Startups are notorious for having long hours, a lot of bumps in the road and many projects occurring simultaneously. When times get tough and your team is down, here are seven ways to keep them motivated. In many ways, startup employees are easy to motivate early on in a company’s life. Like founders, the earliest team members are hungry for a challenge, passionate about their product or solution and eager for knowledge and financial rewards. Nonetheless, it takes a significant amount of time for a successful company to develop, sell and iterate. Most companies are not Mailbox (which famously sold to Dropbox a month after launching). This leaves founders (and startup managers) with a big question: After months or even years of late nights and weekends, how do you keep your team motivated? Based on my two years of managing experience with Travefy -- an online group travel planner -- here are seven budget-friendly tips to keep your startup team motivated. Related: 10 Insights on Building, Motivating and Managing an Exceptional Team 1. Reiterate your vision. Then, reiterate your vision. When starting your company, you likely recruited talent not with the promise of dazzling six-figure paychecks or state-of-the-art facilities but rather with a strong vision of your company or product. The pay cuts and long hours are made worthwhile because of a belief in what you’re building and a desire to be a part of something new. Nonetheless, as time goes on, many founders stop sharing their vision or roadmap as they themselves get into the weeds. Don’t fall into this trap! Constantly share with your team the ever-changing visions and goals of the company. Remind them of what you’re all building towards and let them feel the excitement. 2. Remember that equity aligns interests. To this end, make sure that all interests are aligned by giving your team true company ownership -- through an employee stock options plan. Equity changes the employee mindset from “going to a job” to “being an owner.” This feeling of ownership can be an intense motivator throughout the long startup road. 3. Never create false urgency. Credibility is established over time and lost in an instant. False urgency or deadlines are a huge deterrent to morale and an easy way to lose credibility. Related: 7 Motivational Quotes Entrepreneurs Need to Live By By sharing your vision and roadmap, as well as ownership, you can organically ensure everyone understands the race against cash burn that all startups face. Don’t create burnout and distrust. Save those chips for the real times an insane deadline pops up -- because they will. 4. Recognize the power of food. Among the countless extrinsic motivators, food is inexpensive, universal and easy to manage. A weekly team lunch (or dinner for staying late) is a relative drop in the bucket compared to the goodwill and motivation it will create. Moreover, having food is also literally a productivity booster. The time employees would normally spend leaving to buy and eat food will now be spent as team bonding and a good meal will keep your team alert for the remainder of their daily tasks. As a note, this does not mean you need to hire a Google-style executive chef. At Travefy, we’ve had fun team barbecues with hot dogs and chips for eight people for less than $10 total. 5. Celebrate wins. While every day feels like a race from one project deliverable to the next, take the time to celebrate wins and milestones. Whether it’s a big development release, a customer-engagement milestone, or even a new skill mastered by a teammate, acknowledge it. Additionally, celebrating milestones helps put the overarching progress your team has undoubtedly made into perspective, which can be difficult on the day to day. 6. Plan non-work “team days”. From free things like a day in the park or an in-office video game night to budget friendly golf or beach outings, take the time to plan social “team days”. Everyone needs time to rejuvenate and social activities encourage friendships among coworkers. Don’t forget to invite families to team days or even those boyfriends and girlfriends who are also affected by long working days. 7. Be flexible . Look for opportunities to be accommodating to your team. This not only shows you trust your employees but allows people to focus on work product – the most important thing If it’s ever helpful for your team, let employees do things like work from home, time-shift hours or take an ad-hoc family day. Happy employees, who feel like their company has their best interests at heart, make for productive employees.
CNN) -- The grand jury in the case of Michael Brown's shooting didn't just face an onslaught of witnesses with conflicting memories of what happened the day white police officer Darren Wilson killed Brown, an unarmed black teenager. It also heard from witnesses who couldn't be believed at all. Some admitted lying. Others changed their stories under questioning. Prosecutors were so skeptical of one woman's account that they asked whether she might have dreamed about seeing the confrontation in Ferguson, Missouri, on August 9. Most of the dozens of witnesses who testified likely did their best to describe what they saw, but a review of thousands of pages of grand jury documents shows that untrustworthy testimony came from some witnesses on both sides.
