1 Breakthrough Teams It was 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, October 22, 1879, and experimenter Francis Jehl was still at work. He had been at his desk for ten hours, hunched over, carefully evacuating the air from a pear-shaped lightbulb. It wasn''t an unusual workday for him. His boss''s log routinely noted curious work habits: "we worked all night" or "32 continuous hrs." or "60 hrs." or "six days this week.
" In fact "the Old Man," as "the boys" affectionately called their boss even before his hair turned gray, preferred to work at night when the team would not be interrupted by distracting visitors. As a result, Jehl often began work at 7:00 p.m. and continued until 7:00 the next morning. "We work all night experimenting," lead experimenter Charles Batchelor wrote to his brother, Tom, "and sleep ''til noon in the day. We have got 54 different things on the carpet and some we have been on for four or five years. [My boss] is an indefatigable worker and there is no kind of failure, however disastrous, that affects him." As Jehl finished removing the air from the bulb, the Old Man called his glassblower, Ludwig Boehm, to fully seal off its base.
Over his head, twelve telegraph wires formed an intricate spider''s web, all ending at a large battery at the center of the room. Placing the bulb on a test stand, the Old Man connected it to the nearby battery. Suddenly, the room was awash with light that illuminated work tables, machinery, and jars of chemicals on glass shelves lining the walls.The men quickly fell into the usual laboratory routine to observe the light''s brightness and steadiness. They waited to record the moment when it finally burned out. But this experiment played out differently than ever before. While earlier filaments had burned out within several hours, the carbonized sewing thread that Batchelor had carefully threaded into the bulb stayed lit. As the hours passed, team members came and went: head machinist John Kruesi, who translated sketches into working devices; Francis Upton, the American scientific researcher who proved the concept mathematically; and John Lawson and Martin Force, laboratory assistants.
Each of them felt a growing excitement at having earned a front-row seat to the historic event. They understood better than anyone else the difficulty-and benefits-of earning a place on the Old Man''s team. The Old Man''s name? Thomas Alva Edison. On October 22, the remarkable bulb dreamed up by Edison, drawn by Batchelor, mathematically proved by Upton, built by Kruesi and Boehm, and tested by Lawson, Force, and Jehl, burned for thirteen and a half hours, with a light described by the New York Herald ''s Marshal Fox as, "the mellow sunset of an Italian autumn. a little globe of sunshine, a veritable Aladdin''s lamp," before Edison determined he had seen enough. "If it will burn that number of hours now, I know I can make it burn a hundred!" he cried exultantly. If you were asked who invented incandescent electric light, and you answered Edison, you''d be right and you''d be wrong. The revolution that Edison wrought was the product of a team.
That''s how he thought of it, and that''s how the team thought of it. For some reason, it''s easier for us to assign credit to a single person than to a team. We love the idea of a lone genius, the mastermind, the hero. From an early age, we''re indoctrinated with the single-achiever ideal in school. Our textbooks boil things down to their simplest form, and for a fifth-grader, it''s easy to say that Edison = lightbulbs. The reality is very different. Here''s what geniuses do: they build great teams. Never intimidated by other great minds, Edison actively sought out men with a broad base of knowledge, a passion for learning, impeccable character, and a commitment to excellence.
He then organized them into small teams comprised of an experimenter and two or three assistants. They were given a goal and allowed to pursue it independently. The story is told that once, when an experimenter asked Edison what he would do with a particularly difficult problem, Edison replied, "Don''t ask me. If I knew, I would try it myself!" That''s not to say Edison didn''t care about the process: quite the opposite. He was intensely interested, neglecting sleep and personal hygiene to pursue his inventions. Edison was known to "flit" around the factory in a black floppy-rimmed sombrero and dirty suit with his hair uncombed, checking in on his teams of experimenters-examining and instructing, but rarely interfering. He recognized that by allowing each of the talented people he''d assembled to stretch and succeed independently of him, he got the best results. As Edison explained: "I generally instructed them on the general idea of what I wanted carried out, and when I came across an assistant who was in any way ingenious, I sometimes refused to help him out in his experiments, telling him to see if he could not work it out himself, so as to encourage him.
" Unbelievably, Edison-one of the most brilliant minds in the world-had accepted that he alone did not possess all the answers; but together, his team usually did. Edison shared the vision, the work, the fun-and the rewards-with his team. One lab assistant described his work as "strenuous but joyous." In a letter to his father, Upton wrote, "The strangest thing to me is the $12 that I get each Saturday, for my labor does not seem like work, but like study." Key team members received shares in Edison''s companies and he let them invest in the projects to which they contributed. Perhaps most significant, when the time came to expand operations, Edison rewarded members of his team with leadership positions at the new companies, enabling many of them to retire wealthy men. Recent research confirms the wisdom of Edison''s approach to collaboration. University of New Mexico professor Vera John-Steiner explains that collaboration enables people to compensate "for each other''s blind spots.
Collaboration operates through a process in which the successful intellectual achievements of one person arouse the intellectual passions and enthusiasms of others." In the early 1970s Kenneth Bruffee, an English and composition professor, introduced the then-radical argument that students learned more through group work than when listening only to their teacher. And collaboration has also been shown to benefit the almighty buck. Mark Potter, along with his colleagues Richard T. Bliss at Babson College, and Christopher Schwarz at University of California at Irvine, set out to discover the best management approach when it came to mutual funds success. "It''s fascinating," Potter told us. "If you''re wondering where the safest place is for your money-a team-managed approach is much less risky." In their research, Potter and his colleagues measured three thousand equity mutual funds over a twelve-year period.
They not only found less risk with the team approach, but as counterintuitive as it sounds, the total cost of owning a team-managed mutual fund is nearly fifty basis points lower annually than a mutual fund managed by an individual. This is just a sampling of the research that has come out in recent years regarding the power of collaboration. It coincided with technological advances that created the emergence of linked teams that could communicate faster and cheaper than could previously be imagined. Motivated by the data and the possibility of virtual, global teams, leaders have increasingly turned to teamwork to save their floundering organizations, but only in the most superficial way; and that''s the rub. Rather than fundamentally change how we work and interact, we''ve merely changed our vocabulary. It''s hard not to notice how the use of "team" in corporate-speak has exploded over the past ten years; and along the way, its true meaning and power has been hijacked, as in, "Attention team members: cleanup on aisle four." Instead of referencing power and transformation, "team" has become the default word for "employee." It is the propagandist''s cynical coercion: "Let''s call them teams; then they''ll get along better.
" There is nothing about the true meaning of teamwork in its casual usage. There''s a missing link. Something''s not working. When "team" is used as simply another business buzzword-"let''s drill down and grab a take-away in this space and take it back to the team"-it diminishes what the powerful word (and concept) can really achieve. It''s gone so far that many teams in today''s companies are not true teams at all; they''re faux. Organizationally, structurally, motivationally, they are not set up to work together effectively. They''re simply vague labels placed on random groupings, or even the entire organization as a whole. And those labels accomplish nothing.
Someone has told leadership that they should have teams, and so they have them. But employees are not fooled. They continue to be groups or departments of people that simply have the blanket of "team" thrown upon them. Take a peek underneath and you''ll find a group of individuals largely fending for themselves. The sad truth for leadership is that they are adrift at sea. They''re expected to motivate people to work like high-performance teams, often without having experienced teamwork themselves. So they fake it. They use the training and vocabulary of teams and hope for the best.
Then, when their people fail to bring down big game, managers throw up their hands in frustration: "What''s wrong with these people?" The problem isn''t necessarily with the people, but with what they''re being asked to do: work together without the necessary relationship tool.