Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (14 page)

In August 2012, the pope of long-distance running came to Bismarck to see what it was all about. In the American distance running hierarchy, the inner sanctum of power and wisdom resides in Eugene, Oregon, home to the University of Oregon. The Oregon Ducks are the most famous men’s and women’s distance running program in the country. The legendary Steve Prefontaine was an Oregon Duck. The founder of Nike, Phil Knight, was an Oregon Duck mile-runner in the early 1960s. The Olympic trials for track and field are almost always held at Eugene’s Hayward Field, sometimes called the Vatican of track and field.

The “pope” of American long-distance running is, therefore, whoever is coach of the University of Oregon’s men’s and women’s distance running programs. Andy Powell is the latest—and there is hardly a serious high school runner, boy or girl, who doesn’t dream of running in the green and yellow colors of the Oregon Ducks, on Hayward Field’s track, for coach Andy Powell. Conversely, to get Coach Powell to take notice of you in high school is a high hurdle indeed.

Yet there he was, Oregon’s Andy Powell, in Bismarck. Powell had flown halfway across the country to take a look at Jake Leingang as a potential Oregon Duck recruit. Decked out in a lime green Oregon Nike golf shirt and khaki pants, Powell was all business—and sitting in a small office in Bismarck High’s basement physical education wing with Darrell A. and Dave Z. The Bismarck High coaches were dressed as usual in ratty cargo shorts and faded golf shirts. Immediately, Darrell A. tried to disarm Powell with his shambling low-key prairie humor, a mix of Garrison Keillor and Rick Moranis’s Canadian beer swiller Bob McKenzie. Dave Z. was a bit embarrassed by Darrell A.’s shtick. He said nothing but pulled his cap down, as if trying to disappear.

And therein lies a clue to why Darrell A. and Dave Z. form such
a powerful pair. Though driven by identical dreams of glory and fueled by a shared resentment of stupid coaching, Darrell A. and Dave Z. are different people at their cores. For one thing, Darrell is an extrovert, Dave Z. an introvert. Darrell also operates by feeling, while Dave Z. operates by numbers. On practice days, Darrell walks around and talks to each of the runners. How are you feeling? Feeling okay? Everything cool at home? School okay? Girl problems?

Off to the side stands Dave Z., head down, cap pulled tight, consulting his index cards. To hell with how anyone feels, he thinks. The calendar says Jake needs some brisk intervals today, at a one-mile-race pace.

It’s important to note that Dave Z. has not copied Jake’s daily workout from the Internet or from a book. He has calculated the numbers himself, from his own deep study of running theory, the time of year, and from the records he keeps on Jake’s progress. Dave Z. keeps meticulous records, and he revisits them almost daily. In the late hours at his apartment, alone, he works the numbers, makes his decisions, and prepares his index cards.

For Darrell A., principles are sacred but details are malleable, subject to feelings and gut instincts. He feels it is important to walk around, schmooze his athletes, and buck them up. Running isn’t just training and workouts; it is also about character. And it doesn’t end with graduation: Darrell A. has also developed a network of former Bismarck High track stars who have become successful in business and now donate money to the Bismarck program. One, a former high-jump state champion, is an oil developer worth more than $100 million. Another is a former sprint state champion who is now a nationally famous child psychiatrist. Like a good college athletic fundraiser, Darrell A. keeps close to his network of donors so that his Bismarck runners can get the best shoes and physical therapy, go to high-altitude training camps in Montana during the summer, and fly to races all around the country in the fall and spring.

Dave Z. could never do that, one suspects, even if he wanted to. It would kill him to ask anyone for money. The single Dave Z. is so introverted he has trouble asking women on dates, though women find him attractive. Dave Z.’s monkish behavior has even become an ongoing joke among the other coaches. The night that Bismarck won its seventh straight boys’ track state championship, Darrell A. held a party for coaches and donors at his house. The beer and whiskey flowed while Darrell A.’s wife unloaded pizza from the oven. Darrell A. presented each donor with a gift.