US Totalitarian State Wins After All: Obama Reinstates NDAA Military Detention Provision Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/18/2012 13:23 -0400 Barack Obama FBI First Amendment Freedom of Information Act Middle East national intelligence national security New York City New York Times Obama Administration President Obama White House Just over a week ago, we wrote of the challenge to Obama's NDAA totalitarian bill. Hope remained that Chris Hedges' view of the indefinite detention as "unforgivable, unconstitutional, and exceedingly dangerous" would bolster judgment. However, as Russia Today reports , a lone appeals judge bowed down to the Obama administration late Monday and reauthorized the White House's ability to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or due process . On Monday, the US Justice Department asked for an emergency stay on the previous Chris Hedges'-driven order, and hours later US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Judge Raymond Lohier agreed to intervene and place a hold on the injunction. The stay will remain in effect until at least September 28, when a three-judge appeals court panel is expected to begin addressing the issue. It would appear the total fascist takeover of Amerika is drawing nearer by the day. Some background : What is ironic, is that in the ongoing absolute farce that is the theatrical presidential debate, there hasn't been one word uttered discussing precisely the kind of creeping totalitarian control, and Orwellian loss of constitutional rights, that the biparty-supported NDAA would have demanded out of the US republic. Why? Chris Hedges said it best: The oddest part of this legislation is that the FBI, the CIA, the director of national intelligence, the Pentagon and the attorney general didn’t support it . FBI Director Robert Mueller said he feared the bill would actually impede the bureau’s ability to investigate terrorism because it would be harder to win cooperation from suspects held by the military. “The possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain cooperation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly successful in gaining,” he told Congress. But it passed anyway. And I suspect it passed because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can . Via RT, Obama wins right to indefinitely detain Americans under NDAA : A lone appeals judge bowed down to the Obama administration late Monday and reauthorized the White House’s ability to indefinitely detain American citizens without charge or due process. Last week, a federal judge ruled that an temporary injunction on section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 must be made permanent, essentially barring the White House from ever enforcing a clause in the NDAA that can let them put any US citizen behind bars indefinitely over mere allegations of terrorist associations. On Monday, the US Justice Department asked for an emergency stay on that order, and hours later US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Judge Raymond Lohier agreed to intervene and place a hold on the injunction. The stay will remain in effect until at least September 28 , when a three-judge appeals court panel is expected to begin addressing the issue On December 31, 2011, US President Barack Obama signed the NDAA into law, even though he insisted on accompanying that authorization with a statement explaining his hesitance to essentially eliminate habeas corpus for the American people. “The fact that I support this bill as a whole does not mean I agree with everything in it,” President Obama wrote. “ In particular, I have signed this bill despite having serious reservations with certain provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation, and prosecution of suspected terrorists .” A lawsuit against the administration was filed shortly thereafter on behalf of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges and others, and Judge Forrest agreed with them in district court last week after months of debate. With the stay issued on Monday night, however, that justice’s decision has been destroyed. With only Judge Lohier’s single ruling on Monday, the federal government has been once again granted the go ahead to imprison any person "who was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners" until a poorly defined deadline described as merely “the end of the hostilities.” The ruling comes despite Judge Forrest's earlier decision that the NDAA fails to “pass constitutional muster” and that the legislation contained elements that had a "chilling impact on First Amendment rights” Because alleged terrorists are so broadly defined as to include anyone with simple associations with enemy forces, some members of the press have feared that simply speaking with adversaries of the state can land them behind bars. "First Amendment rights are guaranteed by the Constitution and cannot be legislated away," Judge Forrest wrote last week. " This Court rejects the Government's suggestion that American citizens can be placed in military detention indefinitely, for acts they could not predict might subject them to detention ." Bruce Afran, a co-counsel representing the plaintiffs in the case Hedges v Obama, said Monday that he suspects the White House has been relentless in this case because they are already employing the NDAA to imprison Americans, or plan to shortly. “A Department of Homeland Security bulletin was issued Friday claiming that the riots are likely to come to the US and saying that DHS is looking for the Islamic leaders of these likely riots,” Afran told Hedges for a blogpost published this week. “It is my view that this is why the government wants to reopen the NDAA — so it has a tool to round up would-be Islamic protesters before they can launch any protest, violent or otherwise. Right now there are no legal tools to arrest would-be protesters. The NDAA would give the government such power. Since the request to vacate the injunction only comes about on the day of the riots, and following the DHS bulletin, it seems to me that the two are connected . The government wants to reopen the NDAA injunction so that they can use it to block protests.” Within only hours of Afran’s statement being made public, demonstrators in New York City waged a day of protests in order to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Although it is not believed that the NDAA was used to justify any arrests, more than 180 political protesters were detained by the NYPD over the course of the day’s actions. One week earlier, the results of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union confirmed that the FBI has been monitoring Occupy protests in at least one instance, but the bureau would not give further details, citing that decision is "in the interest of national defense or foreign policy." Josh Gerstein, a reporter with Politico, reported on the stay late Monday and acknowledged that both Forrest and Lohier were appointed to the court by President Obama . As Chris Hedges said so well last week as he sued Barack Obama: This demented “war on terror” is as undefined and vague as such a conflict is in any totalitarian state. Dissent is increasingly equated in this country with treason. Enemies supposedly lurk in every organization that does not chant the patriotic mantras provided to it by the state. And this bill feeds a mounting state paranoia. It expands our permanent war to every spot on the globe. It erases fundamental constitutional liberties. It means we can no longer use the word “democracy” to describe our political system. The supine and gutless Democratic Party, which would have feigned outrage if George W. Bush had put this into law, appears willing, once again, to grant Obama a pass. But I won’t. What he has done is unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous. The threat and reach of al-Qaida—which I spent a year covering for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East—are marginal, despite the attacks of 9/11. The terrorist group poses no existential threat to the nation. It has been so disrupted and broken that it can barely function. Osama bin Laden was gunned down by commandos and his body dumped into the sea. Even the Pentagon says the organization is crippled. So why, a decade after the start of the so-called war on terror, do these draconian measures need to be implemented? Why do U.S. citizens now need to be specifically singled out for military detention and denial of due process when under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force the president can apparently find the legal cover to serve as judge, jury and executioner to assassinate U.S. citizens, as he did in the killing of the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen? Why is this bill necessary when the government routinely ignores our Fifth Amendment rights—“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”—as well as our First Amendment right of free speech? How much more power do they need to fight “terrorism”? Fear is the psychological weapon of choice for totalitarian systems of power. Make the people afraid. Get them to surrender their rights in the name of national security. And then finish off the few who aren’t afraid enough. If this law is not revoked we will be no different from any sordid military dictatorship. Its implementation will be a huge leap forward for the corporate oligarchs who plan to continue to plunder the nation and use state and military security to cow the population into submission . 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