The Cohort Effect
Many of us never get the chance to realize childhood dreams, but actress and comedian Rachel Dratch is one of the lucky ones. Growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, she stayed up past her bedtime once a week to watch Saturday Night Live on television. She discovered SNL while sleeping over at her friend Jill’s house; Jill’s older brother was watching, so Dratch sat down in front of the TV as well. “I remember being immediately fascinated,” Dratch recalled in her 2012 memoir, Girl Walks into a Bar . . . “What was this secret world I had just stumbled upon? It had a feeling like nothing I’d ever seen on TV.”1
SNL was one of the small screen’s hottest programs, and its unique blend of comedy, variety entertainment, and live performances would go on to garner dozens of Emmy awards2 and become a cultural phenomenon. Executive producer Lorne Michaels was credited for launching the careers of early cast members such as Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, and John Belushi as well as a who’s who of comedy superstars, including Dana Carvey, Mike Myers, Chris Rock, Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Seth Meyers, and Jimmy Fallon—a record of talent spawning that continued virtually unmatched in the entertainment industry through the 1990s and into the 2000s. Dratch would become another name on that list, famous for characters such as the perpetually depressed Debby Downer and the junior high school student Sheldon.3
Dratch started at SNL in 1999. Like other cast members I spoke with, she found the show incredibly demanding. Back then (as now), the cast and crew had only six days to create a show from scratch that would air before a live television audience of millions. On Mondays, there was a brainstorming session in Michaels’s office. On Tuesdays, cast members and writers crafted sketches together, often pulling all-nighters to get the job done. On Wednesdays, the cast read through the sketches and made revisions while the production team began work on the sets, costumes, and sound. On Thursdays and Fridays, the cast and crew rehearsed, revised, tied up loose ends, and wrote the “Weekend Update” segment, which commented on items in the news. A cast rehearsal took place Saturday afternoon, followed by a dress rehearsal at eight p.m. before a studio audience. For an hour afterward, Michaels would make last-minute cuts and edits, since the show’s material was usually overtime by twenty minutes. The staff scrambled to make these changes, up until and even after the moment at eleven thirty p.m., when those famous words echoed from television sets across America: “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”
Dratch found that SNL’s high-octane atmosphere spurred her to work at her very best. Michaels and the other producers didn’t coddle her; they threw her into the same proverbial pool that Jorma Panula also talked about, and let her fend for herself. The experience helped Dratch improve her writing skills. It was simple: either write good sketches with funny characters, or sit on the sidelines watching each week’s show. She also learned a lot from her colleagues. Dratch had heard that “competition could be really rough”4 on the show, but as Michaels told me in an interview, “There’s something special about an environment in which nobody is more important than the show. On Monday, we face a blank page. Then, in six days, we’re on the air. It’s a task so difficult that it brings out the best in people.”5
To get the job done, cast members and writers collaborate closely. Many do so selflessly as well, in some cases helping to refine skits that others wrote and would take credit for.6 Amid all the chaos of production, deep emotional bonds form: “We were sort of trapped there,” writer David Mandel has said. “There was a bunker mentality. You know, there was the siege of putting the show up each week. And that ultimately meant you were sort of eating and drinking, and in some cases, sleeping with these people, the same group of people, and going to the bathroom with them and, you know, seeing them at their best and their worst.”7 Veteran cast members remember that one of their favorite parts of working on SNL was the camaraderie that emerged. “I will miss most the moments you’ll never see,” Will Ferrell has said, “the goofing around during the blocking of sketches on Thursday and Friday. Those were the parts of the week that were the most fun for me. That seventeenth floor has the same feeling of living in a dorm—except that everybody is doing comedy—and I liked that feeling.”8
Although the contexts and stakes are radically different, we often see similarly transcendent displays of teamwork among other groups of highly competitive individuals—athletes, entrepreneurs running start-up companies, kitchen staff at restaurants, flight crews, first responders, military personnel, and emergency-room teams. These people find themselves in intense situations where every second counts, peak performance matters, and everyone has to work together to achieve a common goal. In corporate environments, sadly, you don’t always see such deep camaraderie among team members. The most progressive organizations spend considerable time and money focusing on team building, giving rise to an entire cottage industry of consultants and coaches. Still, many workplaces are lucky if they experience heightened, near-seamless teamwork only every now and then. In many organizations, poor teamwork is endemic.
