An important aspect of Walt’s leadership was to keep the staff’s level of aspiration sky high.

Leaders of Great Groups understand the power of rhetoric. They recruit people for crusades, not jobs.

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

Great Groups ship.

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.

a Disney animator recalls, “Disney had only one rule. Whatever we did had to be better than anybody else could do it.”

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 coronar-ies. Sundays off helped at Los Alamos and the Skunk Works.

Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.

Great Groups need to know that the person at the top will fight like a tiger for them. It was one of the things that the PARC group admired most about Bob Taylor. Interestingly, Tom West fought hard for his Eagle group at Data General but chose not to tell them, reasoning that it would only distract them from the project. As a result, some of his t