59 Fun Facts About Team Building

What color were the original Post-it Notes?

Canary yellow was an accident: the lab next door to the Post-it team at 3M happened to have scrap paper of that shade, so the first notes were made on it.

What did the three Ms in 3M originally stand for?

Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing began in 1902 at Two Harbors, Minnesota, trying to mine corundum; it failed and pivoted to sandpaper, tape and eventually sticky notes.

US Labor Day, first celebrated with a New York City parade in 1882, falls on the first Monday of which month?

September; the first parade, on September 5, 1882, was organized by the Central Labor Union.

International Workers' Day on 1 May commemorates the 1886 Haymarket affair, a rally for the eight-hour day, in which US city?

Chicago's rally ended with a bomb and gunfire; the date was chosen to honor the workers who died.

Which carmaker switched its factory workers to a five-day, 40-hour week in 1926?

Henry Ford argued that workers with free time and money would buy more cars, including his.

The QWERTY keyboard layout was devised in the 1870s by a newspaper editor living in which US state?

Christopher Latham Sholes worked on his typewriter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, between 1867 and 1873; his layout has survived every attempt since to replace it.

The word 'robot' entered English from R.U.R., a 1920 play about artificial workers written in which language?

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) was written in Czech by Karel Čapek, whose brother Josef suggested the word 'robot', from robota, meaning forced labor.

Which country led the world in coffee consumption per person throughout the 2010s?

Finland led per-capita coffee consumption throughout the 2010s at about 12 kg per person a year; two coffee breaks a day are written into many Finnish union contracts.

In The Office, Dunder Mifflin's branch is in which Pennsylvania city?

The real Scranton embraced the show; the city's welcome sign appears in the opening credits.

In Office Space, what brand is Milton's cherished red stapler?

The company did not sell a red stapler at the time; the prop was spray-painted, and fan demand made Swingline release one in 2002.

The Googleplex headquarters is in which California city?

The Googleplex sits at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, a campus Google has occupied since 2004 and famous for its free cafeterias.

Who co-founded LinkedIn, the professional network launched in 2003?

Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, which launched from his living room on May 5, 2003; Microsoft bought it in 2016 for $26.2 billion.

In which occupied country were paper clips worn on lapels as a WWII resistance symbol?

The clips signaled unity ('we are bound together'), and wearing one could get you arrested.

Elisha Otis's 1853 safety device made which machine safe enough for tall buildings?

Otis's safety brake stops an elevator if the hoisting rope fails; he demonstrated it at the 1854 New York Crystal Palace exhibition by having the rope cut while he stood aboard.

Which symbol did Ray Tomlinson choose in 1971 to separate the username from the machine name in the first email addresses?

The @ sign was on the keyboard, appeared in no names, and already meant 'at', and it has been used in email addresses ever since.

Slack began as an internal tool at a company that was building what?

Tiny Speck's game Glitch flopped, but the chat tool its developers built for themselves became a $27.7 billion company.

Zoom founder Eric Yuan left which company in 2011 to start it?

Eric Yuan had been a Cisco vice president of engineering for Webex, which Cisco bought in 2007; he left in 2011 with about 40 engineers to found Zoom.

PowerPoint was created by which small company before Microsoft bought it in 1987?

Forethought, Inc. released PowerPoint 1.0 for the Macintosh on April 20, 1987; Microsoft bought the company that July for about $14 million.

Who created the office comic strip Dilbert?

Scott Adams launched Dilbert in 1989, giving the world the Pointy-Haired Boss and Dogbert, the smartest dog on Earth.

In which US state did a 1960s Fashion Guild campaign start what became 'Casual Friday'?

The Hawaii Fashion Guild lobbied employers to let men wear aloha shirts on Fridays; the habit spread east and reached the mainland by the 1990s.

Which company is nicknamed 'Big Blue'?

IBM's blue logo and its old unofficial uniform of white shirts with blue suits earned the name.

A garage in Palo Alto known as the 'Birthplace of Silicon Valley' is where which company started?

Bill Hewlett slept in the shed while the newly married Packards took the apartment, and they built their first products in the garage in 1938.

In which city did the first Starbucks open in 1971?

The first Starbucks opened at 2000 Western Avenue in Seattle in 1971 and moved to Pike Place Market in 1976; for years it sold only whole beans and equipment, no lattes.

In which decade did Herbert Freudenberger publish the paper that popularized 'burn-out'?

His 1974 paper 'Staff Burn-Out' described exhaustion among volunteers at a free clinic in New York.

According to the Peter principle, every employee in a hierarchy tends to rise to their level of what?

Laurence J. Peter's 1969 book The Peter Principle argued that people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence; it was written as satire.

Parkinson's law says that work expands to fill what?

'Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,' C. Northcote Parkinson wrote in a 1955 Economist essay mocking how bureaucracies grow regardless of workload.

Which company introduced the 914, the first successful plain-paper photocopier, in 1959?

The machine was so popular that 'to xerox' became a verb, to the company's lawyers' dismay.

László Bíró, who patented the first commercially successful ballpoint pen, was born in which country?

Bíró was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1899 and emigrated to Argentina in 1940, where ballpoints came to be called biromes in his honor.

What is Homer Simpson's job at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant?

Homer is the safety inspector in Sector 7G; he got the job in the season-one episode 'Homer's Odyssey' after campaigning for safety in Springfield.

In which year did Nike adopt the slogan 'Just Do It'?

