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.

For Penrose, the firm was defined not by the assets it owned or the contracts it made but by its capabilities and its ability to deploy those capabilities in productive services: ‘All the evidence we have indicates that the growth of firms is connected with the attempts of a particular group of people to do something.’ Perhaps that seems obvious. But her emphasis

on ‘the group’ recognises the centrally cooperative nature of business activity, and her identification of purpose – ‘to do something’ – establishes its problem-related focus.

The critical resource for a firm lies in its distinctive capabilities or distinctive combinations of capabilities.

Distinctive capabilities, such as those of Apple’s design team, are those characteristics of a firm that cannot be replicated by competitors or can only be replicated with great difficulty, even after these competitors realise the benefits which they yield for the originating company. That distinctiveness could never be true of the hierarchical organisation run in the spirit of Frederick Taylor or as a cascade of principal–agent problems formulated by reference to the solutions in leading economic journals.

When executives deliver that routine cliché of modern management – ‘Our people are our greatest asset’ – the commercial value of the collective intelligence developed within the corporation is probably what they have in mind. The asset is the capability of individuals and teams within the business to solve problems, to devise and deliver new products and to win

the commitment of suppliers and the trust of customers. Collective intelligence is the basis of the competitive advantage of most successful corporations, and it is enshrined in its people.