At superboss companies, colleagues compete with one another to perform at their best, but also work together every day as seamlessly and effectively as the cast of Saturday Night Live. Of course, superbosses are great at building “vertical” bonds between themselves and their protégés, but much more than traditional bosses, they also know how to create winning teams. Protégés typically have a deep respect and affection for their colleagues (similar to what they feel for their superboss), enabling everyone to work together, learn, and perform far better than they would on their own.
To some extent, collaboration and team spirit at superboss-run organizations emerge indirectly as a consequence of other steps superbosses take to spur motivation, creativity, and learning in their individual protégés. However, superbosses understand that teams win more than individuals do—that the potential of a group of immensely talented individuals is greater than the sum of its parts. They explicitly encourage collegiality among colleagues to take root, even as they instill a strong competitive spirit within their teams. For superbosses, extreme collaboration and meaningful competition aren’t opposites; they go hand in hand. The presence of one enhances the other, resulting in a seemingly magical outcome: a high-performance environment that feels nurturing, welcoming—and fulfilling.
Crafting the Cult
At a glance, it may seem hard to appreciate how special superboss workplaces are. Many workplaces have at least some degree of team spirit, right? Colleagues celebrate one another’s birthdays. They throw holiday parties. They participate in fantasy football leagues. They connect on social media. And when challenges arise, they help one another out to get the job done. Most of us don’t work on the sets of television shows; we work in professional offices or retail environments or production facilities or schools. In these contexts, the teamwork and camaraderie that exist often seem pretty good.
Here’s the difference: the teams that superbosses assemble aren’t just pretty good—they are exceptional. Even at the best workplaces, employees might refer to their team as a surrogate “family,” but it’s rare for employees to go so far as to describe their teams as “cults.” When I talked to protégés of superbosses, however, that term came up over and over. Recall from chapter 3, for instance, how designer Joseph Abboud described working for Ralph Lauren: “It was very much like a cult. You wanted to be part of it. Ralph was our hero. We believed the myth; we dressed the myth. We were the legions.”9
You might think creating a profound “cult” experience would be hard for superbosses, requiring some sort of special energy, devotion, and commitment, not to mention resources. How else would you overcome all the petty politics, resentments, and miscommunications that normally hamstring teams? Doesn’t it take millions of dollars spent on team-building retreats and intensive coaching? In reality, crafting a cult experience isn’t that hard for superbosses. As Abboud’s language suggests, strong bonds between teammates arise as a happy side effect of key elements of the superboss playbook. First and foremost, Abboud identifies the distinctive vision of his superboss (i.e., Lauren’s “myth”) as the cornerstone of the cultish identity. In agreeing to go all in behind a unique vision, protégés naturally feel different from others who don’t get the vision, or are unlucky enough to work for a leader without a vision.
Superbosses establish a kind of insider sensibility for protégés, constantly affirming to them that they are a uniquely talented bunch unlike any other. Ralph Lauren inspired his staff by saying they weren’t ordinary designers or merchandisers, but an elite of “chosen people.” “We were on this incredible ride,” one employee recalled, “and he’d say that this beautiful stuff wasn’t him, it was us—the most talented people in the world were in this room.”10 For superbosses, what most defined membership in the “chosen people” was the ability to set standards for the rest of the industry. Protégés were leaders, not followers. They had what it took to control, change, and dominate the marketplace, not merely keep pace with it, and this is what established them as a breed apart. “Ralph was always telling us that we’re the standard,” one employee related, “that everybody is always imitating everything we do, that everybody wants to be like us.”11
Superbosses reinforce their protégés’ sense of themselves as a “chosen people” by constantly reminding them that they can accomplish anything if they set their minds to it. Others submitted easily to adversity, superbosses proclaim, but protégés were made of much tougher stuff. Obstacles and challenges weren’t evidence of the team’s fallibility but rather occasions when teams could rise up together and reaffirm their inherent greatness. Bill Walsh explicitly worked with his team to turn disadvantages into advantages. In his hands, an extended road trip (which usually is a huge disadvantage for a football team) became an opportunity to thrive on the challenge and ride strong emotions to victory. As he explained in an interview with Harvard Business Review, “I would condition the 49ers to adversity. We would talk about how it feels to fly into enemy territory. . . . When I talked with the team, I would use examples from the early days of WWII as illustrations of the desperate and heroic fights we could emulate.”12 Standing strong and emerging victorious against the odds, members of superboss-led teams could think of themselves as uniquely talented and heroic, head and shoulders above teams at other organizations.
