60 Fun Facts About Team Building

What color were the original Post-it Notes?

The color was an accident: the lab next door to the Post-it team happened to have scrap paper of that shade lying around.

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

The company started in 1902 trying to mine an abrasive mineral, failed, and pivoted to sandpaper, tape and eventually sticky notes.

In the United States, Labor Day falls on the first Monday of which month?

The first Labor Day parade was held in New York City on September 5, 1882, organized by the Central Labor Union.

International Workers' Day on 1 May commemorates the 1886 Haymarket affair in which city?

A rally for the eight-hour day 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 lived in Kenosha, and his layout survived every attempt since to replace it.

The word 'robot' entered English from a 1920 play written in which language?

Karel Čapek's R.U.R. is about artificial workers; the word comes from robota, meaning forced labor.

Which country drinks the most coffee per person?

Finns get through around 12 kilograms of coffee each per year, and two coffee breaks a day are written into many 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 address is 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, and the campus is famous for its free cafeterias.

Who co-founded LinkedIn in 2003?

The site launched on May 5, 2003, and 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?

He demonstrated it in 1854 by having the rope cut while he stood on the platform, and it held.

Which symbol did Ray Tomlinson choose in 1971 to separate user from machine in an email address?

He picked it because it was on the keyboard, appeared in no names, and already meant 'at'.

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?

He had been a vice president for Webex and took about 40 engineers with him.

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

The first version was Macintosh-only, released on April 20, 1987, and Microsoft snapped it up within months.

Who created the office comic strip Dilbert?

It debuted in 1989 and gave the world the Pointy-Haired Boss and Dogbert, the smartest dog on Earth.

'Casual Friday' grew out of 'Aloha Friday', a 1960s campaign in which US state?

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'?

The name comes from its blue logo and its old unofficial dress code of white shirts and blue suits.

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 original store at Pike Place Market sold only whole beans and equipment; no lattes for years.

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 was meant as satire, but managers still quote it as if it were physics.

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

C. Northcote Parkinson wrote it in a 1955 Economist essay mocking how bureaucracies grow no matter how much work there is.

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?

He later moved to Argentina, where ballpoints are still called biromes in his honor.

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

He works in Sector 7-G, which says a lot about the plant's safety record.

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

The line was coined at an advertising agency meeting, reportedly inspired by a death-row inmate's last words.

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?

Leslie Knope's beloved town is fictional, but the show borrowed plenty from real small-town Indiana government.

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?

Fusajiro Yamauchi's hanafuda cards were made by hand in Kyoto; the company did not release a home console until the 1970s.

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

The name referred to the way it analyzed the web's 'back links' to rank pages.

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

He changed it after a lawyer misheard the name as 'cadaver' over the phone.

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

It began in 1938 as a small trading company dealing in dried fish, groceries and noodles.

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

Fredrik Idestam built the mill on the Tammerkoski rapids near Tampere; the company later made rubber boots and cables before phones.

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

Ole Kirk Christiansen adopted the name in 1934, more than a decade before the plastic brick.

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?

Bill Gates and Paul Allen set up next to their first customer, MITS, maker of the Altair computer, and moved to Washington state in 1979.

What do the letters 'IK' in IKEA stand for?

The E and A are Elmtaryd, the farm where he was born, and Agunnaryd, the village where he grew up.

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

The brothers split in 1947 and their rival factories sat on opposite banks of the same river in Herzogenaurach.

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

He paid $5 million for the technology and put in another $5 million; twenty years later the studio sold for about $7.4 billion.

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

It was first sold as a patent medicine and temperance drink at a pharmacy soda fountain.

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

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim founded it on Valentine's Day 2005; the first video is 19 seconds of Karim at the San Diego Zoo.

Netflix started in 1997 as what kind of business?

Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings launched the service from Scotts Valley, California; streaming did not arrive until 2007.

What was Twitter's original project code name?

The vowel-free spelling was inspired by Flickr and by the five-character length of American SMS short codes.

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

A coin dropped onto a pan opened a valve for a moment, then the pan tipped and the flow stopped.

What is a group of owls called?

The term is popular in trivia and crossword circles even though owls are mostly solitary birds.

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'?

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

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

Legend says a candy bar melted in his pocket while he stood near an active radar set; he was not the first to notice, but he was the first to investigate.

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?

It crossed the line in August 2018, 42 years after being founded as a partnership by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne.

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?

He built it from a review of about fifty studies; a fifth stage, 'adjourning', was added with Mary Ann Jensen in 1977.

Which two team-building approaches were found to have the greatest impact on team outcomes?

They boost motivation and reduce conflict; a 2008 meta-analysis found team development improves both objective performance and supervisors' ratings.