“Shared values also bind longtime Silicon Valley natives. The personal convictions of the Valley’s remarkable innovators, who created not just a company but an industry, still echo through the community. Bill Hewlett and David Packard influenced the older generation directly; many of them were early employees. Through this old guard, collegiality and high standards for performance are being carried down to next‐generation entrepreneurs.”
Other examples of tribes inspiring individuals to greater heights abound: the sports teams—the 1969 New York Knicks, the “No Name Defense” of the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins, the 1991 Minnesota Twins—that performed as a collective that was more distinguished than any of the individuals; the Bauhaus movement in architecture in the early decades of the twentieth century. In each case, the physical clustering of a tribe of creative individuals led to explosive innovation and growth.
The Alchemy of Synergy
The most dramatic example of the power of tribes is the work of actual creative teams. In Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration, Warren Bennis and Pat Ward Biederman write of what they call “Great Groups,” collections of people with similar interests who create something much greater than any of them could create individually—who become more than the sum of the parts. “A Great Group can be a goad, a check, a sounding board, and a source of inspiration, support, and even love,” they say. The combination of creative energies and the need to perform at the highest level to keep up with peers leads to an otherwise unattainable commitment to excellence. This is the alchemy of synergy.
One of the best examples of this is the creation of Miles Davis’s landmark album Kind of Blue. While music lovers of every sort widely consider the recording a “must have,” and legions of jazz fans—and classical and rock fans for that matter—know each note of the album by heart, none of the players on that album knew what they were going to play before they entered the studio.
“Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates and arrived with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played,” pianist Bill Evans says in the original liner notes to the album. “Therefore, you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances. The group had never played these pieces prior to the recordings and I think without exception the first complete performance of each was a ‘take.’ ” In fact, the songs that appear on the album are all the first full takes, with the exception of “Flamenco Sketches,” which was the second take.
When trumpeter Davis gathered Evans, along with tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb in the studio in 1959, he laid out the scales— itself somewhat revolutionary, since jazz at the time was traditionally built around chord changes—and turned on the tape recorder. Each of these players was an active participant in the tribe moving jazz in new directions at that time, and they’d worked together in the past. What happened during the Kind of Blue sessions, though, was a perfect storm of affirmation, inspiration, and synergy. These artists set out to break barriers, they had the skill to take their music in new directions, and they had a leader with a bold vision.
Their improvisational work that day was the result of powerful creative forces merging and creating something outsize—the ultimate goal of synergy. When the tape started rolling, magic happened. “Group improvisation is a further challenge,” said Evans. “Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result. This most difficult problem, I think, is beautifully met and solved on this recording.” The music they created in those next few hours— working with each other, playing off each other, synchronizing with each other, challenging each other—would last several lifetimes. Kind of Blue is the best‐selling jazz album of all time and, nearly fifty years later, still sells thousands of copies every week.
Why can creative teams achieve more together than they can separately? I think it’s because they bring together the three key features of intelligence that I described earlier. In a way, they model the essential features of the creative mind.
Great creative teams are diverse. They are composed of very different sorts of people with different but complementary talents. The team that created Kind of Blue was made up of extraordinary musicians who not only played different instruments but brought with them different musical sensibilities and types of personality. This was true too of the Beatles. For all that they had in common, culturally and musically, Lennon and McCartney were very different as people, and so too were George Harrison and Ringo Starr. It was their differences that made their creative work together greater than the sum of their individual parts.
Creative teams are dynamic. Diversity of talents is important, but it is not enough. Different ways of thinking can be an obstacle to creativity. Creative teams find ways of using their differences as strengths, not weaknesses. They have a process through which their strengths are complementary and compensate for each other’s weaknesses too. They are able to challenge each other as equals, and to take criticism as an incentive to raise their game.
Creative teams are distinct. There’s a big difference between a great team and a committee. Most committees do routine work and have members who are theoretically interchangeable with other people. Committee members are usually there to represent specific interests. Often a committee can do its work while half the members are checking their BlackBerrys or studying the wall‐paper. Committees are often immortal; they seem to persist forever, and so often do their meetings. Creative teams have a distinctive personality and come together to do something specific. They are together only for as long as they want to be or have to be to get the job done.
One of the most famous examples of powerful teamwork is the administration of President Abraham Lincoln. In her book Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin tells the story of Lincoln and four members of his cabinet, Edwin M. Stanton, secretary of war, Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the treasury, William H. Seward, secretary of state, and Edward Bates, attorney general. These five men were unquestionably part of the same tribe, passionate in their desire to lead and move America forward. However, each of the four others had opposed Lincoln openly and bitterly prior to his presidency. Stanton once even called Lincoln a “long armed ape.” Each had strongly held positions that sometimes differed greatly from Lincoln’s. In addition, each of them believed they were more deserving of the presidency than the man the people elected.