The Virtuoso and the Team

  Strategy  

Teamwork. Be a Team Player. Take one for the Team. Seems there is a lot of focus on teams these days. Local teams, global teams, cross-functional teams, team collaboration; the operative word here being TEAM. But what about the virtuoso, the gifted person who consistently creates one masterpiece after the other? At a CIO conference in the 1990s I recall Peter Drucker’s observation that so much focus on teams leaves little room for virtuoso performances. Drucker went on to say that in his experience, no team ever produced a work that could rival those of gifted soloists. No team has painted a Picasso or created an invention that changed the world, Drucker contended. True breakthroughs are usually the result of the insight and talent of a single individual, while the implementation of that breakthrough usually requires a team.

You could hear a pin drop as those words settled into the 100 by-invitation-only CIOs and then the murmurs as they pondered what the father of strategic planning just put out there.   

For me it was an epiphany: The goal is to create a team whose members were so comfortable within their own skin that they could embrace a soloist. Better yet, how about a team of people, who in their own right were each capable of virtuoso performances, a symphony orchestra or Special Forces model perhaps.

Granted …