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

might wish you had a billion-dollar advertising budget to reach the global marketplace. But no budgets will be large enough in the future, because of our other friend, Metcalfe’s law, which describes the exponential creation of a near infinite number of connections and ways to reach customers. Fast-moving small companies can find more niches and customers than ever. The same is true of technology power. The cloud is rapidly commoditizing the availability of top-class technology. You don’t have to buy equipment from IBM; you can rent it by the second from Amazon, Alibaba, Google, Microsoft, and others.
    Our point is to show you that although access to scale, global reach, and powerful technology is a requirement for success, it is not sufficient to create sustained success. It is being commoditized. It is losing its former status as a barrier to entry. It is becoming, as poker players like to say, mere table stakes in the game of economic competition. Instead, it is maneuverability that will be the new barrier to entry, the new essential for sustained rising value. Such maneuverability will come from the combination of global reach, great technology, and highly optimized teams— team genius , as we call it.
    Here is the uncomfortable truth: Humans run to a much slower evolutionary clock than our inventions. To use an engineering term, we are the “gating factor” that keeps a process from running faster. It is people, not scale or technology, who determine how well an organization adapts to change.
    So, whether we know it or not, the difference in our rapidly accelerating world between a perpetually successful enterprise and a struggling, dysfunctional also-ran comes down to the people in those enterprises—and even more, to how those people relate to each other as they form and re-form into teams.
    Thus, even as the companies that expand their reach around the world grow bigger and more ambitious in their vision, they will, paradoxically, also have to become smaller and more focused in their execution. And, contrary to what many business prognosticators have assumed for the last half century, the more gigantic the enterprise and the more virtual and wired it becomes, the more likely that it will be dependent on dozens, hundreds, even thousands, of small, closely knit internal teams.
    That’s why, at the nexus of two almost unprecedented forces in human history—the unrelenting, exponential advance of technological performance (speed), and the explosion of new connections in the global marketplace (reach)—one of the oldest human cultural phenomena, the team , finds itself as vital as ever before.
    MASTERING MANEUVERABILITY
    Both of the authors of this book knew Bill Walsh, the great San Francisco 49ers football coach of the 1980s. Walsh won three Super Bowls and left his successor with a team that won two more. Walsh died in 2007, but his playbook and team innovations redefined professional football for two generations.
    We once asked Coach Walsh why he drafted Jerry Rice, a little-known wide receiver out of tiny Mississippi Valley State University. Rice went on to become the National Football League’s all-time scorer. But in 1985, Walsh was alone among scouts and coaches in perceiving Rice’s true potential as a future Hall of Famer.
    “Rice was considered to be too slow for NFL greatness,” explained Walsh. “His time in the forty-yard dash was only 4.7. Most great NFL receivers run 4.4 or faster. But when you studied the film from Rice’s college games, you saw two things different about Rice. One, he could turn on a dime. He could run sideways faster than anyone I’d seen. His maneuverability left defenders wondering whathappened. Two, Rice always finished his pass route within one foot of where he needed to be. Like he had a GPS in his head. [Quarterbacks] Joe Montana and Steve Young could count on him.”
    Rice’s abilities give us an insight into success in the modern economy beyond scale, reach, and