Why a great individual is better than a good team | Hacker News Reader

Why a great individual is better than a good team

blogs.hbr.org

22 pointsj_baker7 comments

I made the decision to work in small, preferably very small, teams 20 years ago. Why? Because I noticed that the very small teams I worked with were far, far more productive than the bigger teams.

I also learned at that time, empirically, that "flying in" domain experts for certain problems was far, far more effective than having them hang around on the project. And this is how I've liked to work with my clients ever since.

Taking this a stage further, I decided to study individual effectiveness on teams by writing a thesis on it (for my Masters) by studying a small number of projects in quite a large company. (I am very grateful to that company, and a particular individual, whom I still know, for letting me run riot in their IT department for a summer to conduct this study.)

The result I obtained was absolutely clear that productivity is linked to individuals. I used function points as the basis for the study, and while I'm not wedded to them in any way, I've yet to find a better metric. I'm not active in that field any longer, so please enlighten me of progress.

The maxim "hire smart people and get out of their way" is the best way to be productive in IT. Better still, practice servant leadership alongside http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership and you are golden.

It's hellishly difficult getting businesses to adopt this practice, though. When you are all command and control this doesn't tickle your pseudo alpha genes. But when you want to get work done, it's the nuts.

I'm never able to understand why businesses cannot accept this fact and incorporate it into project management. It seems that they'd rather throw 20 average engineers (using average technology) at a problem and just spend more money and time on all sorts of official-looking artifacts such as meetings and design documents. They often strike me as signalling devices to show that responsibility for the problem is being distributed among everyone in case something goes awry. They're certainly necessary, but they're almost always done to excess. Really, the heavy emphasis on 'collaboration' always seems hellbent on forcing ideas to fit some safe notion on how things should be done instead of just trusting individuals to figure it out for their own.

What's the motive here? Fear? If so, why do we allow people in charge to project this?

I know they are talking about businesses and everything here, but let me throw a wrench into that entire theory.

2010 San Francisco Giants.

When teams gel and you get a synergistic effect, it's an awe-inspiring thing. Humility is often the key ingredient. Contrast the 2011 Mavs with the 2011 Heat. The individual team members must be humble else hubris and competing egos will drag them down.

Hubris leads to overreaching and taking uncalculated risks (http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10565), and I believe this is far more common when individuals are part of a team than whey they are working alone because teams provide a safety net and outlet for passing the buck. Individuals working alone don't have these outs, and this helps keep them in check.

Another aspect to this is if an individual has the freedom to flow in any direction and is not bound by constraints imposed by the group, then the individual has the freedom to tap into and include their best ideas in the project without having to pass them by a committee. This reduces context switches, allows them to flow faster and better maximize their potential.

In addition, when a corporation hires someone with a specific task in mind, they may only see a sliver of the individual's potential because the latent parts aren't relevant to the job description. Contrast this to an entrepreneur that puts his heart and soul and every fiber of his being into realizing his vision. This environment is maximizing his potential because he is summoning all his best parts. When all of that energy is harnessed and focused, the individual is much more valuable.

Another good example!

the 2010 SF Giants had some of the most individually talented pitchers in the game.

As much as the hypothesis in the title appeals to me, I don't think there's anything in the article to substantiate it. The whole thing is a repetitive pattern of {cite some scientific finding}, {blindly assert that the same (or, at some point, the inverse!) applies to this unrelated subject}. Bleh.

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