coffee Toronto.

3. Arati snapped a great shot of a sculpture at the Shops at Don Mills.

4. We had a new pal wandering around the office at Show & Tell when Nick brought in his new puppy, Russell.

5. Evan finally got his hands on Responsive Web Design, a book that got great reviews from some other members of the team.

The book, which you can find through any major book retailer, amassed literally millions of interviews over the course of forty years to generate 34 most common talents. Author Tom Rath argues that from cradle to cubicle, the vast majority of people are unfulfilled in their careers because they are not in positions that best leverage their strengths.

As it turns out, my borderline compulsive need to collect books could actually be considered a strength. According to the Clifton Strengths Finder, this strength is called Input and refers to people who “have a craving to know more,” that “often like to collect and archive all kinds of information.” I think I can live with that. In fact, I came back from the holidays pretty infected with the idea that the whole Jet Cooper team should put the Strengths Finder to work. As a team, we could be greater than the sum of our parts if we all worked more efficiently within our means. It’s a question of capacity – if everyone is fulfilled and challenged in their work, their capacity within the organization would be much more sustainable.

So we got our hands on a few copies of the book and all agreed to come together and share our results at Show & Tell.

A neat thing happened when we all crowded around the meeting table to review our results – nothing was out of left field. Every time someone read out their results, there was a resounding ‘ahh, that completely fits’ from the rest of the team.  The consistency was a nice reinforcement of the fluency with which our team works together and definitely pointed to the test’s accuracy. The Clifton Strengths Finder researchers surveyed over 10 million workers in the past decade alone, with in-depth researching spanning over the past forty years, so I’d like to think that their research is fairly thorough.

While we often overlapped when it came to certain strengths, we all seemed to have one or two strengths that set us apart from the rest. I think that’s where the real benefits of the test kick in, because we can capitalize on those more unique strengths and create teams that are balanced and productive. Like Andrew pointed out, “We have situations come up all the time that don’t call for full-blown roles, but are more initiatives or endeavours. It would be neat to see who might naturally gravitate to a specific one.” By identifying niche strengths, we can start to mold our projects around strengths that are best suited to them.

The matrix was helpful in that it allowed us to position the strengths relative to each other to reveal an alternate facet of the data.  I also created a points system that would take into account the ranking of strengths, so that we could get an accurate idea of how prevalent strengths were among the team. Assigning value to the sequence of strengths (and not just the number of people who possess a certain strength) gave us the true concentration of each strength (see below).

Like Nick realized in our team session, the Strengths Finder points out the seemingly obvious, but presents traits that you might not admit or see as strengths. He said that there was “one I was most surprised by, but at the same time, what it was describing was entirely true. It was always there, I could always see that in myself, but I wouldn’t have used that to describe myself.” It wasn’t a quality he had articulated or really saw as an advantage. There’s an old maxim that goes something like “we dislike most in others what we see in ourselves,” which identifies exactly what makes it so hard to leverage what we’re good at – we unconsciously resent our own strengths. Kind of a society-wide inferiority complex that encourages a preoccupation with our have-nots instead of a healthy incubation of the things we’re good at.

Afshin mentioned that it sort of plays out ‘the way a horoscope would,’ in the specific-generalization kind of way. There are a lot of broad sweeping statements, but the combination of strengths and their sequence that paints a clearer picture. What the test really does is make sense of the roles we naturally fall into within a team and reveals a bigger-picture outlook of our work and play. It functions on the premise that teams should be well-rounded because individuals on their own are not.

The insights you gather from the test may be somewhat self-evident, but you still need to hear it. It’s sort of akin to your mom telling you you’re good at something – she may be absolutely right, but you’ll be way more likely to believe it if it comes from, well, a more objective source.

But really, as if my home library obsession really needed enabling. Thanks Clifton Strengths Finder, for being eternally optimistic about my need to hoard.

1. Our very own Behrouz Hariri plays host to the newly founded Toronto chapter of Creative Mornings. See the first lecture here.

2. Andrew showed off the one-minute elevator pitch video that won Rocketr $1,000 from ITbusiness.ca

3. The team fawned over temporary tattoos from Tattly, founded by Tina Roth Eisenberg (who operates under the prominent moniker Swiss Miss).

4. Satish shared some fascinating info he learned about the future of mobile technology in Canada (did you know that only three carriers can survive in economies of scale?)

5. I got the chance to complete the Clifton Strengths Finder over the break and was really taken by the results. Author Tom Rath suggests we need to capitalize on our strengths instead of dwelling on weaknesses.

6. Gabe is working on another mobile app in his spare time and the team got a sneak peak.

1. Gavin taught us about cycling training on rollers for winter months – cyclists are incredibly impressive.

2. EVERYONE IS GETTING SICK. NO THANKS, HUMAN RHINOVIRUS (thanks to (thanks to Jean-Yves Sgro for the image)

3. Behrouz shared a beautiful video about The Musalman, which is likely the last handwritten newspaper in the world. A stark contrast to the digital environment that most of our time is spent.

4. Some of the team made it out to HoHoTO this year, which raised just shy of $62,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank last year! Thanks for having us, we had a blast and were proud to support such a great cause.

5. We love BBC’s Wonderful World with David Attenborough

6. Gabe read the article Design is Horseshit, and the team debated its arguments. What are your thoughts?

1. Chris found some fresh design inspiration in a book called Graphic Design: Now In Production. The book features posters, books, magazines, identity and branding, info graphics, typography and film and television title graphics, all generated since 2000.

