Everyone Needs a Team

This week's Economist includes a column "Are superstars as good when they move jobs?" It highlighted findings that superstar employees aren't instantly superstars at new companies because that out-performance came from the superstar working with the support team they've built. Everyone needs a team!

Even Steve Jobs had a posse

A clear-cut case occurs in "Can They Take It with Them? The Portability of Star Knowledge Workers' Performance: Myth or Reality" by Boris Groysberg, Linda-Eling Lee and Ashish Nanda, where investment analysts tended to fall in external rankings after changing firms. Per The Economist, "In theory, a move ought not to have made much difference to how well they did their job: analysts often cover the same firms for the same clients. In practice, the stars’ performance declined compared with colleagues who stayed put." A similar example is football, where top-performing wide-receivers don't do as well when they move (because they need to follow plays and work with the team) while kickers (who operate largely solo) transfer fine.

I had a funny conversation with my wife about this article. I strongly believe in the "people work in teams" philosophy; it's also why I have strong opinions about some movies. I cited the example of the Traitorous Eight, a founding story of Silicon Valley where eight PhD students were recruited by a genius, hated it, and jumped ship - twice - to found companies like Intel and AMD. My wife wanted to give a counter-example and gave Steve Jobs, pointing out his departure from Apple and then his return and Apple's resurgence. I was very excited when I pulled up the Wikipedia article and found this passage (emphasis added):

In 1985, Jobs departed Apple after a long power struggle with the company's board and its then-CEO, John Sculley. That same year, Jobs took some Apple employees with him to found NeXT, a computer platform development company that specialized in computers for higher-education and business markets, serving as its CEO. In 1986, he bought the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, which was spun off independently as Pixar. Pixar produced the first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story (1995), and became a leading animation studio, producing dozens of commercially successful and critically acclaimed films.

In 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as CEO after the company's acquisition of NeXT. He was largely responsible for reviving Apple, which was on the verge of bankruptcy. He worked closely with British designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products and services that had larger cultural ramifications, beginning with the "Think different" advertising campaign, and leading to the iMac, iTunes, Mac OS X, Apple Store, iPod, iTunes Store, iPhone, App Store, and iPad.

As emphasized above, Steve Jobs left with a posse to found NeXT, and when he came back to Apple it was via NeXT so he brought his team back with him! And as much as cultural memory credits Jobs with solo creation of e.g. the iPhone, he partnered up with Jony Ive (and many other people) to make it happen. It's worth remembering that none of us work in a vacuum, but instead we all rely on the support structure and community that we've built. And if our jobs change, then the real superstars build new structures and communities to match their new environment.