Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (17 page)

It’s not surprising, then, that one of the most prominent features of Counterweight duos is their compartmentalization. For even with all the chemistry between the members’ personalities, the differences between the two are sometimes so great that they simply choose to overlook those differences—and if that’s insufficient, to keep parts of their personal (and rarely, even business) lives from each other. In fact, this is a measure of the power of a “Counterweight” partnership: its members are willing to accept characteristics, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of their counterpart that they would never accept in any other human being.

As we’ll see, the three early leaders of Intel Corp. created one of the most successful business trios of all time. But before there were three, there were two: Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, two men of very different personalities and lifestyles, but whose mutual trust and admiration were complete—and their melded personalities built two of the most important companies of the twentieth century, Fairchild and Intel.

One the of most successful, and least celebrated, Counterweight partnerships in Silicon Valley history was that between Paul Baran and Steve Millard. Baran was one of the greatest inventors of
the age: his packet-switching technology is generally credited with playing the key role in the invention of the Internet, and his voice/IP discoveries did the same thing for cellular telephony. But Baran was also, according to some accounts, a difficult man to work with. By comparison, Millard, his partner, was the embodiment of prep-school WASP graciousness and diplomacy—and was often called the most connected man in Silicon Valley. In an earlier life, he had been the VP of a Fortune 500 company responsible for a billion-dollar division.

In the five companies the two men created together, Baran was always the consummate engineer-inventor. But the same could not be said of his interpersonal skills. So, besides locating investors, it was often Millard’s job to unruffle employee feathers. Indeed, so much of his time was spent on culture building and personnel challenges that it was often remarked that “Baran did technology and Millard did people.” Neither could have built a successful company on his own—or, arguably, without another person of exactly the same, supplementary skill set as his partner. All five companies they founded went public and each had peak market valuations in excess of $1 billion.

Despite their differences, the two men remained a team to the end. On the day of his death, Paul Baran was working on a new company idea in the telemedicine field with Millard.

A more extreme variant of the Counterweight is:

9.1—INSIDE/OUTSIDE:
These are “Janus” teams—that is, a close-knit pair that works well together precisely because the two members face in opposite directions—one outward, toward the greater world, and the other inward, toward the operations of teams. You’ve no doubt seen this type of pairing in daily life in the forms of friendships and marriages. There, they usually take the form of “introvert/extrovert” or “social animal/homebody.” Inside/Outside pairs resemble several of the other pairs discussed in this chapter,
with the crucial difference that each of the two members is an expert, in skill and temperament, in one of two distinct domains, and rarely enters the other. Indeed, Inside/Outside pairs may interact only rarely, and then just to swap notes.

In the business world, these teams are typically organized around not the relationship itself but the singular demands of different professions. For example, in sales, some of the most potent teams pair a natural salesperson (extroverted, eloquent, affable) with a partner, often a secretary, sales manager, or marketing administrator, who rarely leaves the regional office but knows better than anyone how to package deals, set pricing, and goad manufacturing into making deliveries and giving their team top priority. Similar pairings can be found in other parts of an enterprise, each of them combining some form of outward-looking “face” with another staying back and making the machinery of the system run at peak performance.

You may have noticed that many of the pairs discussed in the previous sections exhibit a lot of Inside/Outside characteristics, especially in the early years of their careers—Larry Ellison and Ray Lane, Walt and Roy Disney, William Durant and Alfred Sloan, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick—as well as any number of other pairs we haven’t yet mentioned. That’s likely because entrepreneurial start-ups, by their very nature, seem to require one figure to run the machinery of the enterprise, including product design and manufacturing, and another to promote that enterprise among potential investors, customers, and employees.

While there are likely a number of different types of these pairings, we have identified three as the most typical and effective:

9.1.1—FINDER AND GRINDER:
The term “finder and grinder” comes from law firms (they add a third, the “minder,” who runs the business), and it means a division of labor such that one person, the
Outsider, finds new business and handles marking and promotion, while the other, the Insider, grinds away at servicing those new clients, writing briefs, and so forth. You can spot Finder and Grinder pairs in almost every commercial enterprise called an “agency”—in advertising, publishing, public relations, design, marketing, and so on—or “firm,” as in law, consulting, accounting, or engineering.

9.1.2—PITCHER AND FIELDER:
The Pitcher and Fielder is an even deeper and narrower version of the Finder and Grinder. Whereas the latter typically work in the long term and on a broad scale (that is, the operation of an entire agency or firm), the Pitcher and Fielder are much more specialized and are more often found in large firms or agencies—mostly because small start-ups usually can’t afford the luxury of having such specialists. At the heart of this partnership is the deal: the Pitcher sells the potential client or target on the dream, and the Fielder follows up with the details of that dream—or, to maintain the metaphor, the Pitcher delivers the pitch on the deal, the Fielder fields the outline of that deal and turns it into an actual agreement and contract.

9.1.3—EXPLORER AND NAVIGATOR:
When you are moving fast through unknown territory, one person has to cut the path and focus on the obstacles and threats ahead, while the other has to follow closely, checking the compass and map and looking for landmarks. If the explorer doesn’t do his or her job, the team will quickly get bogged down; if the navigator fails, then the expedition will get lost, or travel in circles, or be unable to arrive home after it reaches its objective. The archetypes for this kind of team can be found among the great explorers: Cook and Bligh, Peary and Henson, Hillary and Norgay, Carson and Frémont.