Dave Z. attended the party too, but the next day few could recall seeing him there. It turned out that Dave Z. had sneaked off to a quiet room in Darrell’s house to analyze video from the state meet. He was already thinking about next year. He was, and is, determined to be everything he wishes he had had in high school: a really smart coach. By comparison, Darrell has become the coach he wishes he’d had in high school: a faithful believer.

The differences between Darrell A. and Dave Z. are marked and noticeable within minutes of meeting them. But what unites them runs deeper. It is the need for exoneration. Dave Z. is convinced that his own high school running career was wrecked by lackadaisical small-town coaches, and he wants revenge in the best possible way. He wants to produce great runners. And he is willing to outplan, outcoach, and outthink any other high school track coach in the country to do this. Even if it means sneaking out to watch videos during a party.

Darrell A. had smart coaches in high school, but they were arrogant, bullying, old-school, and they disrespected the nonelite runner. They overlooked the brave heart of the small kid. Darrell A.’s life mission is to nourish every runner on the team, not just the best ones. He wants to motivate them all, and shine a light on their potential. Darrell A. knows that the top runners will emerge in time . . . and that they sometimes prove to be little wispy kids like Jake Leingang.

Darrell A. and Dave Z. are friendly toward each other, but not friends. Darrell A., married for thirty years, is comfortable with men and women, old and young, rich and poor, and though he would never say so, he tires of Dave Z.’s social awkwardness. Dave Z. gets bored, and sometimes irritated, with Darrell’s lightheartedness, his seeming to not take things seriously.

In July 2012, Darrell Anderson, the older of the pair, won the national high school coach of the year for boys’ track and field. Receiving the award, Darrell A. said his only goal now was to be in the audience when the younger and equally deserving Dave Z. got his award.

PAIRS COME IN MANY FORMS

Pairs are the most fundamental human teams. Indeed, pairing is so common to human existence that we often forget that it is not the case for other animals. For example, many predators pair during their mating periods but often operate solo the rest of the time. Some—like most cats, big and small—barely do even that. Others, like foxes and hawks, may pair up for a season, until the babies are grown, then go their separate ways. Other predators, especially mammals, such as hyenas, wolves, orcas, dolphins, and the family dog, operate in packs, as do crocodiles, army ants, and, the fossil record suggests, certain dinosaurs. Other animals, especially herbivores, form herds, flocks, or colonies, sometimes of enormous size.

By the same token, some other animals—gibbons, wolves, and eagles among them—will mate for life even as they exist within a larger grouping. These are some of the most enduring “teams” in the animal kingdom, though they are almost always based on reproduction and rearing rather than efficiency or productivity. That said, a phenomenon that looks very much like human “friendship”
between two individuals can be found across the animal kingdom—and even across species.

The classic example of this behavior is the abandoned infant creature of one species being taken up by the nursing mother of another. But there are also well-documented examples of animals, often merely because of proximity, taking up close and enduring “friendships”—the thoroughbred race horse with a goat or dog; a dog and cat living in the same house; pigs with household pets; and so forth. Sometimes these animal friendships result in what can only be described as “teamwork”—like the dog nosing open the bedroom door so that the cat can jump on the bed and awaken the owners—but with the exception of human beings, there are almost no examples of such pairs forming specifically for instrumental purposes.

But humans constantly form teams—usually first as pairs that coalesce into larger groupings—but, in emergencies, we have been known to form coordinating, effective, and trusting pairs in seconds. Think of the everyday folks who pair up to rescue others in burning buildings or to defend themselves in firefights or who rush to save an individual trapped down a cliff. That we have this ability, uniquely among all living things, cannot be a coincidence. Arguably, even more than language (after all, spontaneous pairs and teams can form without a word), it is this talent that singles out our species—that is, a talent that is not just a sense of self (once falsely assigned solely to humans) but a sense of the selfhood of
others
, and an innate understanding that by partnering with another person, we can accomplish things we cannot do by ourselves.