For most people working at companies today, such a disciplined reframing of adversity would seem unusual, to say the least. How many times have you seen colleagues sit at a meeting and do little but cast doubt on solutions others offer? “We don’t have the resources to get this done,” these naysayers claim. “We’re already overworked and understaffed.” “We’ve never tried anything like this before.” To superbosses, such sentiments are tantamount to treason, even if there might be some truth to them. Superbosses understand that focusing primarily on what might get in the way of change prevents a team or company from ever trying anything new. It also prevents employees from identifying wholeheartedly with the team and giving themselves over to it.
As I delved deeper into the lives of my superbosses, I found them doing everything and anything to inculcate a cultish sense of difference in their protégés. In public, they served as evangelists for their protégés, even to the point of minimizing their own contributions. Alice Waters was quoted as saying, “I don’t do anything really. I’m not a chef. I just let them do what they do so well. They are the best, you know.”13 Superbosses also find creative ways to publicize the unique skills and qualities of their protégés. For decades, artists who drew comic books were anonymous. Marvel comics impresario and writer Stan Lee introduced a credits page to his comic books, giving his artists “brands” for the first time. The credits might read something like: “Written with Passion by Stan Lee, Drawn with Pride by Jack Kirby. Inked with Perfection by Joe Sinnott. And lettered with a Scratchy Pen by Artie Simek.”14 Lee also talked up his staff in his monthly newsletter called The Bullpen Bulletin. These shout-outs often shaped the careers of people in his department. For instance, Stan Lee proclaimed Jack Kirby, a midcareer artist at the time, the “King of Comics,” a moniker that has stuck to this day.15 Of course, many would argue that Kirby was the “king of comics” regardless of what Lee thought. But certainly Lee’s coronation of Kirby helped secure that stature for Kirby in the public eye.
As if all of these techniques for establishing their protégés uniqueness weren’t enough, there’s another factor to consider: the superboss’s own revered status in the industry. As a protégé, you know that the superboss’s reputation as a talent magnet and innovator is well established. You also know that this Great One has chosen you. What could be more meaningful (and scary) than that? As Seth Meyers has said, the Saturday Night Live studio felt like a “temple” because of all the greats who came before.16 For all employees of superbosses, the burden is on them to prove they are worthy of the temple in which they work. When they do, they feel even more honored to know they belong. Not only has the superboss inspired them to believe in themselves, but his reputation has lent added credibility to any gesture of support he offers. When he assigns them a tough task or singles them out for their accomplishments, he knows what he’s talking about. It’s not just lip service. It’s real.
In thinking about the creation of cult identities, it’s also worth remembering that superbosses actively preselect employees for their eagerness to go all in, hiring unusual talent whom they feel have an understanding or at least an affinity for their vision. Former employee Robert Burke has said of Lauren: “Ralph surrounds himself with people who understand his taste level. When he says ‘Fred Astaire 1930,’ a big picture goes up in your mind. When he says ‘Montauk Weekend,’ everyone has the same vision.”17 Despite their different backgrounds, protégés of superbosses feel connected the moment they walk in the door because the superboss has ensured that they “get” his defining approach to the business. Lauren’s protégés weren’t just ordinary employees in their minds, but a unified band of soldiers standing tall in their (very well-tailored) uniforms as they paraded through a conquered village. As Luc Vandevelde, the former Marks & Spencer chairman, remarked of his time working for Michael Miles at Kraft, “We were part of a young generation and clearly were given the feeling that we were going to make it if we developed the company’s talent.”18
The high-performance environments of superboss organizations also naturally reinforce group identities among protégés. Like cast members on Saturday Night Live, protégés work long hours together, to the point where work seems to blend into personal lives. “The job and their personal life were kind of inseparable,” said former Chiat/Day creative director Bob Dion. “Best friends were also business associates and employees.”19
The superboss’s rejection of hierarchy, noted earlier, also comes into play here. As Michael Milken once observed, “People are much more productive when they feel they’re part of a team. It should be a collective force. No one should stand on top of someone else.”20 In most traditional organizations, hierarchy constitutes a formidable barrier to teamwork. It’s hard to give yourself over to the group when you’re constantly being reminded that you and your colleagues are not the same. Thanks to egalitarian policies as well as the open layout common to many superboss work spaces, team members receive both easy access to one another as well as constant affirmation of their unity. On Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, cast members maintained a friendly, supportive, and casual kind of interaction, taking time out to coach one another in an office environment that has been described as having “the offhand feel of a college dormitory lounge.”21 Architecturally as well as philosophically, the team reigns supreme.
