Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (18 page)

Why? In KPMG’s own words to those interns, “Mentors can inspire you to meet challenges and achieve success. They enable you to see a wider realm of opportunities, and they provide valuable advice to help you excel in your career.”

Will all of those mentors and interns form a Remember the Force relationship? Hardly. No doubt there are many cases of interns who rarely contact their mentors, even when they are interning, much less after they leave or even take a job at KPMG. And equally likely, there are many busy KPMG partners and managers who make a pro forma contact with their young charges, stay in touch just enough to meet the company’s requirements, and never speak to the intern again. That said, there are more than enough successful such pairings to justify KPMG’s commitment to the program—with many more payoffs as those relationships mature through the years.

There is also a secondary benefit to KPMG’s mentoring program. As we’ve seen over and over, teams are almost always more productive than individuals. But teams also take time to create. A young college graduate dropped into a strange office in a different part of the country (or the world) is going to take time to find someone else with whom to pair up, much less with whom to build a larger team . . . time that individual doesn’t have in a comparatively short internship. By teaming the youngster with a veteran, KPMG radically shortens the learning curve, placing the intern into a competent (if not yet productive) pair-term on almost the day of his or her arrival. This newbie-veteran duo may not be optimal, but it is certainly better than legions of lost souls wasting much of their internship just trying to fit in.

11.0—THE DISTANT IDOL:
These are the ultimate “distance relationships.” One of the biggest bestsellers of the 1920s—indeed of the twentieth century—was
The Man Nobody Knows
. Written in 1925 by an advertising executive named Bruce Fairchild Barton,
The Man Nobody Knows
started a whole new genre of what might be called the “business-spiritual” book. Barton essentially retells the New Testament as a book of business strategy and management theory. Needless to say, the hero of the book is Jesus Christ, whom Barton
describes as “the Father of modern business” and “the greatest business executive of all time.” It was a clever conceit. Jesus emerges in the pages as a tough outdoorsman, a decisive manager, and an inspiring leader who took his start-up team (the twelve apostles) and built the biggest and greatest organization in history.

While some reviewers lampooned its seriousness and over-the-top theme, millions of businesspeople found in the book a new, very silent partner who had left this world nearly 2,000 years before. This wasn’t the first example of a mass movement of people, filling a void of meaning and purpose in their lives, who found inspiration—a partnership of sorts—with a great, if long-dead, figure. Almost a century before Barton’s, another book—this one a novel, and written by a truly great writer—explored the same theme. In Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black
a young village boy rises to the top of French society largely through his obsession with the exiled Napoleon and his desire to emulate the emperor’s ambition and ruthlessness.

Distant Idols are true
ghost partnerships
. In that respect, they take the mentor relationship to its ultimate extreme: one partner is long dead (or at least inaccessible) and has never met the living partner in person. Thus, the relationship in this pair-team is entirely one-directional, with the living partner asking, “What would my idol/mentor do?”—and that idol can only reply from a fixed repertoire of quotes and aphorisms.

Thus, the central dynamic of Distant Idol partnerships is that the living partner embarks on what can be a lifetime of research into that famous figure of the past to assemble the largest possible body of historical records (especially his or her spoken and written words) on that person, learns from that corpus, and then comes to understand the idol to the point that the living partner can imagine—even to the point of extrapolating new words—the advice the idol would give in this imaginary partnership.

To include this type of pair-team in this book may seem bizarre.
After all, how do you manage such a team? How does it grow? How is the advice of someone gone for centuries, or even millennia, directly applicable to business decision-making in the Internet-based world of the twenty-first century?

In fact, these relationships are more common than we know—and are willing to admit. We’ve already noted that
The Man Nobody Knows
was one of the great bestsellers of the last century; but so too was
Think and Grow Rich
, which invited readers to imagine asking questions at dinner with a famous historical board of directors, called the “mastermind.” If that type of book is an anachronism today (though many older readers will remember a television series on the similar theme of a dinner with great historical figures, produced by Steve Allen, that was broadcast in the early 1980s), it doesn’t mean that we’ve outgrown these relationships.