While our capacity to quickly, instrumentally, and effectively form teams argues for team-building as fundamental to human nature and society, the astonishing range of
types
of teams, beginning with pairs, shows the universality and flexibility of this phenomenon in daily life.

As far as we can determine, there has never been a listing—a taxonomy—of the various types of human pairs. So we decided to create one, and before we were done, even we were astonished by how many different forms pairs can take. And these are just professional pairings: if we were to add the many types of pairs that appear in private and social life, this list might double or triple.

For now, though, we believe it might be of immediate assistance to the reader in forming, identifying, and managing teams in their own enterprises. Let’s begin in the next chapter.

W
e like to think of ourselves as individuals. And in one respect that is certainly the case: our consciousness is locked into our individual brains, forever isolating us—Descartes’s “ghost in a machine”—from ever fully merging our identities with those of others.

And yet, if we were to track every second of our waking lives, we would probably find that we are interacting with others at least as often as we are alone. And no other type of interaction takes place more often in our daily existence than an interaction with a single other person. As solitary as we imagine ourselves to be, we are just as much binary. One reason is biological: We mate with one person at a time; we typically speak with only one person at a time (even if we are addressing thousands); and we even smell each other’s pheromones as individuals. The archaeological evidence suggests that this has always been so, and that the breeding pair pair-bond has been the single most dominant cultural phenomenon for most
of the million years that hominids have walked the earth—and certainly for the 20,000-year history of modern humankind.

In other words, to be human is to be a member, both serially and in parallel, with a succession of pairs—numbering perhaps in the hundreds—over the course of a lifetime. Nothing that consumes so much of our existence on earth can be anything less than genetically advantageous . . . and indeed, statistically speaking, being married (that most common and enduring pairing) confers distinct advantages over being single in terms of one’s overall health, income, and life expectancy. The following is a taxonomy—a classification—of the twelve different forms, in four categories (occasion, similarity, inequality, and difference) that professional pairings can take. It is based on both research and our own careers as journalists dealing with every manner of Silicon Valley start-up pairs.

PAIRS DEFINED BY OCCASION

1.0—GOT YOUR SIX:
We put this type of pair first because it is different from all the others. It is the most spontaneous, the shortest lived, and likely the oldest. Thus it is probably the most fundamental of all teams. The term comes from the military: if twelve o’clock is directly in front of us, then six o’clock is directly behind, the direction from which we are most vulnerable. “I’ve got your six” meaning “I’ve got your back” is a modern phrase, but it was surely stated in some form before the walls of Troy, and certainly among the Spartans at Thermopylae. Its most mythical American moment occurs at the O.K. Corral, where Doc Holliday backs up Wyatt Earp (the phrase from the movie, “I’m your huckleberry,” echoes the most famous fictional team of this type). Among the most celebrated examples of this kind of partnership are those of the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and the frontiersmen John C. Frémont and Kit Carson.

Note that this kind of pairing typically exists during crises and emergencies. The two individuals involved may not even know each other. It is only when facing a threat that such pairings are created—and when that threat is removed, the members of the pair usually go their separate ways again. For all of their evanescence, Got Your Six teams have some extraordinary attributes—none more so than the complete trust each member of the pair puts in the other. The implied message is “Focus on what is in front of you, I’ll take of whatever comes from behind—even if I die in the process.” This is humanity at its most selfless, which means it is both rare and short-lived.

Because of the intensity of this relationship—there is no greater commitment two people can make to each other than to put their lives in each other’s hands—the Got Your Six relationship may be the strongest of all teams. The almost superhuman strength of such a relationship is a force multiplier over the individual fighting alone or even with another person at a lower level of trust. It is also a reason Got Your Six teams are usually short-lived—human beings can maintain that kind of intensity for only so long—and quickly devolve, once the challenge is met, either to friendship or mere acquaintanceship. It is also a very narrow form of partnership, targeted at one type of challenge, and one not really adaptable for other tasks.

