106 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.

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: after a bomb broke up the Haymarket rally, four defendants were hanged, and in 1893 Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the survivors, calling the trial unfair.

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

Ford: Henry Ford said it was 'high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege.'

Which gunmaker built the first typewriters to use Christopher Sholes's QWERTY keyboard layout?

Remington: Sholes sold his patent rights to the gunsmiths for $12,000 in 1873, and the first machines went on the market the next year.

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.

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

Scranton: to research his role, John Krasinski visited a real paper company there, and footage from that trip 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.

Which office product did Dallas secretary Bette Nesmith Graham, mother of the Monkees' Michael Nesmith, invent?

Liquid Paper began as white tempera paint Graham brushed over her typing errors, and in 1979 she sold her company to Gillette.

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

Reid Hoffman: after Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016, he joined Microsoft's own board of directors.

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

Norway: patriots who wore one on a lapel risked harsh punishment.

Elisha Otis invented a safety brake that made which machine safe to ride?

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.

Ray Tomlinson's 1971 program, which put the @ sign in email addresses, sent messages across which network?

ARPANET: Tomlinson picked the @ sign because it did not appear in anyone's user name.

Which workplace chat app grew out of an in-house tool built by the makers of the online game Glitch?

Slack: Stewart Butterfield's earlier failed game had already spun off Flickr, and when Glitch failed too, its in-house chat tool became the product.

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

Cisco: Yuan had worked on Webex there, and years earlier he reached Silicon Valley only after eight failed attempts to get a US visa.

Microsoft bought the Silicon Valley startup Forethought in 1987 to get which program?

PowerPoint was going to be called Presenter, until a last-minute trademark check found that the name was already taken.

Who created the office comic strip Dilbert?

Scott Adams worked his office day job at Pacific Bell until 1995, drawing Dilbert outside working hours.

In which US state did a 1960s office dress custom start what became 'Casual Friday'?

Hawaii: in one of two origin stories for Casual Friday, 'Aloha Friday' let office workers swap mainland-style business wear for aloha shirts.

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?

Hewlett-Packard: Bill Hewlett and David Packard settled the order of their names with a coin toss.

In which city did the first Starbucks open in 1971?

Seattle: the first Starbucks opened at 2000 Western Avenue in 1971, and for a decade its stores sold only beans and equipment, not coffee drinks.

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?

Hungary: Bíró later moved to Argentina at the invitation of President Agustín Justo and set up a company there to make his pens.

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

Safety inspector: in 'Homer's Odyssey', Homer is fired after crashing a cart, becomes a safety crusader, and is then made the plant's safety inspector.

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.'

Which burger chain did a milkshake-mixer salesman buy from its founding brothers in 1961?

McDonald's: Ray Kroc first visited the brothers' San Bernardino stand in 1954 to see why it was using eight of his Multimixers.

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

Indiana: Leslie Knope is only deputy director of Pawnee's parks department; her boss, Ron Swanson, wants as little government as possible.

Which electronics giant's co-founder built an electric rice cooker that mostly failed to cook rice properly?

Sony: its first tape recorders, launched a few years later, barely sold at first because customers didn't know how they would use them.

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

Nintendo: before video games, it also tried running a taxi company and selling instant rice.

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?

Nokia: Fredrik Idestam's 1865 pulp mill grew into a company that made rubber boots, tires and cables long before mobile phones.

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

Lego contracts 'leg godt', Danish for 'play well'; carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen chose the name in 1934, when his workshop still made wooden toys.

Which carmaker grew out of a loom company that sold a patent to Britain's Platt Brothers?

Toyota: its production system borrowed jidoka from Sakichi Toyoda's looms, which stopped by themselves when something went wrong.

Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, but in which city did Bill Gates and Paul Allen found it?

Albuquerque: Allen moved there to work with MITS, maker of the Altair computer, and Gates soon left Harvard to join him.

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

Puma: the brothers' decades-long feud split their hometown, Herzogenaurach, into two rival camps.

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

Lucasfilm: Steve Jobs spun its computer division off as Pixar in 1986 and at first tried to sell the Pixar Image Computer, not films.

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

Atlanta: Pemberton had first sold a coca wine, and his alcohol-free Coca-Cola was then marketed as a temperance drink.

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

PayPal: Hurley, Chen and Karim first built YouTube as a video dating site with the slogan 'Tune In, Hook Up', then opened it to any video.

In 2000, which video rental chain turned down the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million?

Blockbuster: ten years after passing on Netflix, the rental giant filed for bankruptcy.

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

Twttr: it grew out of a side project at the podcasting startup Odeo, after staff there were told to come up with new ideas.

