Who among us would not wish to have been a part of Apple's iPhone team? Sure, the work was hard, and they faced huge challenges and demanding, unreasonable, leaders -- iPod hero Tony Fadell captured the enormity of what the iPhone team accomplished when he recalled: “It was like the first moon mission, ... I’m used to a certain level of unknowns in a project, but there were so many new things here that it was just staggering” -- but they succeeded, and in the process experienced a touch of immortality that will last their entire professional careers. What more could any young tech-savvy geek ever ask for? Fame and recognition from a concentrated burst of superhuman effort! But, whatever happened to them after the lights went out?
For that matter, whatever happened to Apple's Mac or Lisa teams? Motorola's "Razr" team?
Who cares?
For the most part, it is true, we are nostalgic about our favorite teams. We cherish memories of our best team experiences, be they at work -- Craig Ventor's Human Genome Project team, Seymour Cray's Supercomputer team; in the military -- the U.S. Army's Delta Force, the SEALs; in sports -- the '98 New York Yankees, Cincinnati's Big Red Machine, Oracle's wonder America's Cup-winning crew, or even at school --West Point's class of 1976, etc. Teams are important in our lives. Even when they are not "formal", we tend to work daily in teams with co-workers/friends who make the passing of time each day well worth looking forward to. It is for such reasons that the prevailing logic in team development has long been, and remains: Hire for attitude, train for skills. After all, good attitudes make our workplace convivial, and when we all have to get up in the morning and face a day at work, "convivial" matters!
But, when "Big Change" is involved, conviviality goes out the window; "attitudes" are not enough, you need skills! And, with big skills come big attitudes. So, the new mantra for big change becomes: Hire for skills (because you need them), and figure out how to deal with the attitudes (because you'll have them, and they won't all be good). Such all-star teams become irresistible magnets for great talent, but the competition amongst such talent, and the pressure to excel, can be exhausting. Fred Vogelstein quotes Scott Forstall, formerly Apple’s senior vice president of iOS software, as recalling that he recruited big talent to the emerging iPhone team at Apple, by telling them: "You are a superstar in your current role. I have another project that I want you to consider. I can’t tell you what it is. All I can say is that you will have to give up nights and weekends and that you will work harder than you have ever worked in your life.” And, I suspect, that he also hinted that if they succeeded they would have a chance to change the world! It was Leonard Bernstein, after all, who was attracted to the West Side Story project, because he believed "this could change the face of American musical theater." Such dreams are certainly not modest, but neither is the talent being recruited. In our book Virtuoso Teams, Andy Boynton and I found similar sentiments used to attract the amazingly creative team of writers who worked for Sid Caesar [including: Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner], and the "Muckers" who worked on the incandescent light bulb with Thomas Edison. Miles Davis pushed, and pushed, and pushed in order to get the very best out of the talent that he had recruited for each of his big innovative projects, and no doubt J.Robert Oppenheimer was well-aware that when he brought young scientists out to Los Alamos that he was putting them into a high-pressure cauldron that would test all that they had, both intellectually and physically. Despite their glamor, these are not easy teams to be a part of!
These teams all burned bright, and then burned out. What I, personally, was not prepared for was the sense of loss that others express whenever I speak about such teams. There appears to be real regret that such teams are no more: What a shame the Apollo 13 organization disbanded! Couldn't we work to get Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young together again? Just think what the iPod team could have done if only they had stayed together? There will never be another Beatles! Why, even just last week, the now lone-remaining member of the New York Yankee "core four", team captain Derek Jeter, watched yet another teammate [Andy Pettitte] retire and reflected "“It’s been fun, it’s been sad.” Emotionally, I understand, but, professionally, I think that this nostalgia for high-performing teams is misplaced.
Each of these teams was fit for a single purpose: high-performance in the pursuit of a big objective, at a specific point in time, and in a unique competitive context. And, they all succeeded, some well-beyond their wildest dreams. They were never meant to sustain. In none of these instances were attitudes ever valued above skills. They were thoroughbreds groomed for one short race, and they delivered. But, there was nothing in their make-up that would allow them to do it again, or do it longer than necessary. Like an incandescent bulb, they illuminated all around them -- Lynda Gratton would say that they glowed -- and then it was over.
In fact, however, it's not entirely over, and, if you dig deep enough, you often discover that they are still changing the world, but no longer as a team.... they have individually become the leaders of the next generation of whatever industry, art or discipline that they are a part of. Be it Sid Caesar's writer Woody Allen going on to become a dominant figure in the movie world, or Miles Davis' pianist Herbie Hancock growing into a leadership role in contemporary jazz, West Side Story's Stephen Sondheim becoming Broadway's preeminent librettist of the late 20th century, or Apple's Tony Fadell going to to create the highly anticipated startup nest.com. The well-known leadership scholar Warren Bennis, has spoken about leaders having passed through "an intense, transformational experience that was at the very heart of becoming a leader." He refers to this as a "crucible," and I believe that "incandescent" team experiences, where much personal risk is involved in return for a flirtation with immortality, is exactly the sort of experience that not only has the potential to change our present world, but creates conditions beneficial for the formation of the next generation of leaders for the future, as well.
So, with great teams, it's better to let them glow, and then let them go. Brand them and disband them. At some point, when success is achieved, attitudes are a better bet than skills for the sustainable long-run.
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Bill Fischer is the co-author of Reinventing Giants (with Umberto Lago & Fang Liu) (Jossey-Bass, 2013), as well as The Idea Hunter (with Andy Boynton & Bill Bole) (Jossey-Bass, 2011) and Virtuoso Teams (with Andy Boynton, FT/Prentice Hall, 2005)). Bill can be followed on Twitter at @bill_fischer
