American Leadership Books

The same workplace game. Triple the price The same workplace game can cost dramatically more when the customer is a corporation. One example in Gini Graham Scott’s research: a simulation priced at $16.60 for students can cost $49 for a corporate trainee. Other workplace simulations can reach $168 per person. That raises a bigger question: Are companies paying for better learning—or simply paying more for access? The workplace gaming industry is growing fast. But measuring participation is not the same as measuring results. Read more on our Substack

Do you think your workplace uses games? Maybe you don't call them games. A leaderboard. A badge. A business simulation. A role-play exercise. A team challenge. These are all different ways organizations use games to influence learning, performance, decision-making, and participation. There are 9 different kinds of workplace games. How many can you name? Read Gini's latest Substack to discover all nine and see how businesses are using them gini.substack.com

A game isn't automatically a good learning experience. Research points to something more important: Design. What does the learner have to decide? What feedback do they receive? What happens when they fail? And most importantly… What does that experience actually teach them? The value isn't simply in adding a game. It's in designing an experience that helps people learn.

Checkout more on our Substack gini.substack.com

When the Roman Empire began to crumble in the fifth century, the games its people had played for generations did not crumble with it. Knucklebones kept rattling in taverns and courtyards, dice kept rolling across marked tables, and the race game the Romans called Tabula kept its board of twenty-four points essentially intact, simply changing hands and names as new peoples took it up. gini.substack.com/p/games-fr…

There is a particular kind of grief that belongs to children over the loss of identity and understanding who and where they are, but they are unable to put that into words. For example, a seven-year-old girl who has fled a bombed city and landed in a foreign classroom does not say: I have lost my sense of self, my relationship to place, my native tongue, the neighborhood I knew by feel in the dark. She says nothing, or she says it with her body by sitting apart, by not raising her hand, and by crying at a sound she cannot explain. The war Russia launched against Ukraine in February 2022 has created more than a million such children scattered across the continent and beyond, caught in the middle of growing up while everything that growing up depends on has been taken from them or put violently in doubt.

There is a story that the world doesn’t often tell about Ukraine that goes back more than a thousand years to a time when the land along the Dnipro River was among the most powerful, prosperous, cosmopolitan civilizations on earth. Understanding that story is essential to understanding why Ukraine has not broken under the weight of the most devastating war in Europe since World War II — and why, against all odds, it is now turning that war around.

Health and Mental Health Among Ukrainian Refugees in America open.substack.com/pub/gini/p…