On the contrary, they’ve just taken different forms. Thus, witness the hugely popular run of business books distilling career and competitive advice from the most historic figures, such as the Chinese politician and philosopher Sun Tzu, the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, and most unlikely, the world-conquering tyrant Attila the Hun. That some of these books are partly tongue-in-cheek doesn’t diminish the seriousness with which they have been received—untold numbers of business professionals have taken their messages to heart and applied them to their careers.

Another modern manifestation of Distant Idol relationships derives from business-oriented print biographies and movie idealizations. Both derive from the hagiographies—idealized biographical portraits—of great men that first appeared in the Renaissance and continued into the twentieth century until the publication of Lytton Strachey’s
Eminent Victorians
, which introduced a trend of skepticism and warts-and-all biography that continues to this day.

Every year, scores of new business histories and biographies of famous figures appear, whose essential task is to place those idols
into the context of modern life and to derive lessons from them that can be applied today. We have hardly been immune to this trend: Rich’s
Forbes
column regularly lists the lessons of famous figures in industry, politics, and sports. Mike’s history of Hewlett-Packard even offered an appendix of “lessons from Bill & Dave.” Meanwhile, some of the most popular books of recent years, from Walter Isaacson’s
Steve Jobs
to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s
Team of Rivals
have been celebrated not just for their content but also for how their lessons can be applied by readers to their own lives. Some subjects—Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Churchill, Washington—have appealed as idols for generations: the number of books about Abraham Lincoln is in the thousands.

One reason these partnerships have proved so popular and enduring is that they escape a lot of the messiness of two living partners’ having to work together on a daily basis. The ghost partners never have annoying habits, they don’t have bad days, they never betray you, and the chance of a disagreement or a breakup on their part is zero. Moreover, these idols also never surprise, and they never fail—or at least they don’t in an unexpected way. You know they’ve succeeded, that the story has a happy ending (at least in their place in history)—that’s why you picked them. Meanwhile, you will never find another partner of this quality. There’s a lot to be said about having a partner with the courage of George Washington, the integrity of Abraham Lincoln, and the decisiveness of Elizabeth I, George Patton, or Alfred the Great.

On the other hand, Distant Idols never really grow or adapt to changing conditions. The ghost in the relationship is essentially a two-dimensional figure who cannot correct misinterpretations of his or her views or beliefs by the living partner, who is the sole (biased) interpreter. With a few exceptions, the pool of wisdom available from the idol is both small and limited in scope, meaning that a lot of that wisdom must be shoehorned—often inappropriately—into most situations.

That said, Distant Idol pairs can operate in the confidence that at least one of the members is world-class—unfortunately, it is the long-dead one.

12.0—THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD:
This is a “protection” pair. This duo differs from the Got Your Six pair because one member is strong and responsible while the other is weak and vulnerable. It is also different from the Remember the Force relationship because it is usually briefer and there is a lot more at stake—that is, one member of the pair-team has taken on the duty of protecting the other, renegade, member in the face of fundamental, usually bureaucratic, threats.

If you work in the corporate world, or in government, you have likely seen such a pair—or at least heard of one. They are the stuff of institutional myths. In a typical scenario, a particularly talented employee—often in a single-minded pursuit of a new idea—crashes into the corporate culture. The idea is too new, or too radical, or doesn’t properly align with the enterprise’s current business strategy, or the creative individual just doesn’t have enough political strength to carve out a protected position within the bureaucracy. If left to fend for himself, the maverick will quickly attract swarms of organizational antibodies—bookkeepers, middle managers, cost accountants, operations executives—who will summarily expel that perceived threat to the status quo.

Luckily, our renegade has a protector, a corporate knight-errant who chooses to defend that figure from those institutional threats. Sometimes this hero takes on the task for the right reasons and sometimes for the wrong ones, but ultimately the maverick is saved . . . and, with luck, the company is sent on a bright new path.

