Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

The respect issue is a critical one. Great Groups are voluntary associations. People are in them, not for money, not even for glory, but because they love the work, they love the project. Everyone must have complete faith in the leader’s instincts and integrity vis-a-vis the work.

Alan Kay once observed, “The way to do good science is to be incredibly critical without being depressed.” Great Groups don’t lose hope in the face of complexity. The difficulty of the task adds to their joy.

Thus the weekly meeting served as a simple but remarkably efficient structure for exposing everyone to information that might prove key somewhere down the line.

There is a certain kind of leader who recruits only people like himself or herself. There is another, better kind of leader who realizes you can only accomplish extraordinary things by involving excellent people who can do things that you cannot.

In Great Groups, you don’t find people who are distracted by peripheral concerns, including such perfectly laudable ones as professional advancement and the quality of their private lives. Ivy League colleges are full of well-rounded people. Great Groups aren’t. Great Groups are full of indefatigable people who are struggling to turn a vision into

Pragmatism was the gospel of Los Alamos. People often had to improvise, and not just in terms of equipment. People such as Teller, who reacted to every slight and were relentlessly confrontational, often accomplished less than those who found clever, oblique ways to get what they wanted.

Many Great Groups have a dual administration. They have a visionary leader, and they have someone who protects them from the outside world, the “suits.”

There is a lesson here that could transform our anguished workplaces overnight. People ache to do good work. Given a task they believe in and a chance to do it well, they will work tirelessly for no more reward than the one they give themselves. People who have been in Great Groups never forget them, although most groups do not las: very long. Our

West says that he thinks the creation of a subculture, with its own language, is not just typical of Great Groups, but predictive of their ultimate success. “I think you can almost identify projects that are going to be successful by the fact that they have invented their own world. If you wanted to find a litmus test for whether this stuff is work

Roland Joffe’s 1989 film on the Manhattan Project, Fat Man and Little Boy.