At Teamrubber, i’ve taken it upon myself to reward everyone’s birthday by making replica cakes of the things people love! I started this as a way to practise different techniques to improve my cake making abilities and maybe one day make them for events or special occasions. They don’t always go to plan, but I learn from the mistakes and move on to the next idea. Here is a selection of my favourites:
You can see more Teamrubber cakes here.
On Friday, Team Rubber were involved in helping raise money for ActionAid as past of it’s Pover Tie Day initiative. The idea was simple; dress up smart for the day!
Team Rubber scrubs up pretty well, although wearing suits in summer is hot!
Just outside the Team Rubber office, there is a HUGE £80,000 screen in Queen Square, courtesy of Hyundai. They’re expecting 11,000 people, so could get a bit noisy….!
Working remotely is something Team Rubber does with mixed success. Sometimes we’re very good at it. Sometimes we’re not so good.
I’ve found working in a remote (or distributed) way massively productive, but I don’t think remote working looks like as much fun for other Team Rubber staff as it should be, so I’ve been thinking about how we could and should do it better.
It was a handy co-incidence that I found this piece from Jason Z at 37 Signals about remote working and team parity.
In short, when most of a team work together in one location, it’s very hard to prevent remote team members becoming second class citizens. It’s very easy for the people in the same location to share information and solve problems with quick conversations, white boards, a quick sketch or a quick list of actions on a post-it note. They can also have lunch, tea and banter together.
Those working remotely miss out on this shared ‘stuff’, or worse, get the negative side-effects (“we were just talking about the project and we’ve decided xxxx”, “sorry we missed your call, we were having a meeting” etc.). I’ve seen this happen and it doesn’t look like much fun 
Meanwhile I collaborate almost every day on open source projects where all work is distributed. Using tools like internet relay chat (irc), forums, and web-based project management apps, I get stuff done with people in different countries and different time zones (I’m currently collaborating with people in Canada, Germany, Holland, Spain, Sweden and Russia). We use English, we use a lot of short written communication, a few pictures, and an awful lot of emoticons (to indicate when we’re really not cross…or when we really are). It’s fun and we get stuff done.
I’m not advocating that Team Rubber works remotely by default. Having a base is really important to us, and by working together closely we’ve built strong personal ties, developed seriously impressive capabilities to get stuff done, and had fun. That’s massively valuable – but we should get better at working in a distributed way, because it’s also fun and valuable, and because we already have people in multiple locations.
Wednesday is a great day to work from home – or somewhere else out of the studio/office (get out in the world!). It won’t be compulsory – and some jobs are tied to a office phone – but I’m strongly encouraging distributed working on Wednesdays, and I’m going to be very interested in how we do do it better. Our tools are things like email, irc, trac, and (omg) “picking up the fricking phone”. We’re going to learn how to do it right, and it’s going to be fun 
cheers,
Andy
Originally posted at Rubber Republic
–
[Image courtesy of : Wendelboe on Flickr]
The *devil* in question was indeed the force of office evil that is Powerpoint, and Tom Alcott from the Social Network Company gave us a masterclass in how to keep presentations succinct, engaging and conversational while remaining in total control of your material.
His PechKucha style talk on social network analysis lasted exactly ’6 minutes & 66 seconds’ and covered everything from a crash course in social psychology, the ambiguity of what being ‘connected’ actually means to mapping the *viral* spread of information within networks.
At the heart of it was that key question: Who is the most valuable node within any social network? The ‘hub’ (the most connected individual within a community). Or the ‘broker’ (the person who bridges between two communities and therefore allows that idea to spread to new audiences)?
Finding this overlap is something we are fascinated by, as it potentially allows the conversation to evolve and new participants to join. This was also a central theme to ‘Connected’ our last Rubber Book Club mail-out which explains the various ways information travels with some very entertaining illustrations.
So all good stuff and many thanks to Tom for coming in on a very warm and humid Friday afternoon.
Incidentally if ’666′ is the number of the beast, does that ’668′ the neighbour of the beast?
Politics is changing – and it’s happening right in our backyard. Follow us live blogging from the venue of today’s leadership debate, and on Twitter.
Simple and pretty awesome: http://bentleg.co.uk/?p=1181
A couple of weeks ago, David Gilroy from Conscious Solutions came to give a select few of us at Team Rubber a crash-talk in selling. I won’t give away any of the secrets shared with us in this post, but it focused on the different approaches to sales that his company uses. Detailing to us how his team is built in such a way to take prospects through the sales pipeline and underpinning attitudes enabling them to achieve their targets. Other, less obvious techniques (all above board of course) were equally intriguing, and those who were fortunate enough to be in the crash-talk certainly came away with heads buzzing. Even two weeks after, new ideas inside Team Rubber are still emerging from the talk and I think it’s safe to say that it really helped many of us.
Many thanks to David for taking the time to come and chat to us. Crash-talks are definitely of great use – more of the same please!
“Bristol offers what 87% of America’s towns and counties lack: the optic-fibre internet.”
Right story, wrong Bristol.
Interested in helping get fibre for Bristol, UK? Try Connecting Bristol.
There’s some nice space in our building coming up. Easy-in, easy-out.
35 King Street, near the Old Vic.
It’s an awesome building, very close to St. Nick’s Market, the Apple, the Royal Navy Volunteer and other important amenities. Plenty of bike parking!
Give me a shout if interested andy@teamrubber.com
