Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

Warren G. Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman

INTRODUCTION

The most exciting groups—the ones, like those chronicled in this book, that shook the world—resulted from a mutually respectful marriage between an able leader and an assemblage of extraordinary people. Groups become great only when everyone in them, leaders and members alike, is free to do his or her absolute best.

THE END OF THE GREAT MAN “None of us is as smart as all of us.”

In all but the rarest cases, one is too small a number to produce greatness.
Instead, we have to recognize a new paradigm: not great leaders alone, but great leaders who exist in a fertile relationship with a Great Group. In these creative alliances, the leader and the team are able to achieve something together that neither could achieve alone. The leader finds greatness in the group. And he or she helps the members find it in themselves.

Study Greatness: Insights into Great Groups

Our conviction that excellence is a better teacher than is mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary. We must turn to Great Groups if we hope to begin to understand how that rarest of precious resources—genius—can be successfully combined with great effort to achieve results that enhance all our lives.
The organizations of the future will increasingly depend on the creativity of their members to survive. And the leaders of those organizations will be those who find ways both to retain their talented and independent-minded staffs and to set them free to do their best, most imaginative work.
Psychologically and socially, Great Groups are very different from mundane ones. Great Groups rarely have morale problems. Intrinsically motivated, for the most part, the people in them are buoyed by the joy of problem solving. Focused on a fascinating project, they are oblivious to the nettles of working together in ordinary circumstances.
Although the group is too busy working to philosophize much, any participant would tell you that he or she would rather be here than anywhere else. The money doesn’t matter, career doesn’t matter, the project is all. In some cases, personal relationships have been interrupted or deferred. It’s hard to have a life when you’re up half the night in the lab working on your part of a compelling problem, often with one of your equally obsessed colleagues at your side. This is not a job. This is a mission, carried out by people with fire in their eyes.
But the truth is that most people in Great Groups spend very little time thinking about their surroundings. They have wonderful tunnel vision.

Commonalities of Great Groups

They all have extraordinary leaders, and, as a corollary, they tend to lose their way when they lose their leadership,
It’s a paradox, really. Great Groups tend to be collegial and nonhierarchical, peopled by singularly competent individuals who often have an antiauthoritarian streak. Nonetheless, virtually every Great Group has a strong and visionary head.
But all these leaders share certain essential characteristics. First, each has a keen eye for talent. Sometimes Great Groups just seem to grow. Some places and individuals become so identified with excellence and excitement that they become magnets for the talented—