Some superbosses go even further and locate their open work spaces in out-of-the-way places, creating a den or haven that greatly cements group cohesiveness. Milken moved his offices to Los Angeles, away from the industry’s center of Wall Street. During the early 1980s, George Lucas used money earned from the original Star Wars to create Skywalker Ranch, a creative mecca in northern California, away from Hollywood. “The idea for this came out of film school,” he once explained. “It was a great environment; a lot of people all very interested in film, exchanging ideas, watching movies, helping each other out. I wondered why we couldn’t have a professional environment like that. When you make a movie, it really is a fifteen-hour-a-day thing, and you don’t have time to do anything else. You need an environment that gets people excited about things, and they don’t do that in Hollywood.”22
Whether a superboss’s headquarters are physically removed or not, the lack of hierarchy, long hours, and shared pursuit and belief in the superboss’s vision all contribute to a group culture. Protégés I spoke with described a variety of shared memories, work habits, and even ways of communicating. Director, visual effects expert, and Oscar winner Phil Tippett recalls an intuitive “language” that evolved among Lucas protégés: “You develop a language that is almost telepathic where your understanding of film history and your references and the kinds of things that had inspired you in the past kind of become a touchstone. In the context of any particular discussion, you can cut through hours and hours and hours of description by saying, ‘Yeah, well, it’s gotta feel more like the third-act battle in The Wild Bunch’ and immediately you know what that means.”23 Imagine understanding your colleagues so well and feeling so close to them that your communication is “almost telepathic.” Some married couples don’t even enjoy that kind of intimacy, yet among employees of superboss-run companies, it’s far from unusual.
The “No Jerks” Rule
As of 2015, the San Antonio Spurs have been the most successful professional basketball franchise in the National Basketball Association for the previous seventeen years. They have made the play-offs every season since 1997–1998, and in 2014, they won their fifth championship in that time span.24 Their winning streak has taken place not only on the court; the team has also become a factory of talent for the rest of the league. Former assistants have become head coaches and/or general managers for the Atlanta Hawks, New Orleans Pelicans, Oklahoma City Thunder, Orlando Magic, Philadelphia 76ers, and Utah Jazz.25
Such talent creation reflects the management approach of the two superbosses at the helm: head coach Gregg Popovich and general manager R. C. Buford. The two emphasize strong teamwork among management, particularly when it comes to decision making. Whereas other teams might marginalize assistants and front-office staff, Popovich and Buford would treat them as integral parts of the leadership team by involving them in decision making and expecting them to have good ideas.26
Coach Bill Walsh deployed a similar approach with his teams. He believed in creating a “sense of belonging” for his people, and this meant insisting that he, his players, and his coaches overcome their egos and foster an atmosphere of open dialogue and debate. If during studying films of the previous week’s game, the lowliest assistant coach saw something Walsh missed, Walsh wanted him to feel comfortable sharing his idea.27 Walsh even encouraged this type of open environment on the sidelines during games. On Sundays, coaches and players were expected to provide input and feedback in order to make appropriate changes in personnel or in how plays were called. On other occasions, when Walsh analyzed potential recruits, he met with his talent scouts individually and then brought everyone together as a group to hash it out. “We created an atmosphere in meetings in which a scout or a coach was able to express himself completely. If he overstated or understated in any category, he could later change his opinion without being criticized. . . . Everyone was expected to participate.”28
