Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations Read Free

fast, disruptive, and turbulent economy will play an ever larger role in your success or failure. To prepare ourselves for the world to come in the rest of this century, we need to find the genius that resides in great teams.
    It is time to revisit the idea of the teams—and not just in story and lore (and perhaps a few rules of thumb). It’s time to take a look at teams systematically, scientifically , using the latest discoveries in anthropology, sociology, cognition, and neuroscience. To prepare ourselves for the world to come in the rest of this century, we need to find the genius that resides in great teams. And to do that, we need to develop a new science of teams .

Change Kills—If You Don’t Have the Right Teams
    T alking about the rapid pace of technology-driven change has become commonplace. These days, even schoolchildren are taught about the power of Moore’s law , that measure of semiconductor memory chip development that has now become the metronome of the modern world. But our acceptance of the reality of this change doesn’t necessarily mean that we understand it, or that we have developed effective strategies to cope with it. In fact, the reality of this ever-accelerating change is stranger and more challenging that we can imagine.
    Gordon Moore, a cofounder of Fairchild Semiconductor (and later of Intel Corporation), first devised his law in 1965 in an article for Electronics magazine. The point Moore wanted to make was that memory chips, invented just a few years before, were improving at a dizzying speed. He tried to plot their price and performance points on regular graph paper, but they took off too fast, so he switched to logarithmic graph paper (that is, to show exponentialgrowth), and he got a nice straight and shallow line. It showed that the performance of these chips was doubling every couple of years (eighteen months at the time, twenty-four months now).
    It was an impressive graph, but no one then, not even Moore, realized that this graph would continue to hold for fifty years and set the blistering pace of change for the modern world. We all now live in the world of Moore’s law, and we likely will for at least another quarter century. It’s interesting to note how shallow that curve is for the first forty years, until about 2005. Yet along that comparatively flat curve can be found the births of the minicomputer, the microprocessor, the digital calculator, computer gaming, the personal computer, the Internet, robotics, wireless telephony, the smartphone, and electronic commerce. After 2005, as we race toward twenty-five billion transistors per chip, the curve goes almost straight up, heading toward infinity. Are we really prepared for this? If the entire digital age occurred in the foothills, what happens now that we are entering the Himalayas?
    We have grown so accustomed to living in the world of Moore’s law that we forget we’re dealing with one of the most explosive forces in history. We’ve become so adept at predicting, incorporating, and assimilating each new upward click of the curve that we assume we have this monster under control. We don’t.
    There is a second great exponential law that has emerged out of the digital world to redefine modern life: Metcalfe’s law . It says that the value of a network is proportional to the square (or a similar multiple) of the number of users. In other words, each new addition adds value to the Web out of the usual proportion to its presence. And with the emerging Internet of Things, those “users” may soon include 100 billion new smart devices as well—sensors, cameras, robots, drones, and the like. As far back as 2005, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, estimated the Internet’s data size to be 5 million terabytes (that’s eighteen zeros). 1 Today, the Internet is 60,000 times larger, at 300 exabytes.John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, says the “Internet of Everything” is worth $14.4 trillion, growing more than 20 percent per