But Great Groups are made as well. Recruiting the right genius for the job is the first step in building many great collaborations. Great Groups are inevitably forged by people unafraid of hiring people better than themselves. Such recruiters look for two things: excellence and the ability to work with others.
Great Groups often tend to attract mavericks, If not out-and-out rebels, participants may lack traditional credentials or exist on the margins of their professions.
But probably the most important thing that young members bring to a Great Group is their often delusional confidence.
He believed lack of experience was an asset, not a liability, because, as Kidder writes, these unseasoned recruits “do not usually know what’s supposed to be impossible.” The French composer Berlioz made a similar observation about fellow composer Saint-Saens. “Saint-Saens knows everything. All he lacks is inexperience.”
Thus many Great Groups are fueled by an invigorating, completely unrealistic view of what they can accomplish. Not knowing what they can’t do puts everything in the realm of the possible.
“We didn’t know we couldn’t do it, so we did it,”
Time teaches many things, including limitations. Time forces people, however brilliant, to taste their own mortality.
Great Groups often show evidence of collective denial. Denial can obscure obstacles and stiffen resolve. It can liberate. Great Groups are not realistic places. They are exuberant, irrationally optimistic ones.
Many of the people in our Great Groups are tinkerers—the kind of people who, as children, took the family television apart and tried to put it together again. They are people willing to spend thousands of hours finding out how things work, including things that don’t yet exist.
Members of Great Groups don’t fear technology, they embrace it. And they all think that creating the future is really neat.
Curiosity fuels every Great Group. The members don’t simply solve problems. They are engaged in a process of discovery that is its own reward.
Many of the individuals in these groups have dazzling individual skills—mathematical genius is often one. But they also have another quality that allows them both to identify significant problems and to find creative, boundary-busting solutions rather than simplistic ones.
They have hungry, urgent minds. They want to get to the bottom of everything they see. Many have expansive interests and encyclopedic knowledge.
People like Alan Kay are able to make connections that others don’t see, in part because they have command of more data in the first place. It is one of the unique qualities of Great Groups that they are able to attract—people of Kay’s stature, then provide an atmosphere in which both individual and collective achievements result from the interplay of distinguished minds.
The truism that people don’t want to be managed, that they want to be led, is never more true than when orchestrating a group of Alan Kays. (“Knowledge workers” can’t be managed, according to Peter Drucker, who coined the term. For that reason alone, Great Groups warrant close study by anyone interested in running an information-based enterprise.)
The leaders who can do so must first of all command unusual respect. Such a leader has to be someone a greatly gifted person thinks is worth listening to, since genius almost always has other options. Such a leader must be someone who inspires trust, and deserves it. And though civility is not always the emblematic characteristic of great groups, it should be a trait of anyone who hopes to lead one.
The right response, if forced, is not the same as the right response when it comes out of conviction.
Members of Great Groups don’t have to be told what to do, although they may need to be nudged back on task, as educators like to say. Indeed, they typically can’t be told what to do: Being able to determine what needs to be done and how to do it is why they are in the group in the first place. In the collaborative meritocracy, people who are talented enough and committed enough are rightly seen as indispensable.
“You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.” Such people need to be freed to do what only they can do.
Great Groups are coordinated teams of original thinkers. Kidder has a wonderful term to describe the structures that result in creative collaboration. They are, he writes, “webs of voluntary, mutual responsibility.” Such groups are obsessionally focused on their goal. They couldn’t care less about the organizational chart (which often becomes a dartboard in such a group), unless there is something on there that might get in the way of the project.
Our suspicion is that one of the reasons so many members of Great Groups are young is that, given a choice, more mature and confident talent opts for more autonomy, choosing to work collectively only when the project is irresistible.

Who succeeds in forming and leading a Great Group?

He or she is almost always a pragmatic dreamer. They are people who get things done, but they are people with immortal longings.
Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls, people like Oppenheimer, who turned to the Bhagavad Gita to express his ambivalence about the atom and its uses. They are always people with an original vision. A dream is at the heart of every great group. It is always a dream of greatness, not simply an ambition to succeed.
The dream is the engine that drives the group, the vision that inspires the team to work as if the fate of civilization rested on getting its revolutionary new computer out the door.
Disney asked his artists to push the envelope of animation, he told them, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” He believed that, and, as a result, they did too.
The atmosphere most conducive to creativity is one in which individuals have a sense of autonomy and yet are focused on the collective goal. Constraint (perceived as well as real) is a major killer of creativity. Freedom or autonomy is its major enhancer.
Effective leaders are willing to make decisions, but they typically allow members of the group to work as they see fit.

