Sublime

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.

4. Finally, the executive is within an organization.

Profits also come, in large part, from the firm’s ability, through its project team structure, to leverage the professional skills of the seniors with the efforts of juniors.

Skunk Works creator Kelly Johnson was a visionary on at least two fronts—designing airplanes and organizing genius. Johnson seemed to know intuitively what talented people needed to do their best work, how to motivate them, and how to make sure that the desired product was created as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In time, Johnson wrote down

ten to twenty testimonials;

of the firm’s entire productive capacity, 40 or 50 percent is consumed with a higher-priced person performing a lower-value task.

FIGURE 2–1 Spectrum of Practice

If we want to be authentic and whole at work, we must learn to speak up about other important commitments in our lives.

services that begin as the domain of the creative, experienced professional inevitably “mature” and can be delivered by using more junior personnel and relatively well-specified procedures.