About the Author

I’m Oliver Sharp, and welcome to the blog.  I hope it is a place where passion meets pragmatism – exploring ways to nurture creative ideas and turn them into reality.  When I started my career in academic research, I spent much of my time working alone, and tried to find ways to be as effective as I could.  Since then, I’ve been in startups and large companies and non-profits, working within and helping to run teams of every size from one to 10,000 people.  I’ve always been fascinated by the magic that can happen when you harness the concentrated potential of a group .. and how hard it can be to make that magic happen.

Regardless of the team I’m in or where I happen to sit in the org chart, my goal is always to act as a Force Multiplier – to make it possible for the team to define and achieve its goals by fostering inspiration and turning it into action.  This blog is an effort to share what I have learned and to create a dialogue with a community of fellow practitioners.  If you’d like to be connected, my LinkedIn profile is here and my Twitter handle is @ojsharp.

Thanks for dropping in!

The Model for the Site

When I was a kid, my father gave me this great book that organized the universe based on powers of ten – it took you visually from seeing the universe at the level of its sub-atomic structure all the way out to an entire galaxy, in 37 pages – from one-hundred-trillionth – 10^-14 – of a meter, where you can see the sub-atomic particles making up the nucleus of an atom, to 10^22 meters, where you can see the whole Milky Way (try this site for a modern version).  I have found that the way you work with a team often depends on a lot on its scale, so I’ve taken that same concept and used it to organize this site.  Topics are in categories reflecting teams of size 1, 10, 100, and 1000 or more.