“Proud to call Garmin a great workplace”

 

 

In my job, I get to talk a lot. To customers at expos. To journalists at trade shows. To fellow runners at races. To fellow cyclists at rides. To geocachers at events. To the camera in a tutorial video. To you in this blog. Usually I’m talking about our newest products, their coolest features, and how they can help all of you get a little (or a lot) more out of your favorite activities. But recently a local news crew wanted to talk about how great it is to have Garmin as part of the Kansas City area. The weekly “Proud to Call it Home” segment showcases local businesses and organizations, what makes them unique and what they add to our community. So that day, my job was to talk about how much I love my job. After Jon, our VP of Communications, shared his perspective on our company’s local start and global growth, I gave the camera crew a tour of our facilities. You can watch the video and read the story here, as what started as a 20-minute chat lasted more than two hours. Partly because I like to talk, but mostly because I had great stuff to talk about.

 

I discussed our vertical integration, and how engineers and salespeople and writers and designers all have a voice in product development. But it’s not just our brilliant, creative, energetic people who make Garmin a great place to work. It’s that we’re encouraged to pursue our passions and live a healthy, active lifestyle. And as a leader in the outdoor and fitness industries, that just makes sense. So I enjoyed showing off our fitness rooms full of folks on exercise equipment and colleagues playing table tennis and foosball. I invited them to my office, which has my bike perched against the wall while waiting to hit the road before or after work or over lunch. And when the tour wrapped up and the cameras were packed away, I realized that it’s not hard work talking about a great workplace.

Garmin FR60 Fitness Watch

The Garmin FR60 is a versatile heart rate monitor that can measure speed and distance while running or biking.

http://www.youtube.com/v/eiVjVVessmE?f=videos&app=youtube_gdata

Flagstaff Challenge in 3D

Most office rivalries rise to a boil at conference tables and water coolers. At Google’s Boulder office, our grudge matches play out across topo lines. Last week, our third annual “Flagstaff Challenge” blasted off up Flagstaff Road, Boulder, Colorado’s signature hill-climb. Over 1,500 feet of elevation gain, the Flagstaff Challenge (mapped below) attempts to answer our office’s ultimate water cooler question – what’s really faster: two wheels or two feet?

Bloggers in the office fired up Google’s KML Embed Gadget to cook up an embedded Google Earth course map (if the map below is not in 3D, try installing the Google Earth plug-in, then start embedding KML’s on your own site!).

 

As our route map shows, Flagstaff’s paved switchbacks criss-cross its running trail all the way up to the finish point, making this slice of topography perfect for an office grudge match between cyclists and runners.

While there was a good bit of trash-talking over GMail and in the halls leading up to the Challenge, Googlers generally prefer to let data speak for itself. Minutes after our team returned to the office, folks were already using Google Earth’s GPS tools to visualize tracks and dissect elevation profiles recorded on their My Tracks app or fitness units.

And yes, a few folks from the Docs team even fired up spreadsheets to run statistical analyses on the finish times. After accounting for outliers (those un-named Geo folks who actually got lost!), it turns out that there was no statistically significant difference between the cyclists and the runners. That just means our office feud will have to simmer for another year; enough time to sharpen our fitness and also the Geo tools we use to share and analyze our weekday warrior exploits!