So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
—“The Blind Men and the Elephant,” John Godfrey Saxe
A king asked six blind men to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of its body. Each one of them claimed to know what the elephant was “like,” but each one claimed it was like a different thing. The blind man who felt a leg said the elephant was like a pillar; the one who felt the tail said it was like a rope; the one who felt the trunk said it was like a tree branch; the one who felt the ear said it was like a hand fan; the one who felt the belly said it was like a wall; and the one who felt the tusk said it was like a solid pipe. The king said to them: “All of you are right, and all of you are wrong. You are right because each one of you touched an actual part of the elephant. You are wrong because each one of you imagined that the whole elephant was like the part you touched.”
Think of the organization as the elephant and each of its members as a blind man who touches a part, believing that he can extend his experience to describe the whole. Everyone thinks that they know better than anyone else what is happening in their immediate surroundings. They are all right. Each person believes that his or her knowledge is sufficient to determine what the whole organizational situation looks like. And, believing that, each person thinks he or she can make decisions about how the organization should move toward its objective. They are all wrong.
In a perfectly aligned organization, people in every division or department, in every subsystem, to use an economist’s nomenclature, are committed to optimizing the system. Yet conflicts among its members still arise. “Aligned” means that everyone is playing to help the team win, regardless of his or her local performance indicators. But it doesn’t mean that they can all agree on the best course of action, or on what each person should do to help achieve the shared goal. Because each person has different information and makes different inferences, they will often disagree as a group about strategic decisions. Worse, if each person assumes that he is right and that the other person is wrong, escalating clashes will inevitably rip the organization apart.
I call this problem “disinformation.” And it makes it impossible for an individual to work in concert with others to pursue the larger organizational objective—even if everyone agrees on the objective. The problems of “disorganization” lead individuals to pursue their local KPIs and are not aligned on a common goal; with “disinformation” they are aligned on the common goal but disagree over the best strategy for accomplishing it. This is because people can only see a fraction of the possible impact that their actions would have on the global objective, so they don’t know how their actions will affect other parts of the company. While they can sense the opportunities and risks that appear in their local environment, they have no idea of the opportunities and risks that exist in other places.
To make matters worse, the best strategy for the organization as a whole usually doesn’t please anybody. Think about the familiar problem of setting a thermostat in a room with four people, each of whom prefers a different temperature (say, 68, 69, 71, and 72 degrees Fahrenheit). The temperature that would maximize overall comfort would be the average one of 70 degrees. But at that setting, every person would likely tweak the thermostat to make him- or herself more comfortable. Unless they all agree on the goal, and share truthfully their preferences, they will not be able to make a good collective decision.
Disinformation is a serious issue in its own right. It prevents rational decision making and coordination, and it creates conflict among individuals even when they are aligned behind a common goal. But it is deadly in combination with disorganization. These two dynamics together yield an incoherent and self-defeating pattern of organizational behavior. In the real world—where people are misaligned, and even incentivized by local KPIs to bias their outlooks and reports to give precedence to local performance—disorganization is more than enough to undermine an organization. But if it doesn’t do the job, disinformation will provide the coup de grâce, blocking organizational effectiveness, success, sustainability, and even survival.
When we focus only on our immediate surroundings and experience, we lose sight of the larger environment and can make terrible decisions, putting others and ourselves at risk. I learned about the dangers of “tunnel vision” as I was diving in the Galápagos in search of whale sharks. I almost paid for the lesson with my life.
The whale shark is the biggest fish in the world. (The whale is bigger but it is a mammal, not a fish.) It can grow up to fifty-five feet and weigh up to sixty thousand pounds. Its mouth is over six feet wide. Fortunately, this gentle giant eats only plankton and has no teeth. Still, a smack of its powerful tail can kill you.
Divers dream of seeing a whale shark up close, but since it’s a pelagic (migratory) species, it’s never a sure thing that you’ll find it. As I looked down from the deck of the dive boat that day, I wondered whether I would be lucky. But before I could possibly get a glimpse of the whale shark, I’d have to get past the hundreds of hammerhead sharks that circled lazily under the hull. Yum, breakfast, I imagined the sharks thinking. Human wrapped in neoprene. Our favorite dish. But I hadn’t come all the way to the Galápagos to chicken out.
