Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (21 page)

Only when it was discovered that a basic patent for a field-effect transistor already existed did Bell Labs decide to put all three names on a patent application for a “point-contact transistor,”
officially invented on December 23, 1947. Declaring the situation “intolerable,” Bardeen soon left for the University of Illinois (where he would win a second Nobel Prize, for his work in superconductors). Brattain asked to be transferred to another division at AT&T. While Bardeen and Brattain remained close friends, they had almost no contact with Shockley. The famous photograph of the three of them in the lab, Shockley sitting at a microscope, was a tense session . . . and the last time the three men would be in one room for almost a decade.

Nine years later, Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley were awarded the Nobel Prize. By then, Shockley had already walked out of Bell Labs (where there were celebrations at his departure) and had gone to California to start his own company—Shockley Transistor—and get rich. He celebrated his Nobel Prize with the same new employees who would walk out on him a few months later.

When they arrived in Sweden for the Nobel ceremony, the two old lab partners hung out together, like the pair-team they had once been (they were a classic “Yin and Yang” pair: Bardeen the theorist who pondered in his office, Brattain the builder who made Bardeen’s vision—in this case the famous arrowhead of plastic, holding two gold wires and embedded in a slab of germanium—a reality). Shockley was largely shunned. Nevertheless, after the ceremony, the three men were seen toasting each other with champagne well into the night. They had, after all, changed the world. And their names would live forever.

2.0—PARALLEL TRIOS:
Often what we perceive as a trio is, in fact, two pairs sharing a common member, while the other two members rarely interact.

Parallel Trios are the most powerful of the trio architectures. There are several reasons for this. The first is that because the members of the trio don’t actually all work together, it is possible to fill the two outside roles with individuals who are the best at what
they do without worrying about their compatibility with the other, only their compatibility with the sole inside member.

This architecture also features its own inherent hierarchy: Inside, because he or she is the traffic cop between the two outsiders, is the uncontested leader of the trio. This solves a lot of the stress found in most trios as the members struggle for dominance. Inside sets the rules, acts as the synthesizer, establishes goals and milestones, and settles differences.

A famous parallel trio story we told in
Chapter 7
is worth repeating here: the three scientists at Intel who invented the microprocessor in 1970. That project began when a Japanese calculator company, Busicom, approached Intel, then a memory chip company, with a custom order to reduce the number of chips in its new desktop calculator. Busicom was desperate—the calculator business was undergoing a shakeout and also-ran Busicom didn’t think it would survive without a real breakthrough.

The man who fielded the Busicom contract was a young scientist named Ted Hoff. He saw in the Japanese company’s problem a way to rethink chip architecture along the lines of the hot new minicomputers then being built by the likes of Digital Equipment Corporation. When the Japanese sent over a team to work at Intel under his supervision, Hoff realized that there was another, even better, way to design this chip set. He then went to Intel’s cofounder Bob Noyce (himself the coinventor of the integrated circuit) and proposed a second, “skunkworks” project. Noyce, even though he knew that Intel was at that moment at real risk of bankruptcy from the low yield rates on its memory chip production, gave Hoff the green light and hid the project the best he could.

Hoff, in turn, assembled a design team composed of Federico Faggin (the inventor of the silicon gate, recruited from Fairchild), Masatoshi Shima from Busicom, and a software expert and Intel employee, Stan Mazor. It was this trio that went on to create the Intel model 4004, the first microprocessor, as well as the 8008, the
true precursor of all modern processors. But at almost no time were the three scientists working as a trio—indeed, like their direct predecessors Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen, the three were rarely even in the same room.

In reality, the microprocessor was Faggin’s project. He organized the team, established the specifications of the finished product, and led the design and production of the four-chip set. Because Faggin’s expertise was hardware, he tended to work more with Shima, assigning him specific tasks on the different chips. He also took over all the hardware design work when Shima returned to Japan. Mazor, being a software expert, tended to work more independently: his job was to deliver the operating code to load into the 4004 when the chips were ready.

So, in practice, the Intel microprocessor trio operated as two overlapping pairs, one composed of Faggin and Shima, the other of Faggin and Mazor. This was a distinctly different arrangement than the Bell Labs trio, which was a tight pair that kept the third player at arm’s length. One reason for this is that the microprocessor trio was formed that way (rather than created out of desperation); another is that the Intel trio viewed each other more as equals, and Faggin’s supervisory role was clear. The National Medal of Technology and Innovation committee saw it the same way forty years later, when it gave the award to Faggin and Mazor, the two Americans, and to Hoff as the visionary. (Sadly, as with the integrated circuit, Noyce had already died.)

3.0—SERIAL TRIOS:
Serial trios differ from Parallel Trios in a temporal way. Rather than the one common member dividing his or her time between the two other members, the various members of the trio simply, and sequentially, work briefly with each other in pairs.

Serial Trios are particularly powerful because there is no need for compromise among the players. You don’t have to have the Insider of the Parallel Trio, who is required to bring to the party not
only his or her own skills, but also a talent for being a traffic cop and diplomat. Rather, as long as the three can work out an arrangement among themselves to constrain the contact between the pairs that don’t get along, and to connect and disconnect for as long or short as necessary, all three are free to run at full speed. And that in turn means that you recruit for that team the very best people for the job. As long as they can stay together, they will be damn near unstoppable.

As it turns out, that famous Parallel Trio that created the microprocessor was managed by the even more famous Serial Trio that ran Intel Corporation. Mike has written a book about this trio of Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andrew Grove. Arguably, this was the most successful business trio of all time, as Intel would at one point at the beginning of the twenty-first century be the most valuable manufacturing company on the planet. And, as the original guardians of Dr. Moore’s legendary law, this trio can also be credited with creating the modern digital world.

