Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration

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.

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

most talented people have little incentive to defer to an individual without a strong moral core. Genius, even simple excellence, multiplies personal options. Why follow someone you can’t trust or who makes you feel soiled?

Although the ability to work together is a prerequisite for membership in a Great Group, being an amiable person, or even a pleasant one, isn’t. Great Groups are probably more tolerant of personal idiosyncrasies than are ordinary ones, if only because the members are so intensely focused on the work itself. That all-important task acts as a social

a Disney animator recalls, “Disney had only one rule. Whatever we did had to be better than anybody else could do it.”

the way an environment is structured can have an enormous impact on creativity, for good or for ill. The atmosphere most conducive to creativity is one in which individuals have a sense of autonomy and yet are focused on the collective goal. Constraint (perceived as well as real) is a major killer of creativity, Amabile has found. Freedom or autono

(Kay recalls a metaphor from that era: “The ARPA dream was a magnetic field, and we were little iron filings lining up in that.”)

Great Groups have a tendency to give rise to others.

All Great Groups share information effectively. Many of the leaders we have looked at were brilliant at ensuring that all members of the group had the information they needed. Bob Taylors weekly meeting at PARC was a simple, efficient mechanism for sharing data and ideas.

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