It’s that time of the year again.

Every March tens of millions of people participate in an NCAA Final Four office pool.

I’ve filled out office pool brackets since I was ten years old, when my mom would bring hers home from work.

But in 2009, I figured something out.

We’re all doing it wrong.

Stop me if this sounds familiar

Many office pools are free and exist to increase office camaraderie.

Those that do involve money usually keep the stakes friendly — everyone throws in a nominal sum, usually between $5 and $20, and fills out a bracket.

When the tournament is over, whoever had the top two or three brackets (often the non-sports fans) split up the winnings. Then everyone forgets about the whole thing until next year.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Yawn.

The standard office pool is boring and doesn’t create the office camaraderie everyone hopes it will.

There’s a better way to run it that’s more fun and brings employees closer.

I call it the Skill Swap.

How Skill Swap Began

In March of 2009, I was one of nine people attending Seth Godin’s Alternative MBA program.

I wanted to run a Final Four pool for the team but nobody else cared about college basketball and they certainly didn’t care about gambling a $10 entry fee.

So I changed how it worked.

How Skill Swap Works

Instead of throwing in $10, everyone donates a skill. Something they are good at.

There were 10 of us, so 10 skills were swapped.

The donated skills are listed publicly so people can browse the list during the tournament and learn more about their colleagues.

1. Seth offered Canadian Style canoe paddling lessons (called Omering).
2. Emily offered guitar lessons.
3. Al offered a comprehensive fitness and nutrition audit and consultation.
4. Susan offered to design an e-book.
5. Jon offered kayaking lessons.
6. Becca offered a “Day with Becca” personalized guided tour of Manhattan.
7. Alex offered to teach exactly how to make his famous melted ginger scallion sauce. (similar recipe here)
8. Ishita offered a personal coaching session on conquering fears in business.
9. Allan offered to teach someone how to read and build a cap table.
10. I offered to cook a 4 course home-cooked meal.

After the tournament, instead of winning money, the winner of the office pool gets to choose first from the donated skills. Second place gets second choice, and so on.

Jon took first and chose Becca’s guided tour of Manhattan.

Susan took second and chose Jon’s kayak lessons.

Seth took third and chose Susan’s offer to design an e-book.

And so on…

Everyone teaches. Everyone learns. Everyone wins.

Run Your Own Skill Swap: Free Templates

Here are some free templates to help you run your Skill Swap office pool.

• Skill Swap – GoogleSpreadsheet (click to open read-only, then choose File -> Make a Copy to save your own version)
• Skill Swap – PDF
• Skill Swap – Microsoft Excel

Optional Additional Rules

The skill should be something that can be delivered or taught in two hours or less.

You have one year to redeem the skill or it expires.

Why Skill Swap is Better

People generally do office pools to increase connection and camaraderie. But it doesn’t work. Nobody really cares about the $10 (and many people don’t even care about the tournament.)

The Skill Swap actually does increase connection and camaraderie.

Everyone is great at something.

Teaching that skill to a colleague helps everyone and brings employees closer.

Everyone teaches. Everyone learns. Everyone wins.

This year, instead of the traditional office pool, try the Skill Swap this year and bring employees closer.

Let me know how it goes in the comments below.

Election Day is tomorrow. Every rational poll says the race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is extremely close.

I’ll be watching closely to see who wins but not because I think either candidate understands what this country needs to move forward and even if they did, the bureaucracy of our political system is an innovation condom structured to prevent it.

Below are fifteen links I’ve curated on the topics of education, healthcare, the economy and innovation. These links are intended to be non-partisan and don’t explicitly endorse either candidate. These are the issues that I wish more people would read and understand and have intelligent discourse about.

These are the issues that I wish our two presidential candidates would read, watch and understand. Below are click-to-tweet buttons if you would like to share this post with your candidiate of choice or anyone else. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

I’m going to steal a convention I like from Fred Wilson, and list “The Money Quote” for each link.