If you read the official histories of Intel, this trio is always presented as a troika of equals, working harmoniously as a team leading the company to glory at the vanguard of the semiconductor industry. The reality was much more difficult; the interrelationships between the three men were both complicated and sometimes contradictory—just like real human beings, not mythology.

The three men were very different from each other. Bob Noyce was one of life’s natural winners: graceful, charismatic, a wild risk-taker who almost always swept the table, a man who seemed to toy with his career as if it were a game. In a just world—and a longer life—he would have won as many as three Nobel Prizes, one of them for the integrated circuit. Gordon Moore was a local Valley boy, the son of a sheriff, with one of the most powerful minds in high tech. Kindly and self-effacing, he would also devise his law of semiconductors—which would prove to be the metronome of modern life. And Andy Grove: ferociously brilliant and just plain
ferocious; arguably the greatest business leader of the second half of the twentieth century.

It should be obvious from just looking at their résumés that there was no way these three men were going to link arms in a kumbaya and together run the most innovative company in the most competitive of all industries of the era. This was especially true in the relationship between Noyce, who seemed to take nothing seriously, and his employee Grove, who took everything seriously. In fact, Noyce didn’t even take Grove entirely seriously—remember, he green-lighted the microprocessor project behind Grove’s back—and Grove was contemptuous of Noyce, whom he considered irresponsible with the company and its employees. Grove almost didn’t join Intel in the first place after he learned that Noyce would be involved. Moore, meanwhile, floated above it all as Noyce’s partner and friend, and as Grove’s mentor and boss.

It was even more complicated than that, because as much as Grove admired Moore, they never socialized; meanwhile, Grove and Noyce and their families did socialize—at least in the early years. As Grove grew older and played on the global scene, he became more like Noyce. And Noyce found himself engaged in the creation of the government-industry initiative Sematech that forced him to buckle down and manage in a way he never had before . . . and the relentless stress may have contributed to his early death at age sixty-two.

Tellingly (and a real challenge for Intel’s marketing), for all their fame as the Intel “trinity” who led the company for almost twenty years—and the surviving two members for more than a decade after that—there is really only one photograph of the three men together. And, once you get past the wide ties and long sideburns, even that photograph is symbolic: Noyce and Moore stand together behind a table, while Grove has kicked one leg up onto it, both team insider and outsider.

So, how did these three very different men not only manage one of the fastest-growing companies in business history but also lead Intel to the top of the pile in a trillion-dollar, cutthroat industry that destroyed scores of its competitors?

The answer is that they managed to work together almost continuously, without ever really working together. There was no single inside person to act as centerpiece of the trio, as there would be with a Parallel Trio. Noyce was officially the top executive of the company—but as we’ve seen, he sometimes would go renegade and set up side projects. He also was notorious—especially in Grove’s eyes—for being conflict-averse: he was almost constitutionally unable to fire anyone. Moore wasn’t much better, and his interests were far removed from the day-to-day operations of the company; rather, he was (rightly) focused on keeping Intel the technological leader. As for Grove, he was the one member of the trio who was concentrated on the day-to-day operations of the company. But as the junior member of the trio, he was constantly overruled by the other two—most frustratingly by Noyce—and thus devoted much of his time to angling for the independence and responsibility he thought he deserved.

And yet, for all the frictions and resentments, the trio worked—brilliantly. Why? There are three reasons:

•
      
Their talents and seniority nicely lined up with the classic alignment at the top of a company: CEO (Noyce), R&D director (Moore), and COO (Grove).

•
      
Intel grew so fast, and faced such unrelenting technical and competitive challenges, that it was enough to keep the three members of the trio engaged on a full-time basis.

•
      
Intel’s long-term success was such that upward mobility was available at the top. Thus, Noyce slowly detached himself from Intel as he became a national industry figure—leaving room for
Grove to move up to running the company and finding his true destiny. Meanwhile, Moore, now an industry legend and company chairman, could continue in his role as Noyce’s friend and Grove’s mentor.

It is our sense that all successful Serial Trios are like this: complicated, explosive, dynamic, and constantly readjusting their power alignments. They find a way to deal with each other—sometimes by minimizing direct contact; sometimes by using the third member as an intermediary or a cover or filter; sometimes by simply staying away; and sometimes just by gritting their teeth and waiting for better times. They almost always do (or endure) this because:

•
      
Despite their differences, they respect the unique talents of each other.

•
      
The project upon which they are embarked is so interesting, challenging, or rewarding that it dwarfs any interpersonal differences they may have.

Certainly this was true with the Intel trinity. Noyce put up with Grove’s maneuvering because he knew that Andy was tough enough to run Intel in a way that he himself could not. The same for Moore, who stood by Andy in good times and bad. As for Andy, feeling unappreciated and slighted—and not a little jealous of the ease and fame of the other two—his reward for being patient and getting along with Noyce was to become the CEO of the world’s most important company, receive recognition as a great business leader, and even become
Time
magazine’s person of the year.

4.0—INSTRUMENTAL TRIOS:
If 2+1 trios are the easiest to construct, and Parallel Trios the most powerful, Instrumental Trios—three people with carefully defined roles working together on a single, equally well-defined task—are the most consistently successful.

When we think of instrumental trios, we naturally gravitate to sports—where the roles are carefully circumscribed and the results are immediate—and particularly to baseball and the three players of the classic double play combination: shortstop, second base, and first base. And from there, of course, we find ourselves with Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance of the Chicago Cubs from 1902 to 1912. Thanks to Franklin Pierce Adams’s poem “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon” in the
New York Evening Mail
. . .

These are the saddest of possible words:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”