RELATIONSHIPS DEFINED BY INEQUALITY

10.0—REMEMBER THE FORCE:
“Force” pair-teams are mentor partnerships in which the two members are unequal. In a typical case, these teams consist of an older veteran who serves as an adviser and guide to a younger partner. The title of this type of team comes, of course, from
Star Wars
and the relationship between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker—that is, between an old master and, potentially if he is successful in his teachings, a younger version of himself.

This older-younger version of a “Force” pair is, undoubtedly, the most enduring version of this type of partnership, with roots in monarchal and aristocratic succession—and even more so in the guild system, with its established program of master and apprentice. This type of partnership is likely even older than the teacher-student relationship that is its most common manifestation.

But “master and apprentice” is only one type of Remember the Force pair. And while it may still dominate the trades, another type of mentorship seems to dominate the professional world. In this version, a mentor relationship is created between a veteran male executive and a younger businesswoman in which the older figure guides the younger through the minefield of corporate life.

Interestingly, because of the potential for misinterpretation, these “May to December” mentorships aren’t usually talked about. But they are everywhere. One of the authors of this book hosted a nationally syndicated public television interview series (
Betting It All
) in which one season was dedicated solely to top female executives in industries ranging from automobiles to finance to computers. Oblivious to these mentor relationships (they wouldn’t become the subject of magazine stories for another couple of years), we were surprised when one subject after another spoke of the crucial role a male mentor had played in her climb up the corporate ladder. By the end of the series, we had learned to ask what we came to call
the “mentor question” early in each interview, confident that we would get a positive response.

Needless to say, older man–younger woman relationships carry with them a unique set of dangers, not least the biased or jealous perception by others regarding what the young protégée is doing to get to the top. But the reality is that few of these relationships end in romance. Rather, most seem to be the product of a very different, but equally organic drive: that between a father and daughter. This might suggest that this type of mentor relationship could become rarer as the number of women in senior executive positions increases. But that presumes that these relationships are strictly based on efficiency, when in fact their sources may be deeper.

Another celebrated version of the Force relationship is that of a veteran athlete, now approaching the end of a career or having moved on into coaching, who takes a young athlete under his or her wing and conveys to the newcomer a body of acquired wisdom and experience. Yogi Berra appears to have played such a role over decades with the New York Yankees; and before him, Tony Lazzeri is known for having protected the young Joe DiMaggio when he first came up. Another famous mentor is Stan Musial, who mentored Ken Boyer and a young Lou Brock in one generation, and Albert Pujols in the next. In basketball, the most famous such mentor is coach Phil Jackson, a twelve-year pro himself who then brought along the most famous talent of the next generation, Michael Jordan.

Versions of this sports mentorship model can be found in a wide range of professions, from the theater to the military, in which older noncommissioned officers—chief petty officers, master sergeants, gunnery sergeants—apprentice junior officers who are, officially, their rank superiors. Special forces programs, from the British SAS to the US Navy SEALs and the Army’s Delta Force, are particularly noted for their mentoring programs between veterans and new recruits
as a way to supplement training in real-life scenarios that are hard to duplicate in training.

“Remember the Force” relationships have a number of crucial advantages:

•
      
They don’t have to reinvent the wheel
. That is, while one member may have an extended learning curve, the other doesn’t, so the team itself can be productive almost from the instant of its founding. By comparison, a team like a Castor and Pollux pair will likely be young, and will have to go through their apprenticeship together . . . meaning that it may take years for them to reach top performance.

•
      
They typically have enormous longitudinal strength
. The senior member may have decades of experience and now be approaching the end of his or her career. By passing that wisdom and experience on to a younger partner, that expertise can still be used at peak performance for decades more . . . and assuming that the junior, now senior, member takes on a new junior partner, that high productivity can last a half century or more. In some of the great and venerable guilds of Europe, such as the livery companies of London (that is, the “Worshipful Companies” of apothecaries, gunmakers, spectacle makers, ironmongers, and, most famously, taxi drivers), the mentor-apprentice relationships form a continuous line of descent dating back to before the thirteenth century. This overcomes the biggest weakness of the May to December duos: they are doomed to lose one member early.

•
      
They smooth out the variability of a single career.
It goes without saying that the temperament, energy, and goals of a middle-aged person with grown kids looking toward retirement are very different from those of a young college grad without a mortgage trying to make his or her mark on the world. Put those two
together, and if it works, you have a team in which those two extremes counterbalance each other, producing a single entity that is mature and ambitious, prudent and adventurous, patient and tireless. That’s a tough combination to beat.

•
      
They create context.
The problem with young people is that, whatever their energy and talent, they almost always lack a body of experience to tell them when a new idea is viable and worth pursuing, or is simply a repetition of past failures and should be abandoned. The result is a tremendous waste of time and money. By comparison, mature workers typically operate with a huge inner encyclopedia of what works and what doesn’t—but they lack any real understanding of new and emerging markets and the newest generation of consumers. Put them together, though, and you may be able to build the perfect beast: a team that is at once hip to the marketplace and with a lifetime of experience in what works and what does not.

In the corporate world, the accounting and auditing giant KPMG is especially noted for its mentorship program, which is based at the company’s headquarters in Amstelveen, Holland, and engages all the hundreds of interns whom the company hires each year. Some of those interns will stay on for the summer, other will sign up for the company’s national training program, and still others will be sent into KPMG’s international program. But whatever direction they take, in a commitment made by KPMG that may be unique, almost every one of the company’s interns is teamed with a mentor at the very beginning of the internship—and the company enforces a comparable commitment from those mentors to “offer guidance and help answer day-to-day questions.”