Leaders also encourage creativity when they take the sting out of failure. In creative groups, failure is regarded as a learning experience, not a pretext for punishment. Creativity inevitably involves taking risks, and, in Great Groups, it is understood that the risk taker will sometimes stumble.
Many Great Groups have a dual administration. They have a visionary leader, and they have someone who protects them from the outside world, the “suits.”
Great Groups tend to be island societies. They are often physically isolated,
Great Groups tend to be nonconformist. Their members sometimes dress haphazardly
People in Great Groups are never insiders or corporate types on the fast track: They are always on their own track.
As a result, they often need someone to deflect not just the criticism, but even the attention of the bureaucrats and conventional thinkers elsewhere in the organization.
The zeal with which people in Great Groups work is directly related to how effectively the leader articulates the vision that unites them.
Such leaders understand very basic truths about human beings. They know that we long for meaning. Without meaning, labor is time stolen from us.
Steve Jobs and the others also understand that thought is play. Problem solving is the task we evolved for. It gives us as much pleasure as does sex. Leaders of Great Groups grasp this intuitively. They know that work done for its own sake becomes a wonderful game.
No matter what our kindergarten teachers tell us, we are all Darwin’s children. We love to compete. And so virtually every Great Group defines itself in terms of an enemy. Sometimes the enemy is real, as the Axis powers were for the Manhattan Project. But, more often, the chief function of the enemy is to solidify and define the group itself, showing it what it is by mocking what it is not.
Great Groups always see themselves as winning underdogs, wily Davids toppling the bloated Goliaths of tradition and convention.
All leaders of Great Groups find ways to imbue the effort with meaning. Sometimes the goal is such a lofty one that the meaning is self-evident.
But inspirational leaders can transform even mundane projects, turning them, too, into missions from God.
Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream.
People in Great Groups often seem to have struck a Faustian bargain, giving up their normal lives, if not their souls, in exchange for greatness. Because they are mission maniacs, obsessed with the project at hand, relationships outside the group often suffer.
But Great Groups require a more flexible kind of leadership that has more to do with facilitating than with asserting control. Like cats, the talented can’t be herded. The military model of leadership, with its emphasis on command and control, squelches creativity. Great Groups need leaders who encourage and enable.
Jack Welch once said of his role at General Electric, “Look, I only have three things to do. I have to choose the right people, allocate the right number of dollars, and transmit ideas from one division to another with the speed of light.” Those three tasks are familiar to almost everyone involved in creative collaboration.
Many leaders of Great Groups spend a lot of time making sure that the right information gets to the right people—this was a primary purpose of the mandatory weekly meetings at PARC. Members of Great Groups may be so attuned to each other and to the nature of the task that they hardly have to speak at all, but they do have to have access to relevant data.

The best thing a leader can do for a Great Group is allow its members to discover their own greatness.

Although Great Groups experience their moments of near despair, they are more often raucous with laughter.
In a true creative collaboration, almost everyone emerges with a sense of ownership.
Great Groups also tend to be places where dissent is encouraged, if only because it serves the spirit of discovery that is at the heart of these enterprises. These collaborations also tend to be collegial, with the leader perceived as one among equals, rather than as one in possession of unique skills or knowledge. Egos in Great Groups are often fully developed. Such individuals are unlikely to regard the person they report to as the Messiah.
Great Groups often fall apart when the project is finished. They are like animals that die soon after they breed.
Life in the group is often the most fun members ever have.
People pay a price for their membership in Great Groups. Postpartum depression is often fierce, and the intensity of collaboration is a potent drug that may make everything else, including everything after, seem drab and ordinary. But no one who has participated in one of these adventures in creativity and community seems to have any real regrets. How much better to be with other worthy people, doing worthy things, than to labor alone (“When I am alone,” writer Carlos Fuentes says, “I am poverty-stricken.”). In a Great Group you are liberated for a time from the prison of self.
Karl Wallenda, the legendary tightrope walker, once said, “Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting.” Most of us wait. In Great Groups, talent comes alive.

KEY LESSONS

Life in Great Groups is different from much of real life. It’s better.