The earliest known vending machine, which released a measure of liquid for a coin, was described by Hero of which city?

Alexandria: in Hero's design a coin dropped onto a pan that opened a valve, releasing holy water, or in some accounts wine.

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

Social loafing: later studies found that people also shouted less loudly per person in bigger groups.

James Naismith invented which team sport in 1891 to keep YMCA students busy indoors in winter?

Basketball: Naismith asked the school janitor for two boxes to use as goals, but the janitor came back with peach baskets.

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

Disney: park staff are treated as performers in a show, so they are 'on stage' in the park and 'backstage' in break areas and offices.

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

The microwave oven: Raytheon sold it as the Radarange, and Spencer, who never finished grammar school, rose to senior vice president there.

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

Switzerland: de Mestral got the idea from burrs that clung to his clothes, and he named Velcro from the French velours and crochet.

Which packing material did two inventors try to sell in 1957 as wallpaper?

Bubble Wrap: when the wallpaper didn't sell, Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes tried it as greenhouse insulation before it caught on as packaging.

A broken laser pointer that sold for $14.83 in 1995 was the first item sold on which website?

eBay: the small fees Pierre Omidyar charged sellers soon earned him more than his day job, so he quit to run the site.

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

Apple: its third co-founder, Ronald Wayne, sold back his 10% stake in 1976 for $800.

Which is the world's oldest collegiate business school?

Wharton: Joseph Wharton gave $100,000 to found it, hoping to prepare students for the booms and busts awaiting them in business.

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 personality test was developed during World War II from Carl Jung's ideas?

Myers–Briggs test: Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers meant it to help women entering the wartime workforce find suitable jobs.

The word 'salary' comes from the Latin 'salarium', a term built on the Roman word for which kitchen staple?

Salt gave pay its name, though the popular story that Roman soldiers were paid in it has no ancient evidence. The exact link between the mineral and the stipend is unknown.

Which country star wrote the office anthem '9 to 5' and worked out its typewriter beat on her acrylic nails?

Dolly Parton found the clacking rhythm by running her fingernails against one another. She made her film debut in the comedy of the same name, alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.

Junk email is called 'spam' after a café sketch, featuring singing Vikings, by which British comedy troupe?

Monty Python's 1970 sketch has a menu where almost every dish includes the tinned meat, while a chorus chants its name. Early internet users copied the joke by flooding chat rooms with quotes from it.

Which insect, found jamming a relay, did operators of Harvard's Mark II computer tape into their logbook in 1947?

A moth was taped to the page beside the note 'First actual case of bug being found'. The joke worked because engineers, Thomas Edison among them, had called faults 'bugs' for decades.

Which wireless technology is named after a 10th-century Viking king who united the tribes of Denmark?

Bluetooth began as a code name, proposed by an Intel engineer to suggest a standard that unites communication protocols. Its logo merges the runes for King Harald's initials.

Which ice cream brand began in a converted Vermont gas station after its two founders took a correspondence course?

Ben & Jerry's owes its chunky style to co-founder Ben Cohen, who has almost no sense of smell and judges food by texture. The pair opened their first scoop shop in Burlington in 1978.

Which Moon mission's crew got home after engineers improvised an air filter from duct tape and flight manual covers?

Apollo 13 lost its oxygen tanks to an explosion, so three astronauts sheltered in a lander stocked to keep two alive. The command module's spare filters were the wrong shape for it.

Jeff Bezos's rule for keeping meetings small says everyone in the room should be fed by two of what?

Pizzas set the limit: if two cannot feed the whole room, the Amazon founder considers the meeting too big. He also refuses to schedule meetings early in the morning.

At which Bikini Bottom restaurant does SpongeBob SquarePants work as the fry cook beside Squidward, the cashier?

The Krusty Krab grew out of creator Stephen Hillenburg's own summers as a fry cook at a seafood restaurant. SpongeBob applies for the job in the very first episode, 'Help Wanted'.

Which pope, who trained as a chemical technician, once worked as a bouncer and a janitor?

Francis swept floors and minded a door years before he joined the Jesuits. Elected in 2013, he became the first Latin American to lead the Catholic Church.

Which Art Deco New York skyscraper became the world's tallest by secretly assembling its spire inside its own frame?

Chrysler Building crews raised and riveted the hidden spire in about 90 minutes, overtaking a rival bank tower at 40 Wall Street. The title of world's tallest lasted only 11 months.

Which nickname do Londoners give 30 St Mary Axe, the curved glass tower designed by Foster and Partners?

The Gherkin stands on the site of the Baltic Exchange, which an IRA bomb wrecked in 1992. A 92-storey tower was planned for the plot first, then dropped.

