Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (20 page)

T
rios, troikas, triplets—we are endlessly enamored and intrigued with teams composed of three members. Dumas’s Three Musketeers
—
Porthos, Athos, and Aramis—and their cry
Tous pour un, un pour tous!
(“All for one and one for all!”) remain endlessly entertaining, as shown by the fact that a cinematic version of the story is filmed every few years.

And yet, though few notice, even this archetypical three-person team really comes to life only with the addition of a fourth player, D’Artagnan. Even then, the three swordsmen remain largely a part of the backdrop, their characters pretty much indistinguishable. Only D’Artagnan, the nonmember—or perhaps more accurately, as the end of the novel underscores, the
fourth
member of the trio—seems fully three-dimensional. Perhaps that’s why it is he who devises that famous cry of trio brotherhood for the other three.

As the subtitle of this chapter suggests, if pairs are like inert gases—pairing up and becoming profoundly stable—trios are more
like radioactive elements: they seem to exist for only a brief time before they break down to their natural state, pairs. It is important to appreciate that fact up front. Make the most of your trios for as long as they exist, but don’t depend on them to survive, and don’t be caught surprised when they fail.

A HALL OF FAME TRIO

One of the most successful trios of all time is one you may have watched every Sunday for a decade without ever noticing. It also swapped out its key member once without missing a beat. And of those four members of this trio, three are now in a hall of fame—and, if enough people understood his role, the fourth might be there too. Interestingly, the key to this trio’s success lay not in the members themselves but in the person who managed them, who designed a way to deploy the trio in a revolutionary, and devastating, way that changed their industry forever.

We’re talking about the trio that was the heart of the offense of the San Francisco 49ers during the seasons between 1985 and 1995. The four members were quarterback Joe Montana, who was effectively replaced by Steve Young in 1991, halfback Roger Craig, and wide receiver Jerry Rice. The coach who recruited this trio and designed the revolutionary “West Coast” offense to make the best use of their talents was Bill Walsh, often listed as the best NFL coach of all time.

To understand why this trio was so effective—it won four Super Bowls, put Montana, Young, Rice, and Walsh in the hall, and made the Niners of the era one of the most celebrated sports teams ever—we need to look more closely at Walsh’s much-imitated West Coast offense and the roles that each of these players filled. Interestingly, beyond the obvious talents of these players—Montana’s legendary cool under fire, Young’s athleticism, and Rice’s famous
hands—the secret to their success lies with the least celebrated of the group and his singular gift for deception.

Consider the classic play by this trio. It unfolds like this: Montana or Young takes the snap, steps back, and turns. Craig runs forward and either takes the handoff and runs for a gap in the offensive line, or fakes the handoff and does the same maneuver or swings around toward either end. If Montana or Young still has the ball in this “quarterback option” (as the two men are, respectively, right- and left-handed, their moves are mirror images), they can either run with the ball (Young’s strength) or follow Craig and throw him a lateral pass, or throw downfield to Rice, who by now has escaped coverage and has the best hands in NFL history.

It is a devastating offense that took a generation for other NFL defensive teams to combat. Even though many of the offenses of those teams tried to copy the West Coast offense, none ever did it as effectively as the 49ers.

So why did it work so well? There are two explanations, one simple and the other complex. The complex one is Bill Walsh. As it happens, both of the authors of this book knew Coach Walsh pretty well. Rich regularly interviewed Walsh for a column in
Forbes ASAP
magazine. Mike helped Walsh organize his thoughts for a potential book on coaching. What we both remember most about the late legend was his extraordinary, almost superhuman mental organization. Even as he sat on the floor, wincing from chronic back pain as he pressed his spine against an office wall, he would say things like, “Coaching has four components: logistics, strategy, tactics and contingencies. Logistics has eight components: recruiting . . .” and so forth. He could go for an hour that way, talking his way through a vast, unbelievably detailed outline in his head.

