I stated an opinion based on an idea of mine.
“Teamwork is huge. It is critical. But without a good idea, you have no reason for a team to exist.”
That’s my opinion. Well, it got toasted in this thread.
I think largely in part because I stated my opinion, but did not explain my idea.
Here’s the idea:
Everything starts with an idea. Even teams. “Let’s put together a team.” Great. Why?
• To create better software
• To campaign for a politician
• To plan a church service
• To sell this product
• To make money
• To change the world!
OK. So, did you just create a team or did you also create an idea? The world needs to change, so let’s create a team. Great idea! Now you create a team and THEY may create new ideas. Wonderful! Your idea reproduces. It recycles. It multiplies. It spreads and grows.
Now create a team without an idea (or a horrible idea). Congratulations. You just handed your team a boulder and told it to swim. It is a temporal endeavor and it ends up being a horrible waste of resources.
Put together a horrible team of “idea killers” around a great idea. What a waste. Pearls before swine. You end up with what Steve Jobs discussed in a recent Time cover story.
“You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production car, and it sucks? And you go, What happened? They had it! They had it in the palm of their hands! They grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory!
“What happened was, the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers, and the engineers go, ‘Nah, we can’t do that. That’s impossible.’ And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people, and they go, ‘We can’t build that!’ And it gets a lot worse.”