It wasn’t simply that the work was fascinating and vitally important. The process itself was exciting, even joyous.
“Focus,” Oppie answers, naming a critical element of every Great Group. “You have all these great minds, but they’re all dancing to a different tune. Bring them together in one place. Isolate ‘em—no distractions. You create an atmosphere of stress, creative stress, everyone competing to solve one problem. And you have one ringmaster.”
These are the fifteen top take-home lessons of Great Groups:

1. Greatness starts with superb people.

Recruiting the most talented people possible is the first task of anyone who hopes to create a Great Group. The people v/ho can achieve something truly unprecedented have more than enormous talent and intelligence. They have original minds. They see things differently. They can spot the gaps in what we know. They have a knack for discovering interesting, important problems as well as skill in solving them. They want to do the next thing, not the last one. They see connections.
Often they have specialized skills, combined with broad interests and multiple frames of reference. They tend to be deep generalists, not narrow specialists. They are not so immersed in one discipline that they can’t see solutions in another.
They are problem solvers before they are computer scientists or animators. They can no more stop looking for new relationships and new, better ways of doing things than they can stop breathing. And they have the tenacity so important in accomplishing anything of value.

2. Great Groups and great leaders create each other.

Great Groups don’t exist without great leaders, but they are much more than lengthened shadows of them.
Inevitably, the leader of a Great Group has to invent a leadership style that suits it. The standard models, especially the command-and-control style, simply won’t work. The heads of Great Groups have to act decisively, but never arbitrarily. They have to make decisions without limiting the perceived autonomy of the other participants. Devising and maintaining an atmosphere in which others can put a dent in the universe is the leaders creative act.

3. Every Great Group has a strong leader.

This is one of the paradoxes of creative collaboration. Great Groups are made up of people with rare gifts working together as equals. Yet, in virtually every one there is one person who acts as maestro, organizing the genius of the others.
He or she is a pragmatic dreamer, a person with an original but attainable vision. Ironically, the leader is able to realize his or her dream only if the others are free to do exceptional work. Typically, the leader is the one who recruits the others, by making the vision so palpable and secutive that they see it, too, and eagerly signup.
Within the group, the leader is often a good steward, keeping the others focused, eliminating distractions, keeping hope alive in the face of setbacks and stress. One of the simple pleasures of Great Groups is that they are almost never bureaucratic. People in them feel liberated from the trivial and the arbitrary. Often, everyone deals directly with the leader, who can make most decisions on the spot.
Leaders of Great Groups inevitably have exquisite taste. They are not creators in the same sense that the others are. Rather, they are curators, whose job is not to make, but to choose. The ability to recognize excellence in others and and their work may be the defining talent of leaders of great groups.
Such leaders are like great conductors. They may not be able to play Mozart’s First Violin Concerto, but they have a profound understanding of the work and can create the environment needed to realize it.
The leader has to be worthy of the group. He or she must warrant the respect of people who may have greater genius.
The respect issue is a critical one. Great Groups are voluntary associations. People are in them, not for money, not even for glory, but because they love the work, they love the project. Everyone must have complete faith in the leader’s instincts and integrity vis-a-vis the work. Great Groups don’t require their leaders to be saints. But they do expect them to be absolutely trustworthy where the project is concerned.

4. The leaders of Great Groups love talent and know where to find it.

Great Groups are headed by people confident enough to recruit people better than themselves. They revel in the talent of others.
Where do you find people good enough to form a Great Group? Sometimes they find you. The talented smell out places that are full of promise and energy, the places where the future is being made.
But the quality of a group often reflects the network of its leader. Many Great Groups start with great rolodexes.
The broader and more diverse the network, the greater the potential for a Great Group. The richer the mix of people, the more likely that new connections will be made, new ideas will emerge.
Being part of a group of superb people has a profound impact on every member. Participants know that inclusion is a mark of their own excellence.
Everyone in such a group becomes engaged in the best kind of competition—a desire to perform as well as or better than one’s colleagues, to warrant the esteem of people for whom one has the highest respect. People in Great Groups are always stretching because of the giants around them. For members of such groups, the real competition is with themselves, an ongoing test of just how good they are and how completely they can use their gifts.

5. Great Groups are full of talented people who can work together.

This may seem obvious, but talent can be so dazzling, so seductive, that the person who is recruiting may forget that not every genius works well with others.

