We talk a lot about teamwork. Collaboration is the newit-kid in the business world. But a degree of healthy competition within a team is a good thing. The key is to balance competition with collaboration. Here are some things to keep in mind when adding a little friendly competition to your office:

It has often been said that there is no better place to teach character than on the playing field, where sports can instill the life lessons that prepare young people for success. The most common lessons in sports concern resilience, teamwork, competitiveness, discipline, leadership and how to overcome fear and other adversity.

So while the word — and the practice — might make you roll your eyes, playing hardball can be useful and even necessary when the stakes are high. But please, use sparingly both verbally and in action.

I was fired for not meeting 100 percent or higher of my performance goals. I feel these goals are unattainable. People are fired if they are at 99 percent. Is an employer allowed to set those types of goals?

Lately, with the news worldwide being somewhat bleak, I thought I’d write about trust -— since it seems to be waning a bit. Trust is something we commonly talk about in business, in leadership, in politics. It’s something we aspire to build and yet still seems challenging to grasp. So here’s my attempt to define trust and how it manifests in our lives.

These days, college athletics is as much about big business as competition on the field. We recently sat down with Sacramento State Athletic Director Bill Macriss to talk about the challenges small programs face as they try to compete with the behemoths of big-time college sports.

Tuohy was approached by Legends’ management to help them pitch their vision of the arena’s new way of doing things to the Kings: hyperlocal, fully integrated, super complicated but ultimately worth it.

When Oleg Kaganovich was growing up in Michigan in the 1980s and early ’90s, his city of Grand Rapids was suffering the doughnut effect then typical of downtowns everywhere: Shoppers and residents were fleeing for the suburbs. By 1990, fewer than one in 10 residents shopped regularly downtown, a drop from about one in three in the early 1960s, according to a local newspaper.

How did Nagle, now 62, go from weed-puller to angel investor? He shares his maxims of leadership, including how he somehow reads 300 emails a day, makes work an obsession and why he feels soccer is the future of America.

Moore believes UC Davis could be the first institution in the country to have an approved clinical trial using banked stem cells in a young, athletic population.

More youth are participating in competitive (tryout-based), travel teams that practice more often and play additional games, often year-round, as parents shell out thousands of dollars per child, per sport, per year. The stakes are high. Or so they seem, as college scholarships or professional careers beckon at the finish line.

In September 2014, the River Cats signed a two-year affiliation agreement with the San Francisco Giants, effectively ending the team’s 15-year partnership with the Oakland Athletics. Less than two years later, the two clubs have inked a new four-year deal, extending the agreement through 2020, marking one of the few times the Giants have signed a four-year agreement with a Triple-A affiliate.

Dominik Jakubek, one of two goalkeepers for Sacramento Republic FC, makes a diving save on a shot during practice at Bonney Field. Jakubek joined the franchise as an original member in 2014. He was 34 years old when he was signed.

Did you know that Sacramento has been home to professional basketball, football, indoor soccer, outdoor soccer, baseball, tennis and rugby teams? We highlight 12 of our sports milestones and 10 standout athletes.