Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

Time forces people, however brilliant, to taste their own mortality. In short, experience tends to make people more realistic, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

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.

most talented people have little incentive to defer to an individual without a strong moral core. Genius, even simple excellence, multiplies personal options. Why follow someone you can’t trust or who makes you feel soiled?

One thing Great Groups do need is protection. Great Groups do things that haven’t been done before. Most corporations and other traditional organizations say they want innovation, but they reflexively shun the untried. Most would rather repeat a past success than gamble on a new idea. Because Great Groups break new ground, they are more susceptible

Great work is its own reward.

2. Great Groups and great leaders create each other.

Jobs had a genius for building group identity. He handed out distinctive T-shirts and offered such childish but effective incentives as buying pineapple pizza for everyone if they completed a particularly difficult task by a certain time. He shrouded their work in mystery, insisting that no outsider be told what they were up to. The Macintosh was t

Claude Bernard observed, that “art is I; science is we.”

Warren Bennis Santa Monica, California November 1996