Hiring specifically for an ability to collaborate is another key technique superbosses deploy to nourish team spirit. “We had a cardinal rule that we weren’t going to hire any pricks,” Michael Miles told me. “We decided that there were plenty of smart people out in the world, and you could hire smart, nice people as easily as you hire smart, not-nice people. And by doing so, you’d make Kraft into a place where people enjoyed working.”29 Miles’s main problem with “pricks” was that their very presence risked creating a “dog-eat-dog environment,” and Miles didn’t want his protégés to be forced to watch their backs at every turn or aim to succeed at their colleagues’ expense.30
Another way superbosses instill team spirit is by scrupulously modeling it. Miles Davis and Stan Lee were known for publicly and graciously acknowledging contributions proffered by protégés. “If I was the inspiration and wisdom and the link for this band,” Davis remarked, “Tony [Williams] was the fire, the creative spark; Wayne [Shorter] was the idea person, the conceptualizer of a whole lot of musical ideas we did; and Ron [Carter] and Herbie [Hancock] were the anchors. I was just the leader who put us all together.”31
For coach Bill Walsh, loyalty to the high-performing team and its staff was paramount: “How eager would you be to join an organization that might betray your loyalty?” he asked.32 Other superbosses placed a high premium on loyalty as well, especially in situations where members of the team were in trouble or in need of protection. Chez Panisse had an informal policy of helping employees personally and professionally. “You [as an employee] have the sense that people will take care of you,” manager Gilbert Pilgram said. “If you get into a bit of personal trouble, the restaurant will step in—observing your privacy, of course—to help you.”33 In superboss organizations, “team” isn’t an empty slogan. It means something, because the leader of the organization insists on it.
As my interviews revealed, a superboss’s team-oriented behavior made a profound impact on protégés. Clayton McWhorter, Frist’s onetime president and COO at HCA who went on to found and run HealthTrust, told me that he and his colleagues “really believed that if we performed good service, that the patient came first, that we attracted good people to work with us, then we would be supported in the community as being good citizens in the community. Employees were always number one.”34 Don Suter, a senior executive who worked for Bill Sanders, told me that he had been so impressed with Sanders’s ethic of teamwork that he was trying to incorporate it into his own organization. The essence of this model was “to treat people with respect . . . so that we can accomplish a lot more together than any one of you superstars can do on your own.”35
When you look at superbosses as a group, it becomes clear that there is actually much more to their model than “just” treating people with respect or demonstrating loyalty. Good managers with a professional mind-set do that all the time. Superbosses go further, engaging creatively so as to build emotional bonds among teammates. For instance, superbosses promote team identity by purposely nourishing a distinctive culture among their protégés. If you worked for Mary Kay Ash, the superboss who created Mary Kay cosmetics, you’d know that a bumblebee pin worn on a lapel designated someone as a top performer.36 You’d also know dozens of songs sung within the company, some touting company principles or maxims (e.g., “If you want to be a director, you’ve got to be perfecter”).37 You’d know the difference between a salesperson who received a Buick Regal as a bonus and one who received a Cadillac, and you’d also know the meaning of the bumper sticker affixed to the Regal that read: “When I Grow Up, I’m Going to Be a Cadillac.”38 You’d know all kinds of expressions used within the company, such as, “The speed of the leader is the speed of the gang.”39 The existence of all these rituals and practices gave substance to the team identity, making it feel meaningful and real.
