They challenge their people early and often, and move them around more than in most companies. They don't want anybody to get too comfortable in one job.

People were way overstating the amount of skills they had.

Even in tough economic times, when most companies cut back on training and on relocating people to develop their skills, these companies keep right on doing it. That gives them a broad pool of people to promote. And it helps with retention, too, because employees can see long-term opportunities.

It's been a challenge, there's no question about that. We just haven't been able to come up with a formula to get this team to play Mercer Island basketball.

It's just been a challenge. We've had several contracts that have never come to fruition.

Once they released the challenge, we only had six weeks to build the robot.