2.0—THIS MAGIC MOMENT:
“Magical” pair-teams resemble
Castor and Pollux
teams in almost every way but two:

•
      
The two members may have accomplished little without the other, but together they accomplish extraordinary things.

•
      
Unlike the perfect pairs, these duos typically exist for a much briefer duration.

Magic Moment pairs exhibit behavior similar to that of a brief but intense love affair. Their members often know they have
met their perfect partner almost from the moment of their first encounter—the equivalent in professional life of love at first sight.

Magic Moment pairs are most visible in the performing arts, especially music, in which the fruits of collaboration are almost instantly apparent. Musical duets can form almost instantly and produce astonishing results: Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines, Billie Holiday and Lester Young, Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. In cinema, the magic of such duos—often romantic pairs—can be almost instantly apparent: Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, William Powell and Myrna Loy, John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, John Gilbert and Greta Garbo.

The most successful—and certainly the most famous—of these musical magic duos is John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They are listed as a magical pair instead of a perfect Castor and Pollux because their partnership, despite beginning in childhood, was comparatively short, ending in their early twenties; and because their collaboration was even shorter—they were essentially solo artists by the time of
Sgt. Pepper’s
. Yet in the brief interval from Hamburg at the beginning of the 1960s to global superstardom at the end of that decade, Lennon and McCartney produced the most valuable and influential corpus of popular music of all time. The zenith of this collaboration was probably “A Day in the Life” on
Sgt. Pepper’s
, in which Lennon’s social commentary and modernist anomie in the writing and singing of the primary lyrics is perfectly countered by McCartney’s chugging urban proletarian ditty in the bridge. In retrospect, and based on their later solo careers, neither John nor Paul could have written this song alone.

In the business world, the best place to find the traces of these magical partnerships is in patent filings. Much of modern technology and science is multidisciplinary; thus, outside of a few Renaissance men and women, it is typically the product of electrical engineering and software code, or solid-state physics and inorganic
chemistry, or microwave and semiconductor technology—and lately, computer science and biotechnology. This almost always requires a collaboration, often for just a matter of months, between two innovators in different fields. In the Internet age, these fundamental partnerships now extend to between code writers and marketers and other seemingly incompatible combinations. Pierre Omidyar was a code writer when he founded eBay (as AuctionWeb) and hired as his first employee and CEO Jeff Skoll, a Stanford MBA with a background in the Internet. Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page were both computer science graduate students at Stanford.

Perhaps the most famous contemporary example of a Magic Moment pair is that of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The authors of this book were in a position to see this pair (along with Omidyar-Skoll and Brin-Page) almost from the day of its creation. The popular myth is that the two young men, who met in high school, were close to being a perfect pair, as discussed in the previous section. The reality was much different. For one thing, the famous pair were not really childhood friends. Their age difference was such that they really only overlapped for a year of high school, when Wozniak was already a celebrated young technologist (he’d earned his first media attention for a junior high school science project, and later for planting a fake bomb at his high school). At that point, Steve Jobs was just a little kid.

In person at that young age, the two young men were very different from their later personas. Wozniak was the voluble one, the one with a job and career, and something of a jock. Jobs, the future charismatic idol of millions, was shy, mercurial to the point of being obnoxious, and comparatively antisocial. Different as they were, they had a spark between them that was obvious from almost the first moment they met. Wozniak saw in the younger boy an enthusiast for his work, a visionary, and, most important, someone with a plan. Jobs brought a sense of destiny, and he made Woz’s life thrilling. And though their names will be tied together forever, in
reality they worked together closely for less than a decade, and only a couple of years into Apple.