Although the ability to work together is a prerequisite for membership in a Great Group, being an amiable person, or even a pleasant one, isn’t. Great Groups are probably more tolerant of personal idiosyncrasies than are ordinary ones, if only because the members are so intensely focused on the work itself. That all-important task acts as a social lubricant, minimizing frictions. Sharing information and advancing the work are the only real social obligations.
When your mission in life is to find a new way for people to interact with information or some other exalted goal, you may be willing to tolerate social obtuseness in a colleague who helps you do it.
People who are engaged in groundbreaking collaborations have high regard for people who challenge and test their ideas. In such a group, ordinary affability may be no virtue. The young Richard Feynman was infamous for telling his older, more famous colleagues at Los Alamos that one or another of their ideas was stupid. But Feynman was valued in the project because the impolitic judgment was routinely followed by a probing question or penetrating insight that boosted the level of everyone’s thought.

6. Great Groups think they are on a mission from God.

Great Groups always believe that they are doing something vital, even holy. They are filled with believers, not doubters, and the metaphors that they use to describe their work are commonly those of war and religion. People in Great Groups often have the zeal of converts, people who have come only recently to see some great truth and follow it wherever it leads.
The psychology of these high-minded missions is clear. People know going in that they will be expected to make sacrifices, but they also know they are doing something monumental, something worthy of their best selves.
A powerful enough vision can transform what would otherwise be loss and drudgery into sacrifice.

7. Every Great Group is an island—but an island with a bridge to the mainland.

Great Groups become their own worlds. They also tend to be physically removed from the world around them.
People who are trying to change the world need to be isolated from it, free from its distractions, but still able to tap its resources.
Great Groups create a culture of their own—with distinctive customs, dress, jokes, even a private language. They find their own names for the things that are important to them, a language that both binds them together.
People in Great Groups also have a great of fun.
Great Groups are not only fun, they are sexy. There is often an erotic element to working together so closely and intensely. In the charged atmosphere of these groups, people sometimes look across a crowded lab or cubicle and see more than a colleague.

8. Great groups see themselves as winning underdogs.

They inevitably view themselves as the feisty David, hurling fresh ideas at a big, backward-looking Goliath. Much of the gleeful energy of Great Groups seems to stem from this view of themselves as upstarts who will snatch the prize from the fumbling hands of a bigger but less wily competitor.

9. Great Groups always have an enemy.

Sometimes, of course, they really do have an enemy, as the scientists of the Manhattan Project had in the Axis powers. But when there is no enemy, you have to make one up. Why? Because, as Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta, you can’t have a war without one.
Whether the enemy occurs in nature or is manufactured, it serves the same purpose. It raises the stakes of the competition, it helps your group rally and define itself (as everything the enemy is not), and it also frees you to be spurred by that time-honored motivator- self righteous hatred.

10. People in Great Groups have blinders on. The project is all they see.

In Great Groups, you don’t find people who are distracted by peripheral concerns, including such perfectly laudable ones as a professional advancement and the quality of their private lives.
People in Great Groups fall in love with the project. They are so taken with the beauty and difficulty of the task that they don’t want to talk about anything else, be anywhere else, do anything else.
Great Groups often have a dark side. Members frequently make a Faustian bargain, trading the quiet pleasures of normal life for the thrill of discovery. Their families often pay the price. For some group members, the frenzied labor of the project is their drug of choice, a way to evade other responsibilities or to deaden loss or pain.

11. Great Groups are optimistic, not realistic.

People in Great Groups believe they can do things no one has ever done before. The term for that isn’t realism. Such groups are often youthful, filled with talented people who have not yet bumped up against their limits or other dispiriting life lessons. They don’t yet know what they can’t do.
Indeed, they’re not sure the impossible exists. According to psychologist Martin Seligman, depressed people tend to be more realistic than optimistic ones. And the optimists, even when their good cheer is unwarranted, accomplish more.

