“I wouldn't believe it if I didn't see it with my own eyes,” says Murrel Karsh '90, nearly speechless after the record-breaking performance by a group of employees from Diamond Management &Technology Consultants in one of the corporate team-building challenges developed by Karsh's Chicago-based company, Windy City Fieldhouse. The Diamond team managed to assemble a rectangular puzzle of wooden planks in a stunning 12.6 seconds, beating the previous record of 13 seconds which had stood for three years.

“It's unbelievable,” says Karsh.“Had I not seen it, I would have thought one of our guys had timed it wrong.”

But even more unbelievable—and something Karsh didn't even discover until a month after the fact—is that now, the world record-holder of an activity created by a Haverford graduate is held by…another Haverford graduate, Adam Gutstein '84, CEO and president of Diamond.

Ten years ago, Murrel Karsh founded Windy City Fieldhouse as an homage of sorts to the Haverford field house, of which the former baseball player has fond memories.“I came up with the idea of building a field house with no membership fees where a variety of sports could be played.” In December of 1997 the 55,000 square foot facility opened its doors.

It wasn't long before Karsh began drawing on his experiences as a senior manager at Accenture to devise new uses for Windy City Fieldhouse.“I had been through lots of team-building programs, most of which were not very good,” he says,“and coming from the consulting world, I had a different take on them than players or vendors in the industry. I wanted to host team-building events that provided a much greater value than the traditional programs that existed.” He went on to build WCF into a widely respected entertainment company that creates interactive programs, picnics, races, scavenger hunts and more for corporations across the country, and was recently named Best Team-Building Company of the Year by Illinois Meetings and Events Magazine.

The Team Challenge is one of WCF's most popular programs; participants are broken into teams of 10 or 15 people and compete head-to-head at one of four different stations for 20-25 minutes before rotating to different stations.“The goal is to enhance teamwork, group communication, and problem-solving,” says Karsh.“Companies like the competitive, almost exclusively non-physical nature of it.” One of the activities in the Team Challenge is called Puzzling Planks, where 14 pieces of wood between two and six inches in length fit together in a specific pattern to form seven overlapping rectangles. Teams are given 20 minutes to develop a strategic plan and practice assembling the puzzle; when five minutes are left, they begin from the starting position (all of the boards stacked longest to shortest) and see which team can put the puzzle together in the fastest time. Most executive teams, according to Karsh, complete the task in one to two minutes.

Diamond Management and Technology Consultants participated in Puzzling Planks on Oct. 6, 2006. From the start, Karsh was keeping an eye on Adam Gutstein's team because it included a CEO and had been boasting that they would be the fastest group of the day and possibly break the all-time record. Karsh was initially skeptical, as he had heard this from many groups before:“Even if you gave someone a week, it would be almost impossible to break that record. If everyone on the team had perfect knowledge of the puzzle, it would be pretty challenging to do it in less than 13 seconds.” But Gutstein's team performed well in the practice rounds, and their determination to set a new record made Karsh and his colleagues more focused on timing them as accurately as possible.

Now that a new record stands, could it ever be broken?“It's theoretically possible,” says Karsh.“But can it be done in under 11 or 10 seconds? No. There's simply a physical barrier as to how long it takes to put those boards together.”

Karsh sees the feat performed by Gutstein and his team as a testament to teamwork within the company.“Clearly, this was a very bright group of individuals who absolutely knew how to work well together,” he says.“One person can't dominate the activity. Everyone has to know their role. Everyone has to understand how his or her piece of the puzzle literally fits into the big picture.”

-Brenna McBride