Nike launched 'Just Do It' in 1988; Wieden+Kennedy's Dan Wieden coined it, inspired by the last words of death-row inmate Gary Gilmore, 'Let's do it.'

Before building McDonald's into a global chain, what was Ray Kroc selling?

He visited the McDonald brothers in 1954 only because their little restaurant had ordered an unusual number of his machines.

Pawnee, the town in Parks and Recreation, is in which state?

Pawnee is a fictional Indiana town locked in rivalry with wealthy neighbor Eagleton; Leslie Knope runs its Parks Department and later wins a seat on its city council.

What was Sony's first product?

The 1940s cooker was unreliable and sold poorly; the company found its feet with tape recorders and transistor radios instead.

Which gaming giant was founded in 1889 to make playing cards?

Nintendo founder Fusajiro Yamauchi made hanafuda cards by hand in Kyoto; the company did not release a home console until the Color TV-Game in 1977.

Which search engine began as a Stanford research project nicknamed 'BackRub'?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin's BackRub analyzed the web's 'back links' to rank pages; it was renamed Google in 1997 and incorporated in 1998.

Under what name did Jeff Bezos originally register the company that became Amazon?

Bezos incorporated Cadabra, Inc. in July 1994 but renamed it Amazon after his lawyer misheard 'Cadabra' as 'cadaver' over the phone.

The name of which electronics giant means 'three stars' in Korean?

Samsung (samseong, 'three stars') began in 1938 as Lee Byung-chul's small trading company in Daegu, dealing in dried fish, groceries and noodles.

Which mobile phone brand began in 1865 as a pulp mill?

Fredrik Idestam's 1865 pulp mill on the Tammerkoski rapids in Tampere grew into Nokia, named after the town where he built a second mill; it later made rubber boots and cables before phones.

The company name Lego comes from a Danish phrase meaning what?

Lego contracts 'leg godt', Danish for 'play well'; Ole Kirk Christiansen adopted the name in 1934, well over a decade before the plastic brick of 1949.

Toyota grew out of a company that made which machines?

Money from selling the patent for Sakichi Toyoda's 1924 loom funded his son's first car experiments.

In which city was Microsoft founded in 1975?

Gates and Allen set up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, next to their first customer MITS, maker of the Altair 8800, and moved to Bellevue, Washington in 1979.

Which sportswear brand did Rudolf Dassler found after falling out with his brother Adolf, the founder of Adidas?

Rudolf founded Puma (first registered as Ruda) in 1948 after the brothers' split; the rival factories sat on opposite banks of the Aurach river in Herzogenaurach.

Steve Jobs bought the computer division that became Pixar from which company in 1986?

Jobs bought the Graphics Group from George Lucas's Lucasfilm for $5 million and invested another $5 million; Disney bought Pixar twenty years later for about $7.4 billion.

Coca-Cola was invented in 1886 by pharmacist John Pemberton in which city?

Atlanta; Pemberton originally marketed it as a temperance drink.

YouTube's three founders had all previously worked at which company?

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim all worked at PayPal before registering YouTube on February 14, 2005; the first upload is Karim's 19-second clip at the San Diego Zoo.

Netflix started in 1997 as what kind of business?

Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings launched Netflix as a DVD-rental-by-mail service from Scotts Valley, California, shipping discs in envelopes; streaming did not arrive until 2007.

What was Twitter's original name when it launched in 2006?

The service launched in 2006 as 'twttr', a vowel-free spelling inspired by Flickr and by the five-character length of American SMS short codes; the vowels came later.

The earliest known vending machine, described by Hero of Alexandria in the first century, dispensed what?

Hero's temple machine dispensed holy water: a coin dropped onto a pan opened a valve for a moment, then the pan tipped and the flow stopped.

Max Ringelmann's rope-pulling experiments, published in 1913, demonstrated which group effect?

Social loafing: Max Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, measured each person pulling a rope less hard as the group grew, a drop also known as the Ringelmann effect.

How many players does each basketball team have on court at once?

James Naismith invented the game in 1891 in Springfield, Massachusetts, as an indoor activity for restless students.

Which company calls its theme park employees 'cast members'?

Disney University, an idea Walt Disney set up in 1955 for the opening of Disneyland, trains every new cast member.

Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon, invented which kitchen appliance?

A candy bar melted in Spencer's pocket beside an active magnetron in 1945; he went on to patent the microwave oven, and Raytheon sold the first Radarange in 1947.

Velcro inventor George de Mestral was an engineer from which country?

The idea came to him after a hunting trip in the Alps in 1941; the name blends the French words velours and crochet.

Bubble wrap was originally invented in 1957 as what?

Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes could not sell it as textured wallpaper, so they sold it as packaging instead.

What was the first item ever sold on eBay?

It went for $14.83 in 1995, and the buyer explained that he collected broken laser pointers.

Which was the first publicly traded US company to be valued at over $1 trillion?

Apple crossed $1 trillion on August 2, 2018, 42 years after Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded it as a partnership; Amazon followed a month later.

Which is the world's oldest collegiate business school?

Joseph Wharton's 1881 donation founded it at the University of Pennsylvania.

Who proposed the 'forming, storming, norming, performing' model of team development in 1965?

Bruce Tuckman built the model from a review of about fifty studies of small groups; a fifth stage, 'adjourning', was added with Mary Ann Jensen in 1977.

Which two components did a 2009 meta-analysis find most effective in team building?

Goal setting and role clarification: Klein and colleagues' 2009 meta-analysis in Small Group Research found those two components had the largest effects on team outcomes, ahead of interpersonal relations and problem solving.