As we head into the long weekend for some R&R, I thought you might enjoy some inspirational thinking for our profession. Here is an excerpt of the thinking of Warren Bennis:
Organizing Genius by Bennis is one of my favourite business books. In the chapter “The End of the Great Man” he concludes by saying:
“In a Great Group you are liberated for a time from the prison of self. As part of the team, you are on leave from the mundane, (no questions asked), with its meager rewards and sometimes onerous obligations. [On such teams nobody] ever talks about the long days or who got credit for what. All they remember is the excitement of pushing back the boundaries of doing something superbly well that no one has ever done before. Genius is rare, and the chance to exercise it in a dance with others is rarer still…. In Great Groups, talents come alive.”
He starts the chapter by saying “None of us is as smart as all of us.”
“We all know that cooperation and collaboration grow more important every day….. Yet despite the rhetoric of collaboration, we continue to advocate it in a culture in which people strive to distinguish themselves as individuals.. We continue to live in a byline culture where recognition and status are accorded to individuals, not groups. … Throughout history, groups of people, often without conscious design, have successfully blended individual and collective effort to create something new and wonderful….. Great Groups have reshaped the world in very different and enduring ways. We have to recognize a new paradigm: not of great leaders alone, but of 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 members find it in themselves.”
Great Groups are “made up of greatly gifted people. Each achieved or produced something spectacular new and each was widely influential, often sparking creative collaboration everywhere.… Group seem to be most successful when undertaking tangible projects.… The project brings them together and brings out the collective best.… It is no surprise that we tend to underestimate just how much creative work is accomplished by groups. A Great Group can be a goad, a check, a sounding board, and a source of inspiration, support, and even love…. Great Groups are organizations fully engaged in the thrilling process of discovery.”
“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 interdependent minded staffs and to set them free to do their best, most imaginative work…. In a truly creative collaboration, work is pleasure, and the only rules and procedures are those that advance the common cause…. Great groups rarely have morale problems. Intrinsically motivated, for the most part, the people in them are buoyed by the joy of problem-solving…. Imagine how much richer and happier our organization’s would be if, like Great Groups, they were filled with people working as hard and as intelligently as they can, to caught up for pettiness, their sense of self, grounded in the bedrock of talent and achievement..”
“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.”
“Great Groups… all have extraordinary leaders, and, as a corollary, these groups tend to lose their way when they lose their leadership. Great Groups tend to be collegial and non-hierarchical, people by singularly competent individuals who often have an anti-authoritarian streak. Nonetheless, virtually every Great Group has a strong and visionary head. [Such leaders have] 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…. who play well in the sandbox with others.”
“Those who are brought on board saw themselves as an enviable elite, however overworked and underpaid.… [These leaders] sought to recruit only the best person, in the needed specially the project required. Each person was told why he had been chosen: He was the best one to be had….. 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. .. With often delusional confidence… [their] lack of experience is an asset, not a liability, because these unseasoned recruits do not usually know what’s supposed to be impossible. 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.” In short, experience tends to make people more realistic, and that’s not necessarily a good thing…[leaving] an inability to act and the loss of self trust.”
“Curiosity fuels every Great Group. The members don’t simply solve problems. They are engaged in a process of discovery that it’s own reward…. They have another quality that allows them both to identify significant problems and define creative, boundary busting solutions rather than simplistic ones. They have hungry, urgent minds, expansive interests and encyclopedic knowledge…. People are able to make connections that others don’t see, in part because they have command of more data in the first place. Individual and collective achievements result from the interplay of distinguished minds.”
“Great Groups don’t have to be told what to do, although they need to be nudged back on task.Great groups are coordinated teams of original thinkers…. They are people who get things done, but there are people with immortal longings. Often, they are scientifically minded people with poetry in their souls……
Inspirational leaders can transform even mundane projects, turning them, too, into missions from God. They are always people with an original vision… promising a challenge worthy of a Crusader. Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream…. of doing something superbly well that no one had ever done before.”