Which Paris landmark, built as the centrepiece of the 1889 World's Fair, was due to be dismantled in 1909?

The Eiffel Tower escaped demolition because it had proved its worth as a mast for radio telegraphy. Its engineer had been promised the ticket income for the fair and the 20 years after it.

Which Indian landmark did the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan commission as a tomb for his late wife?

The Taj Mahal took more than 20,000 workers and artisans to build. Shah Jahan now lies there too, beside the wife it was made for.

Which US military headquarters has 17.5 miles of corridors, yet any two points are under ten minutes' walk apart?

The Pentagon keeps walks short with five rings of corridors on every floor, set around an open-air central courtyard. It is one of the largest office buildings in the world.

Petronas, whose twin towers were the world's tallest buildings until 2004, is which country's national oil company?

Malaysia's twin towers in Kuala Lumpur are joined by a double-decker skybridge at the 41st and 42nd floors. They lost the height record to Taipei 101 in Taiwan.

Which performing arts venue, opened in 1973, has white roof shells clad in over a million Swedish-made tiles?

Sydney Opera House architect Jørn Utzon resigned in 1966 amid rows over cost and delays, years before the doors opened. He had won the design contest back in 1957.

Which American architect built Fallingwater over a Pennsylvania waterfall and designed New York's Guggenheim Museum?

Frank Lloyd Wright set the house directly above the falls, though his client's own engineers argued the design was not sound. The museum then occupied him from 1943 until 1959.

The London landmark that houses the bell Big Ben was renamed in 2012, for a Diamond Jubilee, as what?

Elizabeth Tower was officially plain 'Clock Tower' until then. It rose as part of the new Palace of Westminster after fire destroyed most of the old one in 1834.

Which Barcelona landmark did Antoni Gaudí direct from 1883 until his death, leaving it less than a quarter complete?

Sagrada Família became Gaudí's life's work, and he is buried in its crypt. He inherited the job in its second year, when the first architect resigned.

The 'CC' line on an email takes its initials from a typewriter-era copying method that used which coated sheet?

Carbon paper sat between two sheets so that typing on the top one printed a duplicate underneath. The spare copies went to a letter's secondary recipients, hence 'cc'.

The word 'boss' entered American English in the 1640s from 'baas', meaning 'master', in which language?

Dutch 'baas' first turned up in English in the 1620s, as the title of a ship's captain. Its later popularity in the US may reflect a wish to avoid saying 'master'.

The word 'deadline' once meant a line that prisoners could be shot for crossing, in camps during which war?

US Civil War prison camps marked a 'dead line' inside the stockade, and guards fired on anyone who touched it. It figured in the trial of the commander of the Confederate camp at Andersonville.

Which office fixture did designer Robert Propst create for Herman Miller, released in 1967 as 'Action Office II'?

The cubicle was meant as a kindness: it gave workers more privacy and personal space than the rows of desks in one open room that came before. Propst's studies had found open layouts cut communication.

Which office device dates back to an 1843 patent by Alexander Bain, 33 years before the telephone was patented?

The fax machine began as Bain's 'Electric Printing Telegraph', a way to send images down a wire. He was reproducing graphic signs in laboratory experiments by 1846.

Which card game, bundled with Windows 3.0 in 1990, taught nervous new users to drag and drop with a mouse?

Solitaire was written by a summer intern, Wes Cherry. His version had a 'boss key' that swapped the cards for a fake spreadsheet, but he was asked to take it out.

Which meeting technique did advertising executive Alex Osborn popularise in his 1953 book Applied Imagination?

Brainstorming already filled a chapter of his 1948 book Your Creative Power, titled 'How to Organize a Squad to Create Ideas'. Osborn had been working on methods for creative problem-solving since 1939.

Which word did psychologist Irving Janis use for the team behaviour behind the failed Bay of Pigs invasion?

Groupthink was coined in 1952 by a Fortune magazine writer, who took his cue from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It describes a group whose desire for harmony produces bad decisions.

Software teams that work in 'scrums' borrow the word, via a 1986 Harvard Business Review paper, from which sport?

Rugby gave two researchers their picture of a team that 'tries to go the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth'. On the pitch, a scrum restarts play with players packed closely together.

In the SMART goals checklist, introduced by George Doran in a 1981 management article, what does the S stand for?

Specific leads the list, followed in Doran's version by measurable, assignable, realistic and time-related. Common later versions swap in attainable, relevant and timely.

The coffee chain Starbucks shares its name with the chief mate of the ship in which seafaring novel?

Moby-Dick came into it almost by accident: the founders started from 'Starbo', a misread place name, which reminded them of the book's Starbuck. One of them called the link coincidental.

