Wednesday, November 12, 2008 by Dave Blum In my last entry, I made three predictions about corporate team building activities in the “new economy”: Prediction 1: Team building budgets will be reduced. Prediction 2: More team building will be done virtually. Prediction 3: Organizations will seek out more “edutainment”. My advice for companies offering team […]

Tuesday, November 11, 2008 by Dave Blum My wife and I met with our financial planner, Jacques Bolivar, last evening to discuss the economic climate, our finances and the advisability of buying property.  I suspect this kind of conversation is pretty common these days, as people around the world look at the news in the […]

Monday, November 10, 2008 by Dave Blum So there I was in Dubai, half way through a program, and my bag (with all the treasure hunt clues for stage 2) is in a taxi cab, somewhere in the United Arab Emirates. If I was in a true “developing country”, my goose would probably have been […]

Friday, November 7, 2008 by Dave Blum As a trainer of corporate team building activities, you have to be ready for anything. But there’s scrambling and then there’s SCRAMBLING.  And somehow the biggest need for improvisation seems to arrive when you’re on the road. So there I was in Dubai awhile back, about as far […]

Thursday, November 6, 2008 by Dave Blum …Denver, in fact. My task today was to playtest our two Denver treasure hunt locations: 1) Denver Museum of Nature and Science 2) Denver LoDo District Playtesting is pretty different from scouting.  When scouting a new, potential treasure hunt location, I walk every street and alley of a prospective […]

Wednesday, November 5, 2008 by Dave Blum A week or two back, I had a chance to scout the new California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco as a Dr. Clue hunt location.  What a wonderful place!  As you walk in, the first thing you see is a huge open rotunda, enclosed in a glass […]

Wednesday, November 5, 2008 by Dave Blum We live in a puzzle culture.  Walk into any book store and you’ll likely see an entire shelf devoted to crosswords puzzles, and perhaps a whole section to Sudokus.  Just yesterday, on a flight from San Francisco to Denver, I watched a mother and child poring over a Word […]

Monday, November 3, 2008 by Dave Blum Something very unusual is going on in the communication between me and my wife, Jen!  It started a couple of weeks back, when my wife and I were on a plane coming back from Indianapolis, where we had both attended the national conference of the North American Simulation […]

Friday, October 31, 2008 by Dave Blum In common parlance, the terms “treasure hunt” and “scavenger hunt” are used pretty interchangeably.  Both involve going out and searching for something, then getting scored in some fashion for your work output.  However, for people in the “hunt community” — and yes, there IS a community — treasure […]

Thursday, October 30, 2008 by Dave Blum A useful way of thinking about people is to consider them as icebergs.  As we all learned in school, the majority of an iceberg’s mass is below the surface.  What we actually see as we’re cruising around is only a very small portion of what an iceberg is all […]