Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations

by Rich Karlgaard, Michael S. Malone

Overview

A groundbreaking book that sheds new light on the vital importance of teams as the fundamental unit of organization and competition in the global economy.

Teams—we depend on them for both our professional success and our personal happiness. But isn't it odd how little scrutiny we give them? The teams that make up our lives are created mostly by luck, happenstance, or circumstance—but rarely by design. In trivial matters—say, a bowling team, the leadership of a neighborhood group, or a holiday party committee—success by serendipity is already risky enough. But when it comes to actions by fast-moving start-ups, major corporations, nonprofit institutions, and governments, leaving things to chance can be downright dangerous.

Offering vivid reports of the latest scientific research, compelling case studies, and great storytelling, Team Genius shows managers and executives that the planning, design, and management of great teams no longer have to be a black art. It explores solutions to essential questions that could spell the difference between success and obsolescence. Do you know how to reorganize your subpar teams to turn them into top performers? Can you identify which of the top-performing teams in your company are reaching the end of their life span? Do you have the courage to shut them down? Do you know how to create a replacement team that will be just as effective—without losing time or damaging morale? And, most important, are your teams the right size for the job?

Throughout, Rich Karlgaard and Michael S. Malone share insights and real-life examples gleaned from their careers as journalists, analysts, investors, and globetrotting entrepreneurs, meeting successful teams and team leaders to reveal some "new truths":

• The right team size is usually one fewer person than what managers think they need.
• The greatest question facing good teams is not how to succeed, but how to die.
• Good "chemistry" often makes for the least effective teams.
• Cognitive diversity yields the highest performance gains—but only if you understand what it is.
• How to find the "bliss point" in team intimacy—and become three times more productive.
• How to identify destructive team members before they do harm.
• Why small teams are 40 percent more likely to create a successful breakthrough than a solo genius is.
• Why groups of 7 (± 2), 150, and 1,500 are magic sizes for teams.

Eye-opening, grounded, and essential, Team Genius is the next big idea to revolutionize business.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062302540
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/07/2015
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	304,940
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Rich Karlgaard is the publisher of Forbes magazine, where he writes a featured column, Innovation Rules, covering business and leadership issues. An accomplished entrepreneur as well as a journalist and speaker, he is a cofounder of Upside magazine, Garage Technology Partners, and Silicon Valley's premier public business forum, the 7,500-member Churchill Club. He is also the author of Life 2.0 and The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success. He lives with his family in Silicon Valley.

Michael S. Malone is one of the world's best-known technology writers. A veteran newspaper reporter and columnist, magazine editor, and entrepreneur, he is the author or coauthor of nearly twenty award-winning books, notably the bestselling The Virtual Corporation, Bill & Dave, and The Intel Trinity.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Power of Teams xi

1 Change Kills-If You Don't Have the Right Teams 1

2 The Magic Numbers Behind Teams 16

3 The New Science of Teams 35

4 The Power of Difference 61

5 Managing Teams to Genius 92

6 The Power of Pairs 101

7 Successful Pairing: The Building Blocks of Teams 115

1.0 Got Your Six 116

2.0 This Magic Moment 117

3.0 Chained Together by Success 121

4.0 Here and There 124

5.0 Together, We're More Than Two 124

6.0 Castor and Pollux 126

7.0 Lifeboats 129

8.0 Yin and Yang 131

8.1 The Artist and the Angel 133

9.0 Counterweights 135

9.1 Inside/Outside 138

9.1.1 Finder and Grinder 139

9.1.2 Pitcher and Fielder 140

9.1.3 Explorer and Navigator 140

10.0 Remember the Force 141

11.0 The Distant Idol 145

12.0 The Sword and the Shield 149

8 Trios: The Plutonium of Teams 160

1.0 2 + 1 165

2.0 Parallel Trios 168

3.0 Serial Trios 170

4.0 Instrumental Trios 174

9 Four and More: The Wild Bunch 183

7±2 Teams 187

15±3 Teams 192

10 Scaling Up without Blowing Up 200

11 The Birth and Life of Teams 210

12 The Retirement and Death of Teams 236

Acknowledgments 251

Notes 253

Index 273

Editorial Reviews

With 300,000 team members around the world, thousands of trucks, and hundreds of aircraft, FedEx delivers more than 2 billion packages a year. We can only do this with exceptional teams of people. Team Genius advances our thinking on what makes highly effective and maneuverable teams.” — FREDERICK W. SMITH, founder, and chief executive officer, FedEx Corporation

“Companies thrive when employees are empowered to do their best work every day. Inclusive teams that value diverse perspectives and have passion for new ideas encourage continuous learning. Team Genius offers a practical approach to fostering top-performing teams.” — SATYA NADELLA, chief executive officer, Microsoft

“Team Genius explores a question key for any organization: What causes teams to succeed or fail? Karlgaard and Malone look at how leaders can create conditions for success by embracing differences within teams, bringing out the best in people, and understanding that we are hardwired to collaborate.” — ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, founder of Huffington Post Media and author of Thrive

“Today’s exponential entrepreneur-anyone interested in going big, creating wealth, and impacting the world-must leverage the world’s talent. Team Genius shows how.” — PETER H. DIAMANDIS, MD, chairman and chief executive officer, X PRIZE; executive chairman, Singularity University; New York Times bestselling author of Abundance and Bold

