Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

Much of the communication within Great Groups is nonverbal. Members understand the shared vision so profoundly that they often don’t need language to communicate. But, while members of Great Groups may be able to work together on some problem without saying much of anything, such groups typically develop a language of their own. Like the private la

But there is nothing like a shared ordeal to build cohesion, as armies and fraternities have long known. Those who stayed at Black Mountain and went through the fire together developed a heightened sense of kinship.

Among Kelly Johnson’s strengths was a sure grasp of what mattered to his people and what didn’t. Most of them were engineers and tinkerers who hated paperwork, which he cut to an absolute minimum.

we decided to focus on seven that have had enduring impact. They are the Walt Disney studio, which invented the animated feature film in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; the Great Groups at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and Apple, which first made computers easy to use and accessible to nonexperts; the 1992 Clinton campaign, wh

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.”

“As We May Think,” published in the Atlantic Monthly

Great Groups don’t just talk about things (although they often do that at considerable length). They make things—amazing, original things, such as a plane that a bat can’t find.

Leaders of Great Groups inevitably have exquisite taste. They are not creators in the same sense that the others are. Rather, they are curators, whose job is not to make, but to choose. The ability to recognize excellence in others and their work may be the defining talent of leaders of Great Groups.

The leaders who can do so must first of all command unusual respect. Such a leader has to be someone a greatly gifted person thinks is worth listening to, since genius almost always has other options. Such a leader must be someone who inspires trust, and deserves it. And though civility is not always the emblematic characteristic of Great Groups, i