Unlike most good professional managers, superbosses also build the culture of their teams by emphasizing socialization outside of work, typically with the superboss as ringleader. When the day’s teaching sessions were over, Jorma Panula had fun with his conducting protégés, encouraging them to get to know one another as well. “He takes care of the students like they are a brotherhood,” one protégé explained. “You eat together. You live together. You go to art exhibitions together. And he’s there with you.”40 Julian Robertson would take his team on informal “outward-bound” weekends to mountain locations for the express purpose of relaxing and bonding.41 As longtime HCA employee Victor Campbell recalls, colleagues at the company played basketball together after work: “A group of us were into basketball and Tommy would be out playing in the Civic Center with us on a Wednesday night. . . . Here he was and his kids in the stands and my little kids in the stands.”42 Jay Chiat socialized so casually and so regularly with colleagues that he created an environment in which, again, personal and work life seemed to blur. “It took me a while to learn,” former Chiat/Day creative director Bob Dion remembered, “but Jay wanted to close the doors at the office and meet you at the restaurant for dinner. And call you on the weekend, meet in the downtown streets in Soho and walk around, meet for brunch with the wives and family.”43
The Cohort Effect
In 1959, songwriter and producer Berry Gordy launched a small, independent record company using eight hundred dollars he borrowed from family members. One of the first acts he signed was William Robinson, a street performer with a melodious voice. Better known by his nickname, Smokey, Robinson and his group, the Miracles, landed a number one hit on the rhythm and blues chart in 1960 with their song “Shop Around.” It was the first of many successes for the Motown label, which went on to become one of the most famous labels in music history. Other legendary artists signed by Gordy include the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Martha and the Vandellas, a young Stevie Wonder, and the Jackson 5 (with little Michael Jackson). These performers all possessed raw talent, to be sure, but Gordy’s tutelage was instrumental in helping them rise to become superstars.44
Like other superbosses, Gordy created a special setting designed to mold and develop raw talent. Everyone on the Motown label was required to meet weekly for “quality control and product evaluation.”45 While its standards were exacting, the atmosphere at Hitsville (as it became known) “allowed people to experiment creatively and gave them the courage not to be afraid to make mistakes.”46 Many young Motown artists lacked social and presentation skills, so Gordy created an in-house finishing school, teaching them table manners, dress, posture, makeup, and even attitude management. With racial tensions running high (the struggles of the civil rights era were already under way), Gordy “packaged” his acts for mainstream audiences, hiring experts in choreography and stage presence, among other things.47
As the Motown artists worked hard to perfect their skills and build their careers, they formed the same kind of connections with one another that protégés of other superbosses experienced. Duke Fakir, one of the Four Tops, told Vanity Fair, “We were friends; we played basketball together, we played cards together, we ate together. It wasn’t like, if I got a hit, somebody else ain’t going to get one. Because one after the other, you kept getting hits, and more hits. It just became a wonderful place to make music. There were always sessions going on, 24/7. And the bar just kept getting raised—higher and higher.”48
Yet all this fun and warmth between artists didn’t mean that Gordy’s talent didn’t compete with one another. Songwriter and record producer Lamont Dozier recalled that as time passed, “competition became fierce, and to stay on top, you had to be on top of your craft.”49 The drive to claim popularity, attention, and financial success was real, although it never became excessive or destructive. As Stevie Wonder reflected, “The competition at Motown was not the competition that said, ‘I don’t like you.’ It was more like the Brill Building:50 It was a challenge to come up with great music, great songs. And to me, that was cool. I love Berry to pieces—Berry Gordy was, for my life, a blessing.”51
We’ve already seen that superbosses defy easy categorization. They are uncompromising and open. They are virtual micromanagers and extreme delegators. To these paradoxes, we add one more: superbosses encourage teamwork and they also deliberately encourage sharp competition among their intensely unified teams. This combustible mixture of collaboration and competition—what I call the 2-C principle—dramatically boosts the performance of individual team members. It is a phenomenon seldom seen among even the best traditional bosses.