At the heart of Walsh’s coaching model was what might be called
controlled randomness
. It may sound like a non sequitur, but what “controlled randomness” means is that Coach Walsh understood that a sport as fast-moving, unpredictable, and violent as pro
football cannot be completely controlled. But it can be given a certain structure at multiple levels that can channel events, if not completely control them. Thus, Walsh’s tiered coaching model:

  
1.
   
Logistics: Recruit the best possible team to match your coaching style and the talents of your key players.

  
2.
   
Strategy: Plan for the entire season based on the qualities of your opponents; organize to peak at the season’s end.

  
3.
   
Tactics: With that strategy, plan for individual games. Build a strong game plan and stick to it.

  
4.
   
Contingencies: Like a general, you must understand that all plans begin to fall apart the moment the shooting begins. Don’t panic, just act decisively when reacting to the new reality.

Note that at each level, Walsh accepts a level of randomness—of the unexpected—that can show up at any moment. Thus, his famous clipboard, on which he pre-scripted the first ten plays in the game. Many people assumed that Walsh did this so that he wouldn’t get so excited by the action on the field and—as many coaches do—start calling plays for the moment and thus deviate from the game plan. This was indeed the case, but less noticed was that the actual plays on that script were specifically selected in order to
inject
randomness into his play-calling—to make the Niners unpredictable and keep the opposing team’s defense guessing. This randomness can also be seen in the legendary story that, before the 1990 Super Bowl in New Orleans, Walsh met the team as it arrived at the hotel dressed as a bellhop—a little bit of unexpected humor to keep the team loose.

Now, let’s go back to that basic West Coast offense play. Here is the apotheosis of Walsh’s controlled randomness. If you look closely, the key figure in this complex dance is Roger Craig. Craig was one of the most balanced halfbacks ever: in 1986, he became the first NFL player to both rush and receive for 1,000 yards in a
season. This balance, which was at the heart of Walsh’s play-calling, was also critical to his offense.

The idea was that, as Craig approached Montana or Young, the odds of his taking or faking the handoff were, thanks to his history, essentially equal. That meant that the defense—the defensive line and the linebackers behind them—couldn’t bet on Craig’s dominant skills, as they could with other halfbacks and fullbacks in the league (like, say, John Riggins of the Washington Redskins). As a result, they had to hesitate for a split second for Roger Craig to commit (if they didn’t, and went ahead and executed, say, a run defense, Coach Walsh would notice and play-call a fake handoff and pass to take advantage of this early commitment).

This is where Roger Craig’s real talent came in. Back in 1983, when he was drafted by the Niners (forty-ninth overall that year), Craig was mostly noted for a high-stepping running style that made him hard to tackle and had led him to several records while playing college football for the Nebraska Cornhuskers. What few noticed—besides Walsh—was that Craig had another talent: duplicity. Roger Craig had one of the best handoff fakes in the business.

So, Montana/Young pivots and moves to hand off the ball. Craig deftly tucks with both arms and charges the line. Does he have the ball or not? Another half second passes as the defensive players hesitate to make sure. . . .

It’s a fake! The defense shifts to pass protection mode. Montana steps forward into the pocket, or Young swings to his left. Meanwhile, thanks to that fraction of a second of defensive hesitation that Craig has given Jerry Rice, the most famous hands in NFL history have just gained a step on their defender—which is all Rice has ever needed. The throw, soft and spinning clockwise from Montana, sharp and spinning counterclockwise from Young, is snatched from the air by Jerry Rice’s huge hands . . . and he is on his way.

Would Rice still be the greatest receiver in NFL history without that half-second advantage Roger Craig gave him? Probably, but he might not hold as many receiving records. Would Rice, Young, and Montana be the football legends they are without Bill Walsh’s strategic genius? That’s another matter. What we do know is that under the right leadership (Walsh) and the right organization (the West Coast offense) a trio of extraordinary skill was able to work so well together that it reached the pinnacle of achievement in its industry—and, just as remarkably, was able to repeat that achievement even after replacing one of the three members.