Education:

1. TEDx: Stop Stealing Dreams: Seth Godin at TEDx talk asking the question nobody else is asking…….”What is School For?”

The Money Quote: (right after Seth has the crowd recite the standard student-to-teacher morning ritual call, “Good morning, Mr. Godin”)

“Have you thought about how, for 100 or 150 years, that was ingrained into the process of public education? Have you thought at all, as people on the cutting edge, as people who are interested in making school work again, about a very simple question? What is school for? I don’t think we’re answering that question. I don’t even think we’re asking that question. Everyone seems to think they know what school is for, but we’re not going to make anything happen until we can all agree, about how we got here, and where we’re going. My goal today is to put that question into your head and help you think about it.“

2. Stop Stealing Dreams Book: The full book, free in every format.

The Money Quote:

“Changing school doesn’t involve sharpening the pencil we’ve already got. School reform cannot succeed if it focuses on getting schools to do a better job of what we previously asked them to do. We don’t need more of what schools produce when they’re working as designed. The challenge, then, is to change the very output of the school before we start spending even more time and money improving the performance of the school.“

3. Changing Education Paradigms, Sir Ken Robinson.

The Money Quote:

“The current education system was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution.“

Healthcare:

4. The Road to Wellville, Jay Parkinson: 

Dr. Jay Parkinson outlines what a new, sustainable healthcare system might look like.

The Money Quote:

“We need designers to create from the ground up a new, sustainable, healthcare experience that’s split into three arms, each paid for with different business models than are applied today. Most important, these three systems should be focused on your needs, interoperable and powered by a platform that looks and functions like a secure Facebook designed to power health communication. You would be able to schedule your own appointments and email, IM, and videochat with your health professionals. You’d also have a guide, an expert in medical triage, to show you what kind of professional you need, how much you should spend, and who would be best for you in your area.”

5. A clinic with two doors, a symbol of two-tier care, Bill Dedman

The Money Quote:

“On Manhattan’s fashionable Upper East Side, the door on 77th Street says Lenox Hill Radiology. It’s a busy place, with 20 or 30 people typically waiting in chairs. It takes insurance. 

But if you walk a few steps down the block to Madison Avenue, and one block up to 78th Street, you’ll walk through the door of New York Private Medical Imaging. The waiting room has only four chairs, usually empty. It takes cash, checks and credit cards. You can try to recoup some of your money later if you have insurance.

Both doors ultimately lead to the same area of changing rooms and scanning equipment. The same technicians perform PET scans and MRIs on the same machines. The employees are warned, in a written policy, not to tell the patients about the other door.”

6. How American Healthcare Killed My Father, David Goldhill

The Money Quote:

“My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

7. The Cost Conundrum, Atul Gawande

Dr. Atul Gawande explains what the town of McAllen, Texas can teach us about healthcare.

The Money Quote:

“Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later? Getting the country’s best electrician on the job (he trained at Harvard, somebody tells you) isn’t going to solve this problem. Nor will changing the person who writes him the check.”

8. Here are a few questions to consider before talking intelligently about healthcare reform, Jay Parkinson

From Jay Parkinson’s blog. Even more detail here.

The Money Quote:

“Don’t do the internet thing and glance at all of these questions. Sit down, read them carefully. Think about each one. Ask the right questions about each one like who, what, when, where, and why. Find the answers. Then go and talk intelligently about healthcare.”

The Economy:

9. The forever recession (and the coming revolution), Seth Godin

Seth explains the forever recession, the race to the bottom, why job creation is a false idol and the opportunity of a lifetime.

The Money Quote:

“Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.

There’s a race to the bottom, one where communities fight to suspend labor and environmental rules in order to become the world’s cheapest supplier. The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win…”

10. VIDEO: Seth Godin explains the end of the industrial age 

In this discussion with George Stroumboulopoulos, Seth goes deeper on the forever recession and the end of the industrial age, and how as a society, we are completely unprepared for this revolution. He explains the way to win is to pick yourself and focus on the race to the top. Instead of being “the same but cheaper”, focus on being interesting, unique, noteworthy and more expensive.