Larry Ellison might not have always gotten the collaboration part right, but he had no trouble with competition. According to one protégé, “he used to set up people in a competing development project. He thought that internal competition was an interesting idea.”52 Many other superbosses, though, aimed for and achieved true 2-C working environments. Lorne Michaels wanted a sense of family to prevail at SNL, but he also specifically encouraged competition by hiring more cast members than could perform regularly on the show. The result was an intense but subtle jostling each week as individuals tried to get scenes they had written actually produced and performed. Likewise, at those lunchtime sessions at Tiger Management, there was only a limited opportunity for “airtime,” those moments when ambitious analysts could dazzle Julian Robertson in front of their peers. Analysts competed accordingly. “There were always fifty people around the table at different times, and you were competitive with them in that you were fighting for capital, fighting for attention, for being the best person at the firm, the most profitable person in your age group,” Chase Coleman told me. “That is the internal competition that occurs . . . but we all want to make the pie grow, because that is in all of our best interests.”53
One superboss who harnessed competition especially well while still ensuring collaboration was Gene Roberts. He told me he would frequently split off the “all-stars” to form a group of their own. This enabled them to shine without the lower performers dragging them down, creating competition between groups and sending a message to the entire organization that excellence is possible. Teamwork was part of this mix. In managing his people, Roberts created “a sense of collaboration in which everyone recognizes that just a handful of people can’t put out a great newspaper—or probably a great anything else. People may on the one hand compete with each other, but on the other hand they have a sense of each other’s work.”54
One reason healthy, balanced competition is so valuable for organizations is that it generates a “cohort effect” when it comes to talent: the more you help people become better, the more they help one another get better. As Paul McCartney said of John Lennon, “If I did something good, he’d want to do something better. It’s just the way we worked.”55 When asked what he learned from his year at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, tennis champion Jim Courier replied: “Nick gave us balls, rackets, and damn good players. We went on the back courts and duked it out.”56 Bollettieri put it this way about the tennis lab he created for talented youngsters around the world: “We have a lot of good players at the same place. You put the good against the good and you get excellent players, and eventually that becomes the best.”57 Healthy competition also drives excellence in so-called technology clusters or geographic hubs such as Silicon Valley, where a critical mass of companies exists side by side and talent pushes other talent, causing new ideas to percolate.
While the 2-C principle is central to how so many superbosses think about their protégés as a group, let’s go back to the world of comedy for the perfect visual. In his fascinating book about the Los Angeles comedy scene, William Knoedelseder describes how “comics would be gathered at the bar [in the famed Improv at Forty-fourth Street and Ninth Avenue in New York] running lines, critiquing, feeding off one another, jotting down ideas on cocktail napkins.”58 These comics, which in the 1970s included Jay Leno, Richard Lewis, Elayne Boosler, Andy Kaufman, Jimmie Walker, and Richard Belzer, were very much focused on getting their time on stage, yet they were also helping one another get better in a maelstrom of creativity. Knoedelseder similarly chronicles how two titans of late-night comedy, Jay Leno and David Letterman, were virtually inseparable in their early years in Los Angeles, forming “a mutual admiration society, watching and learning from each other. Night after night at the Comedy Store, when they weren’t onstage, they were standing together in the back, taking it all in, studying everything.”59 Another classic example of cooperation and competition at work.
By mobilizing both “Cs,” superbosses create their own “talent hubs” marked by intellectual and social ferment. Some protégés, like visual effects expert and director Mark Dippé, explicitly compared their experience to attending a competitive graduate school. Said Dippé: working at Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic was “the best film school for me.”60 Both consciously and unconsciously, superbosses create a kind of cauldron in which ideas collide, prompting new ideas to arise. This cauldron in turn becomes an engine, powering exceptional performance. The cohort effect enables superbosses to take all the techniques they use to motivate individuals and turbocharge them. It’s a powerful formula: individual employees can grow beyond their wildest dreams; teams and organizations can add value that far exceeds the sum of their parts.
Team Building like a Superboss
Superbosses approach the task of team building in a less structured, more intuitive, and more potent way than traditional good bosses. Some of what they do is deliberate, but the greater part flows organically from the rest of their playbook. Team building doesn’t have to take place away from the everyday life of an organization at some five-star retreat; it can be baked right in and take place incrementally. Conversely, work doesn’t have to be distancing or alienating; it can be the space in which some of life’s most meaningful relationships take root and flower.
Organizations realize considerable benefits from the approach superbosses take, above and beyond the existence of high-performing teams. The cohort effect is one of the strongest levers we have for developing talent, and it enables superbosses to become magnets for future talent. What supremely talented person wouldn’t want to go to an organization where he or she would have a chance to brush up against and learn from other supremely talented peers? The cohort effect also enables businesses to become more entrepreneurial places. Jay Last, who started Teledyne after working with Bob Noyce at Fairchild, recalled the creative fusion that existed at the latter: “There was one bar in particular where everybody seemed to congregate on Friday night, and here you would be talking to people that you would work with one week, and the next week you were business rivals.”61 Imagine what that was like, hanging with Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce. When you bring together big-time talent and position them to collaborate and compete with one another, you produce the kind of creative energy visible at the most dynamic start-ups. It can’t help but boost innovation and growth.