Had Wozniak never met Steve Jobs, it is highly likely that he would have stayed at HP—and been part of its ill-fated move to Corvallis, Oregon. Like many others, he would have probably come back to the Valley . . . and been yet another bit player in the Homebrew Computer Club. The personal revolution would have happened with or without Apple; it just would have started a couple years later, and might never have had the galvanizing event that was the Apple II’s introduction. These days, if he had survived the many layoffs, Woz would likely be an aging and anonymous HP engineer with a few patents under his belt, putting in a last couple of years before retirement. As for Steve Jobs, his type of genius would have had a hard time finding purchase, even among the start-ups of Silicon Valley, where he likely would have jumped from one failure to another. His personality would have been a deal-breaker in any company he didn’t run; and he was too harsh to have eventually become a venture capitalist. In the end, he would have probably left Silicon Valley.

But none of that happened, because Woz and Jobs had their “magic moment.” Such Magic Moment pairs are among the most creative phenomena in human existence; they are supernova events. The fact that two very different individuals can, even briefly, join together in such a way that both can work at the absolute peak of their abilities is a kind of miracle. Think Edison and William J. Tanner working on the incandescent lightbulb; or John Bardeen and Walter Brattain on the semiconductor transistor. One of the oddest business Magic Moment pairs was that of the high-rolling playboy William Durant and the sober, hyper-rationalist Alfred Sloan—a short-lived combination that set General Motors on the path to being the world’s most valuable company of its day.

In the arts, probably the most famous and influential such partnership was that between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. The
two worked together only briefly, and rarely encountered each other in the decades that followed. But during their legendary few months as a team they developed cubism—and set the direction of modern art. A comparable, though much more volatile, pairing took place twenty years earlier between Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.

3.0—CHAINED TOGETHER BY SUCCESS:
These are “antagonistic partnerships” . . . and they can be the strangest, scariest, and most remarkable of any pair type. In particular, “Chained” pairs feature a duo of people who are hugely successful together, but for various reasons—lifestyle, personality, stage of career, and so forth—simply do not get along with each other. Indeed, this antagonism can often lead to outright hatred . . . and end in loud, sometimes violent, and often legendary breakups.

The most famous example—indeed, it is the archetype, and even the subject of a film (
Topsy-Turvy
)—is the legendary Victorian operetta team of William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. The two men appeared not just to despise each other but also to hate the predicament in which they eventually found themselves: solo, their careers went nowhere; together, they produced immortal work. Being trapped in such a partnership must be its own particular hell—the world is forever pressing you together, seeing you as perfect partners, sometimes even seeing you as one person indivisible. Meanwhile, if you break up the team, all your success and fame could just fade away—though some Chained team members become so unhappy that they risk it anyway.

Chained teams are typically well known precisely because of their volatile nature. For one thing, if they weren’t wildly successful, they would have happily split up. And, of course, these teams also feed certain human perversities: both the schadenfreude of knowing that their great success has come with equally great frustration, and the excitement of waiting for the inevitable explosion.
And when that explosion does come, it usually makes for good copy and bestselling memoirs.

Chained teams can be found almost everywhere. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart—the latter so bad a drunk that Rodgers dumped him at the height of their success to take a risk with Oscar Hammerstein. The Beach Boys’ Mike Love and Brian Wilson, who recently reunited after decades—only to split up again. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, by both temperament and employment natural competitors, who found their greatest fame paired as movie reviewers. Intel founders Bob Noyce and Andrew Grove, who feuded (at least on the part of the inflammatory Grove toward the indifferent Noyce) even as they built one of the world’s most valuable companies.

We’ll discuss the Everly Brothers in the Castor and Pollux section—and, to a degree, they belong here as well. But their Chained relationship pales next to, say, Sam and Dave, whose breakup reportedly involved knives. The Lennon-McCartney pairing also began to look chained by the time of
The White Album
. Rod Stewart being fired by Jeff Beck, and Dizzy Gillespie stabbing Cab Calloway are also classic examples. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby created perhaps the most successful duo in film history but rarely saw each other off the set; and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis didn’t speak to each other for decades after they broke up. Neil Simon famously captured the complicated love-hate (mostly hate) nature of one of these pairs in his comedy of old vaudeville partners,
The Sunshine Boys
.