One of the least known, but most successful, examples in our time of such a Sword and Shield pairing led to the creation of what has been called the greatest invention of the twentieth century: the microprocessor.

The overall story of Intel’s invention of the microprocessor is well known. Busicom, a Japanese electronics firm that was rapidly becoming an also-ran in the desktop calculator wars of the late 1960s, decided to take one last pass at market victory by betting everything on a radical redesign of the integrated circuits used in its products. In particular, Busicom wanted to reduce the current standard chip set of several dozen chips to just eight to twelve—and thus enjoy an unequaled advantage in price, complexity, and size. It shopped the project to Intel Corp., one of many US semiconductor companies that had spun out of Fairchild Semiconductor to create the modern Silicon Valley, not just because Intel was known to be a technological leader but because it was run by Robert Noyce, a coinventor of the integrated circuit and a hero to the Japanese electronics industry.

Intel, a young, struggling company at the time, took the contract. Busicom sent over some of its engineers, and a bright young Intel scientist, Ted Hoff, was assigned as team leader. The plan was for the Busicom team to do most of the work while Hoff acted as an adviser and presided over their efforts. Meanwhile, he was expected to devote most of his time to helping Intel overcome a company-threatening collapse in the manufacturing yields of its memory chips.

Hoff did both jobs, but he soon realized that he had a much better idea for how to build the calculator chip set—this time with just a half dozen or fewer chips—based on the architecture of the revolutionary new VAX minicomputer made by Digital Equipment Corporation. So he went to Noyce and asked permission to pursue the idea. Noyce had every reason to refuse his request. Intel’s vice president, Andy Grove, was (rightly) demanding that Hoff, now that the Busicom scientists were nearly done, devote his time to saving Intel’s memory business. Meanwhile, the calculator business was now in full collapse and Busicom was headed for bankruptcy—meaning it might not even be able to pay for the work done to date.

But Noyce, one of the greatest visionaries and most fearless decision-makers of the digital age, followed his gut. He hid Hoff and the microprocessor in a corner of Intel’s labs and told him to pursue the microprocessor idea wherever it took him. Meanwhile, Noyce not only protected Hoff from Grove—and even, for a time, from cofounder Gordon Moore—but also from the rest of the company, the board of directors, and investors. He even allowed Hoff to form a first-rate team that included the Intel employees Stan Mazor and (hired from Busicom) Masatoshi Shima—and even, when Intel was squeezing its budget, to go outside and hire (from Fairchild) the superstar Federico Faggin, the inventor of the silicon gate. When Hoff was pulled away from the project, it was this team, working over the 1969 Christmas holidays, when the rest of the lab was empty, that built the four-chip set Intel 4004, the world’s first microprocessor.

Within the next decade, Intel would abandon the memory chip business and devote itself fully to the design and manufacture of the microprocessor—and make itself one of the most valuable and important companies in history, and the linchpin of the electronics age. Hoff, Faggin, Mazor, and Shima have been showered with honors—and will likely one day win the Nobel Prize. But it is Noyce, the charismatic, reckless, and endlessly lucky Silicon Valley legend, who is the secret hero of this story, betting his reputation and even the survival of his company to help another, much less powerful, man realize his dream.

Sword and Shield pairs are some of the most interesting of all teams, not least because the protectors often have little to gain and much to lose by even entering into such a partnership. They must spend considerable hard-earned political or cultural power to come to the aid of a person they likely barely know, on an initiative for which they will gain little credit. Sometimes the knights’ motives are noble—they believe in the idea, they want to shake up the organization from its complacency, they have a natural impulse to help
the underdog, or they see their younger selves in the maverick. And sometimes they are base—they want to ride the idea to the CEO’s office, they want to get the jump on a despised counterpart by stealing his or her best talent, or they are simply bored and want a new challenge. But whatever the motive—and sometimes they are just plain opaque to the outside observer—they are almost always heroic. The knight chooses to intervene and act, rather than stand back and not take the risk.