So the superboss playbook is critical, not just for what it does for talent spotting, motivation, creativity, and managerial development but also because of how it can help turn groups of individuals into high-powered, take-no-prisoners teams. You can jump-start the cohort effect in your organization by rethinking how you organize talent. If Gene Roberts likes to put his “all-stars” together, why not try that in your own organization or department? Dartmouth economist Bruce Sacerdote’s research into primary and secondary education has confirmed that such clustering may be quite useful. As Sacerdote has found, one of the best ways to foster growth and development in children is by putting the stars with the stars and the laggards with the laggards.62 Managers might fear that doing this within a company will create a class system, but in fact marginal performers get better, too, since they are no longer discouraged by much more capable peers. Think about it: How much fun would it be as a runner to have to train with Olympic marathoners, when you struggle to make a ten-minute mile? Even worse, how good would it be for the Olympians? Talent systems in professional sports are all based on clustering. Professional baseball teams don’t lump people of different talent all together in one place; they have a system of minor league teams—single “A,” double “AA,” triple “AAA,” followed by “major league” teams. In most areas of life, people of similar capability will naturally serve to push one another higher. Superbosses intuitively take advantage of this principle, and as a manager, you can consciously do that.
Many of the team-building techniques used by organizations today are designed to reunite colleagues who have otherwise become dispersed. What if we prevented such dispersal from happening in the first place? Your company’s broader culture might not lend itself to the specific techniques that Mary Kay cosmetics uses to build team cohesiveness, but why not notice and celebrate specific rituals—such as quirky vocabulary or inside jokes—that have naturally emerged at work? Why not build team identity and collaboration by delegating more, sharing the credit, and modeling devotion and commitment to the team? Why not structure work so as to spur competition? Why not create forums in your organization where bosses and employees mingle to share ideas, and publicly recognize top performers? Be sure, of course, to emphasize both competition and collaboration in equal measure. And if geography feels like a barrier, know that technological solutions can make up for a lack of physical proximity, allowing enough contact for meaningful collaboration and competition to occur and for a strong team identity to gel.
Managers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from understanding how superbosses approach teams and team building. If you think you may be working for a superboss, then you should realize the importance of peer relationships and do something about it. While it’s important to manage up and down the organizational hierarchy, as the protégé of a superboss, you should embrace “managing across” as well. Your peers will be a source of inestimable learning, so it’s important to make the most of these relationships. The best business schools create a highly interactive culture that prompts students to engage with, and learn from, not to mention push, classmates. Under these circumstances, they can’t help but get better when thrown into a dynamic cohort of talent.
There’s one more important lesson to consider. With the two Cs—collaboration and competition—we find superbosses once again embracing contradiction. Superbosses intuitively know that success depends on balancing and integrating opposite goals, on giving up the linear thinking that assumes that because something is good, we want as much of it as possible. Most bosses shrink from seemingly illogical tensions, but superbosses derive immense value from courageously opening themselves to them. Welcome in all of life at once, they implicitly tell us, not just the particular side of it that we find easiest or most comforting. The more we can sustain tension between opposites, the more we can deepen our engagement with both sides over time, and the more in tune we’ll be with how people, markets, and organizations actually behave.
Given the shared identity and intense emotional bonds that emerge among protégés, you might expect them to stick around in superboss organizations forever. If you’re already a member of the “chosen people,” and you’ve gone to battle time and again with your trusted colleagues, how could you possibly go anywhere else? Add in the many other benefits that come from working for a superboss, including the unparalleled opportunities for learning and advancement, and it’s not surprising that many protégés I studied did in fact stick around for years, even decades. Others did leave for any number of reasons, including the chance to start their own businesses and claim big opportunities elsewhere. Yet in most cases their allegiance and camaraderie persisted, as they became active participants in their superboss’s professional network. Few bosses and organizations today expend much effort maintaining relationships with former employees, but superbosses do because they regard those relationships as vital to their personal and organizational success. As we’ll see in the next chapter, superboss networks are always growing, expanding the opportunities available to everyone in the network, including the superboss. It just goes to show: you can leave a superboss, but a superboss never truly leaves you.