Certain tasks can only be performed collaboratively, and it is madness to recruit people, however gifted, who are incapable of working side by side toward a common goal.

Great groups see themselves as winning underdogs.

Great Groups are full of talented people who can work together.

Leaders of Great Groups find the right niche for each excellent contributor.

Disney, John Andrew Rice, and Steve Jobs not only headed Great Groups, they found their own greatness in them. As Howard Gardner points out, Oppenheimer showed no great administrative ability before or after the Manhattan Project. And yet when the world needed him, he was able to rally inner resources that probably surprised even himself.

Great Groups are optimistic, not realistic.

instead of having everyone working on the same feature, the group would break up into project teams and work on several films simultaneously. The latter decision was a particularly shrewd one. Disney has no competition, really, so how does it achieve that sense, so typical of Great Groups, of being a winning underdog? According to Peter Schneider,

Albers used a hands-on method to teach key ideas. He believed, Duberman writes, that the nature of an object is made up of three aspects: its inner qualities, its external appearance, and how it relates to other objects.

The leaders of Great Groups give them what they need and free them from the rest.