The Money Quote:

“The recession is a forever recession. There’s a cyclical thing that comes and goes but there’s this other thing and it’s the end of the industrial age. It lasted for 80 years. For 80 years, you got a job, you did what you were told, you retired. And good people could make above average pay for average work. And it ended. And so 2012 is not going to be more of the same, it’s going to be worse of the same, in that the industrial age is going away and a new thing is going to take its place.”

11. A Capitalist’s Dilemma, Whoever Wins on Tuesday, Clayton Christensen

The Money Quote:

“Our approach to higher education is exacerbating our problems. Efficiency innovations often add workers with yesterday’s skills to the ranks of the unemployed. Empowering innovations, in turn, often change the nature of jobs — creating jobs that can’t be filled.

Today, the educational skills necessary to start companies that focus on empowering innovations are scarce. Yet our leaders are wasting education by shoveling out billions in Pell Grants and subsidized loans to students who graduate with skills and majors that employers cannot use.”

12. “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read”, Leonard E. Read

The classic essay by Leonard E. Read explains cooperation without coercion; how it takes thousands of people who live in many lands, speak different languages, practice different religions, and may even hate one another to cooperate to produce a simple pencil.

The Money Quote:

“Leave all creative energies uninhibited.”

Innovation

13. VIDEO: Clay Shirky on Cooperation Without Coordination

Clay Shirky explains how distributed version control systems like Github are really a revolutionary new form of arguing, what that means for how communities come together and how they can positively impact society at large.

The Money Quote:

“A momentous thing that can happen to a culture is they can acquire a new style of arguing: trial by jury, voting, peer review, now this. A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes, in the last decade in fact. It’s large. It’s distributed. It’s low cost. And it’s compatible with the ideals of democracy. The question for us now is, are we going to let the programmers keep it to themselves, or are we going to try to take it and press it into service for society at large?”

14. What happened to the future? We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. (The Founders Fund Manifesto)

In an in-depth look at Founders Fund’s investing thesis, the authors explain that human creativity and technical ability can build a better future for all humanity.

The Money Quote:

“The best founders want to radically change the world for the better. To many investors, visionary entrepreneurs come off as naïve or worse – isn’t it safer/easier/more profitable to create a(nother) social network for cat fanciers than to try to cure cancer, defeat terrorism, or organize the world’s information? The problem is that all start-ups are difficult – long hours, low pay, and fierce competition wear on even the most dedicated teams. The entrepreneurs who make it have a near-messianic attitude and believe their company is essential to making the world a better place. It doesn’t matter whether everyone agrees with the entrepreneur about the world-historical nature of the project – if the entrepreneur seeks an impact beyond his own payday and can convince employees of the same, the project is much more likely to get done. The engineers at SpaceX are passionate about commercializing and colonizing space; profit is a significant byproduct of their extraordinary effort to achieve that goal but not enough to get them to pull the thousandth all-nighter. The same is true of Jobs at Apple, or the programmers at Palantir, or the researchers at new drug companies. Early in a company’s life, an entrepreneur can make enough money to satisfy his own needs (though often not much of a return for the investor); to take a company from $50 million to $50 billion requires singular vision and dedication. Wild-eyed passion is not a bad thing by any means.”

15. The Awesomeness Manifesto, Umair Haque

Umair Haque argues convincingly that awesomeness is the new innovation.

The Money Quote:

“Let’s summarize. What is awesomeness? Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That’s a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics.”

16. Abundance is Our Future, Peter Diamandis

Peter Diamandis summarizes his excellent book Abundance in his 2012 TED Talk.

The Money Quote:

“I’m not saying we don’t have our set of problems — climate crisis, species extinction, water and energy shortage — we surely do. But ultimately, we knock them down.“

Thanks for reading. If you would like to share this post with your favorite candidate, or with anyone, feel free to use the click-to-tweet buttons below or share using this link: http://spnd.ws/16links.

If you have thoughts of your own or any other links you would like to share, I’d love to discuss in the comments, although I don’t want the discussion to get political and debate the merits of either candidate or party. If you want that debate, it’s easy to find. Thanks.