Which carmaker's four-ring badge stands for the four companies that banded together to form Auto Union in 1932?

Audi is also a pun: founder August Horch's surname means 'listen' in German, and 'audi' says the same in Latin. The other rings stood for Horch, DKW and Wanderer.

The second M in M&M's stands for Murrie, a partner whose father ran which rival chocolate company?

Hershey's tie to the candy ended in 1949, when Murrie sold his share of the venture to Mars. The idea is said to have come from Smarties that Mars saw soldiers eating in Spain in the 1930s.

Which children's modelling compound was first sold in the 1930s as a putty for cleaning coal residue off wallpaper?

Play-Doh needed a new job after World War II, when homes switched from coal to gas heating and stopped collecting soot. A Cincinnati soap maker had mixed it at a grocery chain's request.

The wartime 'We Can Do It!' poster, later mistaken for Rosie the Riveter, was made for workers at which company?

Westinghouse showed the poster only inside its own plants during February 1943, to push women already on the payroll to work harder. It was rediscovered in the early 1980s.

Which physicist held a desk job examining patents in Bern while publishing four groundbreaking papers in 1905?

Albert Einstein had qualified to teach mathematics and physics, but spent seven years assessing other people's inventions instead. 1905 is remembered as his 'miracle year'.

Which novelist left school at 12 to paste labels in a boot-blacking warehouse while his father was in debtors' prison?

Charles Dickens worked ten-hour days there for six shillings a week. He later used the Marshalsea, the prison that held his father, as a setting in Little Dorrit.

Which crime novelist learned about poisons for her plots by working in hospital dispensaries in both world wars?

Agatha Christie qualified as an apothecary's assistant in 1917. Her details were accurate enough that in 1977 medical staff solved a real thallium poisoning by recognising the symptoms from one of her books.

Which actor played Dunder Mifflin's regional manager, a role based on David Brent, in the US version of The Office?

Steve Carell watched only about half of the British pilot before auditioning, afraid he would start copying Ricky Gervais. Gervais himself had already turned the part down.

The New York Stock Exchange traces its founding to a 1792 agreement named after which tree on Wall Street?

A buttonwood was the traders' traditional meeting place, and legend has them signing beneath it. The 24 brokers agreed to deal only with each other and to charge a 0.25% commission.

Which team contest, an Olympic event from 1900 to 1920, was won in 1908 by a squad of City of London policemen?

Tug of war was dropped when the International Olympic Committee streamlined the programme after the 1920 Games. Great Britain finished with the most medals, five.

The 'lorem ipsum' filler text used in page layouts is scrambled Latin from a philosophical work by which Roman?

Cicero's 1st-century BC text had words altered, added and removed until it read as nonsense. Designers have used it since the late 1960s, when Letraset transfer sheets made it popular.

Jenga, the stacking game of wooden blocks, takes its name from a word meaning 'to build' in which language?

Swahili was a childhood language of the game's British creator, who was born in what is now Tanzania. Her family first played it with wooden blocks bought from a sawmill in Ghana.

Which name for the # symbol was coined at Bell Labs in the 1960s for a new telephone keypad button?

Octothorpe was invented because staff adding an eleventh and a twelfth key to the keypad needed names for the new symbols. The spelling never settled: 'octothorp' and 'octatherp' are also found.

Which English textile workers smashed factory machinery in raids from 1811, in the name of a legendary weaver?

Luddites signed threatening letters to mill owners as 'Ned Ludd', a figure of legend. The movement began in Nottingham and spread north over the next five years.

Blue-chip stocks, shares in the most dependable companies, are named after the highest-value tokens in which game?

Poker sets traditionally come in white, red and blue, with the blues worth the most. Dow Jones lore credits an early employee, standing by a stock ticker in the 1920s, with borrowing the term.

Which country passed the first modern minimum wage law in 1894, a year after giving women the vote?

New Zealand's 1894 act set up the world's first compulsory state arbitration, with a court that could fix minimum pay across an industry. Victoria, in Australia, followed with wage boards in 1896.

Which electronics company's engineer Bill Smith introduced the Six Sigma quality method to its factories in 1986?

Motorola set a 'six sigma' goal for its production lines, and by 2005 credited the method with more than $17 billion in savings.

Which insects tell nest-mates the direction and distance of flowers by performing a figure-eight 'waggle dance'?

Honeybees angle the dance against the Sun: a run straight up the comb means the food lies directly towards it. Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch was among the first to decode the message.

Which board game was invented in Montreal in 1979 by a newspaper photo editor and a wire-service sports editor?

Trivial Pursuit, in most versions of the story, was dreamed up over a game of Scrabble. It went on sale in Canada in 1981.