“Persuasive and crucial…Team Genius, a splendid example of team achievement, lays out what you need to know about a subject that’s becoming more important than ever to an organization’s success.” — Steve Forbes, Forbes

“What topic is this dream team of writers bringing us? The very nature and architecture of dream teams-how to think about them, staff and support them, and when to dismantle them and build anew.” — 800-CEO-Read

“This book offers valuable insights for twenty-first-century management.” — Booklist

“In Team Genius, [Karlgaard and Malone] explore the numbers game and explain the surprising correlations between success and team size.” — Success magazine

“a useful overview of the science of teams….” — Financial Times

From the Publisher

With 300,000 team members around the world, thousands of trucks, and hundreds of aircraft, FedEx delivers more than 2 billion packages a year. We can only do this with exceptional teams of people. Team Genius advances our thinking on what makes highly effective and maneuverable teams.

FREDERICK W. SMITH

Persuasive and crucial…Team Genius, a splendid example of team achievement, lays out what you need to know about a subject that’s becoming more important than ever to an organization’s success.

Steve Forbes

In Team Genius, [Karlgaard and Malone] explore the numbers game and explain the surprising correlations between success and team size.

Success magazine

a useful overview of the science of teams….

Financial Times

This book offers valuable insights for twenty-first-century management.

Booklist

Team Genius explores a question key for any organization: What causes teams to succeed or fail? Karlgaard and Malone look at how leaders can create conditions for success by embracing differences within teams, bringing out the best in people, and understanding that we are hardwired to collaborate.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON

Today’s exponential entrepreneur-anyone interested in going big, creating wealth, and impacting the world-must leverage the world’s talent. Team Genius shows how.

PETER H. DIAMANDIS

What topic is this dream team of writers bringing us? The very nature and architecture of dream teams-how to think about them, staff and support them, and when to dismantle them and build anew.

800-CEO-Read

Companies thrive when employees are empowered to do their best work every day. Inclusive teams that value diverse perspectives and have passion for new ideas encourage continuous learning. Team Genius offers a practical approach to fostering top-performing teams.

SATYA NADELLA

a useful overview of the science of teams….

Financial Times

This book offers valuable insights for twenty-first-century management.

Booklist

With 300,000 team members around the world, thousands of trucks, and hundreds of aircraft, FedEx delivers more than 2 billion packages a year. We can only do this with exceptional teams of people. TEAM GENIUS advances our thinking on what makes highly effective and maneuverable teams.

Frederick W. Smith

06/01/2015
Karlgaard (publisher, Forbes magazine; Life 2.0) and technology author Malone (Bill & Dave) could be a top-flight writing duo. Their research-based fundamentals on team management, historical examples, and personal narratives are sound. The value of teams is a given; however, neither the explication of anthropological, social, and biological bases of teams, from mating pairs to legendary musicians, sports stars, and military commanders, nor the extensive taxonomy of team types will be as useful for would-be managers of high-performance groups as practical advice would have been. Leaders need concrete suggestions of how to create the ideal team for a given task from the ranks of available employees. VERDICT Gems of insight and wisdom are offered here, such as the need for balance between creative and analytical skills to maintain a team's forward momentum, but not all readers will persevere to find and employ them. For fans of business history and theory.—Elizabeth Wood, Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH

Library Journal

2015-04-15
An exploration of the importance of teams in human activity. Drawing from a broadly based foundation in multiple branches of scientific and academic research, as well as technology and business studies, Forbes magazine publisher Karlgaard (The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success, 2014, etc.) and technology writer Malone (The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company, 2014, etc.) assemble their case for the imperative of cooperative teamwork. Along the way, they debunk traditional ideas of business success as attributable to either of "two antipodes," the "lone hero and the giant enterprise." The authors focus on teams and the way technological networking effects compound the continual cheapening of overall cost. In the digital world, people are the limiting boundary to an organization's ability to adapt to change. Karlgaard and Malone draw from anthropology, ethnography, history, psychology, and evolutionary microbiology to show that, rather than competition, "cooperation may be the default tendency in human beings." They present research supporting the notion that the evolutionary requirements for clustering demand coordination, communication, and achievement of an optimal size. Teams, they suggest, consistently outperform, and are more likely to come up with new ideas, solitary inventors. Within teams, bringing together people with different perspectives, skills, and experience will tend to improve the performance of the team. As the authors note, "diverse teams need to be actively managed," and they consider how large-scale enterprises are actually hierarchies of teams. The key to their success often lies in finding the appropriate size, whether pairs, trios, or larger clusters. "The teams in which we work, and the teams we lead, may not change the world," write the authors. "But they can…make our company…more successful and secure, and give ourselves and our teammates a more rewarding and fulfilling career." An intriguing counter to the excesses of both individualism and organizations.

Kirkus Reviews

Narrator Tom Parks does a great job delivering the authors’ discussion of teamwork—from both a historical and a contemporary perspective. Parks’s tone is casual, and his timing is perfect; he also provides ample pauses at the ends of sentences for listener comprehension. As the authors present examples from the fields of biology, business, anthropology, and more, Parks expertly moves through the terminology and names with ease, weaving a seamless narration. Overall, this fascinating look at how teams become more than the sum of their parts is read in an engaging style. E.N. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2015 - AudioFile