Even now, as his ideas have been assimilated in all of football, from the NFL to Pop Warner, Bill Walsh (“the professor”) is regularly acclaimed as the most innovative coach in professional football history, and one of the greatest coaches in all sports. But to fully appreciate what he accomplished, you need to look past the Lombardi trophies and the legends, and, with fresh eyes, look at the game films and his offense in action. Beyond the obvious structural novelty of the West Coast offense, something magical is also going on in those plays when the three players were at their peak.

But the fact that we remember great trios—“Tinker to Evers to Chance”—and that most of them seem to show up in sports, should also be a warning. Dreaming of trios and actually making them work in all but the most synthetic situations are two very different things.
¹

SUCCESSFUL TRIOS IN FOUR TYPES

In our experience, trio teams inevitably take one of four forms:

1.0—2+1:
This, the most primitive trio, is really, at its core, a pair—to which has been added a third player in a vital but not an intimate partnerlike role.

The greatest strength of this type of trio is, again, that it’s not really a trio, but a pair, with a third peripheral person acting as a consultant or a specialist. In some ways this is the best of both worlds. Pairs are structurally much stronger. They are also usually more efficient. But pairs also, by definition, lack the intellectual heft, and the bandwidth, of trios. Adding that third member as a utility player, who can add expertise, time, and energy when necessary, can be a valuable addition. This is particularly true when the two members of the pair bring their common expertise to a task within that expertise, while the third member, the +1, can add a discrete but vital skill when needed.

A particularly useful scenario in a 2+1 team is one in which the two core members share complementary skills and the third brings his or her own specific expertise—for example, software to two hardware experts, marketing or publicity to a designer and manufacturer—to the project. Ideally, the three should work together, but yet another advantage to the 2+1 architecture is that the +1 participant need only be part-time, dipping in when needed. This opens the door to making that third member a world-class expert who may have only limited time to give.

In the history of science, perhaps the single most famous example of this is the invention of the transistor. Walter Brattain and John Bardeen were physicists at Bell Labs who, in the late 1930s, saw a demonstration of how an insulator (silicon, germanium, and so forth) could be “doped”—that is, impregnated—with certain impurities (such as fluorine) to make it a “semiconductor.” An electronic current could then be run through this semiconductor and turned on and off by a second, much smaller, electric current passing through it at right angles (a silicon switch or “gate”).

Brattain and Bardeen were eager to start experimenting with these new semiconductors—but World War II got in the way. Returning after the war, the two men began looking at ways in which
this new technology could be used to create solid-state electronic switches that would be smaller and cooler, and use less electricity—and most of all, be much more durable—than the fragile glass vacuum tubes currently used for the job.

The timing was perfect. Their boss, William Shockley, then head of Bell Labs’ Solid State Physics Group, had been assigned the task of developing a solid-state amplifier. Shockley suggested to the two scientists that one possible approach might be to look into semiconductors. And though he continued to be their official overseer, Shockley mostly left Bardeen and Brattain alone—a good thing, as he is often considered, after driving the “Traitorous Eight” to mutiny at his future company and essentially creating the modern Silicon Valley by default, to have been one of the worst bosses of all time. During the course of the development, he also offered solutions to technical problems when the pair encountered them. Bardeen and Brattain approached the famous scientist only when those problems proved intractable, because Shockley was not only a genius but also almost impossible to work with: arrogant, paranoid, and dismissive of lesser mortals.

When they did approach him, Shockley lived up to his billing—unfortunately, in every way. He not only solved their problems, but when the two other scientists finally demonstrated their new “transistor,” an angry Shockley accused them of working behind his back. “There’s more than enough glory in this for everybody!” Brattain reportedly shouted at him—but that didn’t deter Shockley from going to Bell Labs’ corporate headquarters and demanding that it file for a patent on the new device, which he described as a “field-effect transistor,” solely under Shockley’s name for having suggested the original idea.