12. In Great Groups the right person has the right job.

This, too, may seem obvious, but the failure to find the right niche for people—or to let them find their own perfect niches—is a major reason that so many workplaces are mediocre, even toxic, in spite of the presence of talent.
Too many companies believe people are interchangeable. Truly gifted people never are. They have unique talents. Such people cannot be forced into roles they are not suited for, nor should :hey be. Effective leaders allow great people to do the work they were born to do.

13. The leaders of Great Groups give them what they need and free them from the rest.

Successful groups reflect the leader’s profound, not necessarily conscious, understanding of what brilliant people want. Most of all, they want a worthy challenge, a task that allows them to explore the whole continent of their talent.
They want colleagues who stimulate and challenge them and whom they can admire. What they don’t want are trivial duties and obligations. Successful leaders strip the workplace of nonessentials.
Time that can go into thinking and making is never wasted on activities, such as writing reports, that serve only some bureaucratic or corporate function outside the group.
As one Great Group after another has shown, talented people don’t need fancy facilities. It sometimes seems that any old garage will do. But they do need the right tools. Cutting-edge technology is often a key element in creative collaboration. The right tools become part of the creative process.
All Great Groups share information effectively. Many of the leaders we have looked at were brilliant at ensuring that all members of the group had the information they needed.
Great Groups require ideas—the more the better. One idea sparks another.
Great Groups also tend to be places without dress codes, set hours, or other arbitrary regulations. The freedom to work when you are moved to, wearing what you want, is one that everyone treasures. The casual dress so typical of people in extraordinary groups may be symbolic as well, a sign that they are unconventional thinkers, engaged in something revolutionary. Jeans and a T-shirt have become a uniform for people in innovative groups.
One thing Great Groups do need is protection. Great Groups do things that haven’t been done before. Because Great Groups break new ground, they are more susceptible than others to being misunderstood, resented, even feared. Successful leaders find ways to insulate their people from bureaucratic meddling. They keep the “suits” and other conventional thinkers at a distance, allowing the group to work undistracted.
One vital function of the leaders of Great Groups is to keep the stress in check. Innovative places are exhilarating, but they are also incubators for massive coronanies.
Members of Great Groups also need relative autonomy, a sine qua non of creativity. No Great Group was ever micromanaged. In such groups, it is understood that the talent has to be unleashed to find its own unique solutions to problems it alone can see.
Leaders of Great Groups trade the illusion of control that micromanaging gives for the higher satisfactions of orchestrating extraordinary achievement.

14. Great Groups ship.

Successful collaborations are dreams with deadlines. They are places of action, not think tanks or retreat centers devoted solely to the generation of ideas. Great Groups don’t just talk about things (although they often do that at considerable length). They make things—amazing, original things, such as a plane that a bat can’t find. Great Groups are hands-on.
As Steve Jobs so often reminded his team, “Real artists ship.”

15. Great work is its own reward.

Great Groups are engaged in solving hard, meaningful problems. Paradoxically, that process is difficult but exhilarating as well.
Some primal human urge to explore and discover, to see new relationships and turn them into wonderful new things drives these groups. The payoff is not money, or even glory. Again and again, members of Great Groups say they would have done the work for nothing. The reward is the creative process itself.
People ache to do good work. Given a task they believe in and a chance to do it well, they will work tirelessly for no more reward than the one they give themselves.
People who have been in Great Groups never forget them, although most groups do not last very long. Our suspicion is that such collaborations have a certain half-life, that, if only because of their intensity, they cannot be sustained indefinitely.
The question: Can creative collaboration take place in an evil cause? The answer is yes. The men at Wannsee were no geniuses, but, united by a single, evil vision, using cutting-edge technology and working with missionary zeal, they nearly destroyed an entire people in just three years. As long as talent can be recruited for immoral causes (and there may be an element of emotional intelligence that limits that, Heisenberg notwithstanding), terrible new things can be invented, wreaking havoc on an undreamed-of scale.