2. Behrouz ponders his latest product idea, sketching out the flow of information for the team.

3. One of Gabe’s personal projects, an app called Wobblr, hit the Apple iTunes store recently. The professional wobble machine has been downloaded as far as Italy, since its release last week!

4. We discovered our shared love for Sudoku and our Show & Tell session quickly turned into a massive, playfully infuriating group Sudoku session.

5. Our pal Russell (from the great Eighteen Eighty) brought us some Speedy Spongey Christmas Friends. They weren’t very speedy. Or particularly spongey, for that matter.

6. PINK TING. Thanks Loblaws.

And for that purpose, we hosted the November Dribbble Meetup – a chance for designers to come together and chat about their work in real-life. The Dribbble community does a great job of showcasing work and providing portals for feedback that are really helpful for all kinds of designers. The site operates by invitation-only, which makes for a kind of curated community where all the contributors are well-connected in their respective networks.

With a steady stream of dribbblers through the door and a series of exciting rapid-fire presentations from some members from the DribbbleTO community – you might even call November’s Dribbble meetup a slam-dunk.

A big thank you to everyone who made it out, tweeted, shared your work and gave feedback! We’re looking forward to potentially hosting more of these in the future, so be sure to check back here and on the Dribbble Toronto meetup page for updates.

I’ve been trying my best to embody lean for as long as it’s been around, but tonight I am learning the importance of a few things…

Twelve hours, a cause, and a commitment to “impact”… these are what keep you in check. If you want to ship, this is how you do it.

The cause is Free the Children. They are the beneficiary of 60 of Toronto’s best coders and designers. Tomorrow they will have an entirely new digital experience inclusive of iPhone and Android apps, a mobile web version of their “We Day” website, and a Facebook Canvas app. It would have taken them years to achieve this scale of update. In 12 hours it will be done.

And therein lies the value of choosing a great cause and committing to impact. You don’t have the luxury of paying attention to anything less than exactly what is needed.

It also helps that all of these efforts are being driven by the urgency of shipping by morning. Welcome to ‘Hack for a Cause’. The big audacious goal is simply to make change.

We have 6 hours left.

Last week I had the pleasure of being a part of AccelerateTO, working with some of Toronto’s best technology entrepreneurs, influencers, and investors.

My favourite part of the day-long conference was the morning, which grouped 100+ attendees into smaller sets for close quarters workshops. I was involved in the “Getting Seriously Lean” workshop, which provided an understanding of lean startup, its key principles, and our real cases.

This reminded me a lot of the casual, intimate and honest conversations that LeanCoffeeTO facilitates every week. That’s probably because Max and Andres were there running the workshop with me.

The way I see it, the role we play in these settings is that of peers. None of us are necessarily the first or only source of knowledge on these topics, but we’re fellow entrepreneurs sharing our tales from the trenches for everyone else’s benefit (I hope).

The storytellers at Eighteen Eighty used AccelerateTO as an opportunity to capture this very philosophy. I’ve embedded the film above, not only because they finally put me into one, but because it truly represents the hustle in every part of Toronto’s technology ecosystem.

Behrouz had a similar sensation when he caught a lecture at OCAD U called The Practice of Planned Serendipity this past week. Thor Muller, CTO and Co-founder of Get Satisfaction talked about creating the perfect conditions for innovation, and explained that building your own breed of luck demands a combination of obsessive curiosity and the ability to observe an exception. He also pointed out that Fight and Flight involve the same chemical reactions – it’s just what you choose to do with it. We also laughed about the fact that Muller identifies these traits as the traits of a geek – really good news for the Jet Cooper team.

We all found it pretty hilarious that Chris, one of our designers, went to England last week for a couple of days.  He had a pretty good reason – he was sent there for a personal project that he’s working on – but we nevertheless enjoyed poking fun at the idea of spending twenty hours of travel time for a couple of days with Big Ben. I think we’re mostly just jealous.

Satish also had an exciting announcement – Jet Cooper was nominated for a Digi Award as one of Canada’s Top Digital Design Teams! Satish laughed through his account of getting the news at the nomination dinner; no one on the team could make it and Jet Cooper flashed on the screen so quickly that he barely had a chance to react. He sat dumbfounded for a few minutes until it finally sunk in, and spent the next few minutes excitingly calling the team to pass on the great news!

On a more grim note, Arati got some news last week that her uncle had passed away. With a massive family spread across continents, mourning him became a question of logistics; sadly, not everyone could make the trip down to his funeral. And so the family took to Facebook, visiting his profile regularly to view pictures and his regular status updates. It brings up an interesting point about our virtual lives- who do you trust with your passwords if something happens? We already know that Facebook has a policy on ‘memorializing’ accounts - but it doesn’t stop there. Email, Twitter and the pile of apps we subscribe will keep on keeping when we’re gone. Do we need to preemptively strategize just in case?

In any case, it was nice to hear that the family created a space to swap memories, share photos and leave messages. We might not have any control over these moments, but we can turn them into something beautiful, something to draw encouragement from when the going gets particularly tough. Inspiration always comes down to these kinds of stories and and the chance to learn from the experiences of others. It’s the reason we gather at conferences and attend lectures – and I guess it’s why we have Show & Tell, too.

There’s no shortage of other great events in the coming weeks – Startup Weekend Toronto kicks off on the 18^th, well as Pixel Hack Day on the 19th and 20th.