Checklists & Goals & Racing - Oh My!

DMC held our periodic all-day off-site company meeting on February 8th at Melrose Park Grand Prix.

Business topics covered included:

1. Checklists - motivated by the book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, by Atul Gawande. A simplified synopsis of the book is that the use of checklists prevents mistakes and frees the mind by removing the focus on determining if the routine things are taken care of. Most applicable example would be pre-flight checklists used by airplane pilots. We spent the session determining what checklists we could use to imporve our operations.
2. Goals - we spent a fair amount of time planning out our company goals for the next 90 days and what specific tasks each of us can complete to contribute to those goals.

After the business part of the day, we got down to the fun part - indoor kart racing. For those who aren't familiar wit these venues, we were in an industrial building converted into an indoor go-kart track. The karts are high-performance and the track is challenging. We've held several events at Chicago Indoor Racing in the past and, although CIR is fantastic, the overall consensus was that Melrose Park Grand Prix was a more exciting experience.

After a practice round and three additional qualifying heats, there was a race-off of the top 11 drivers. Although there was a little controversy, Ken Brey emerged as the top-dog racer for the day. Full results for the final are here:

You can check out a few videos from the racing below: