Diversity isn’t an impediment to building a great team—rather, it’s the fundamental ingredient without which a great team cannot exist. If we were all the same, there would doubtless be things that all of us could not do, and that therefore the team could not do. We need to partner with people whose strengths—whose weirdness, whose spikiness—is different from ours if we are to achieve results that demand more abilities than any of us has alone. And this means, in turn, that the more different we are from one another, the more we need one another. The more different we are, the more we rely on understanding and appreciating the strengths of others, and on building a shared understanding of purpose, and an atmosphere of safety and trust, so that those strengths can be most usefully put to work. Well-roundedness is a misguided and futile objective when it comes to individual people; but when it comes to teams, it’s an absolute necessity. The more diverse the team members, the more weird, spiky, and idiosyncratic they are, the more well-rounded the team.

Nothing is tougher and more time-consuming than having to replace people who haven’t kept up with the growth of the business.

And just as no cell can be too far from the blood supply, no team can be too far removed from the action of the marketplace — or so big that it becomes unwieldy and unresponsive…

Divide big teams into smaller ones aligned around projects, product lines, customer segments, geographical locations, etc., based on the idea of getting everyone in the organization into small teams and as close to his or her respective customers as possible. This is a way to increase the surface area of the company, giving the maximum number of employees a chance to interact with the marketplace.

By defining the what and not the how, great managers/coaches give employees the autonomy to find their own way of achieving these goals.

Nothing can emerge from the collective brain of the team that doesn’t enter it first.