“Be careful down there!” the dive master told me and my six companions, right before sticking the regulator in his mouth and jumping over the side of the boat. We followed him into the cold, choppy, shark-infested waters.
I followed the dive master’s instructions, descending slowly, ready to bail out at the slightest sign of aggressive behavior from the sharks. But the hammerheads reacted to us with utter indifference. For all they cared, we could have been sinking logs. They ignored us and kept swimming with their relaxed, elegant wiggle. Phew.
Minutes later, someone banging on a tank jolted me into high alert. It was the signal that someone had sighted a whale shark. I scanned all around for the massive shape, orienting myself toward the clanging. And then I saw it—a majestic, breathtaking, awesome creature. I was excited and relieved that the trip had not been in vain. From afar, the whale shark looked like it was barely moving, but when I got closer I realized that the enormous creature was swimming away rapidly.
I began to kick with my fins at full speed, totally oblivious to anything but the mesmerizing animal. I didn’t realize that I was leaving my dive buddy behind—a diver’s mortal sin that risks both people’s lives. In a few minutes, I found myself right next to the whale shark. I moved beneath it, turned my body faceup, and swam just a few feet under its massive belly, my arms outstretched to my sides. My eyes welled up. I was in an altered state of consciousness, totally connected to this incredible life-form in its natural environment.
My fascination with the whale shark broke when I realized that I was sucking air harder and harder with every breath. I wondered what was wrong. I had been under water less than thirty minutes, so I thought I should have had plenty of air left. I checked my oxygen pressure gauge. What I saw horrified me: I had only about 100 PSI left in my tank, which means I was practically running on empty.1 My dive computer marked fifty-eight feet. Worst of all, I found myself totally alone; there were no other divers around with whom to share air. I drew in the last fumes of my tank, feeling like I was squeezing a tube of toothpaste from the inside. Relax, I told myself, you have enough to get to the surface.
In recreational diving, if you stay within the limits of time and depth, you can come to the surface without stopping to let the accumulated nitrogen in your tissues “gas off.” If you go beyond the limits and don’t stop to decompress, the nitrogen condensed in your body by breathing at depth can literally make your blood bubble. This can cause rather unpleasant consequences ranging from “the bends” (pains in your joints) to death. Even when we stay within limits, recreational divers make a three-minute safety stop between twelve and sixteen feet to let the accumulated nitrogen exit the body as an extra precaution. Although strongly recommended, this safety stop is not required. Guess I’ll find out if the safety stop is really optional, I thought grimly. I ascended as fast as I dared, disregarding the angry beeps of my computer telling me to slow down and make the safety stop.
I finally broke the surface, gasped a delicious breath of fresh air, and put on my snorkel. (The size of the waves made it hard to breathe without it.) I looked around and saw that the current had taken me away from the boat and the group. I was utterly alone, floating away in God knew what direction, among waves that made it impossible for me to see anything, or for anybody to see me.
I reached into my BCD (buoyancy control device, a kind of inflatable vest) and turned on the radio beacon that I had been given in case of an emergency. I also inflated my “sausage,” a large, oblong orange balloon that stands about three feet above the surface, and hoped that the rescue team would find me. After the longest ten minutes of my life, I heard the engine of the Zodiac. Two crewmembers helped me climb in. We motored back to the mother ship.
The dive master was waiting for me on board. “What did I tell you in the dive briefing?” he asked sternly.
“To be careful,” I replied sheepishly. “And I was. I paid close attention to the hammerheads and didn’t see any of them making jerky or aggressive movements.”
“It’s not the hammerheads you had to watch out for, you knucklehead!” he chided. “They are not dangerous. Accidents happen when people get so focused on the sharks that they stop paying attention to air, depth, location, their buddy, and the group. You are the poster child for how not to dive safely!”
I learned a big lesson that day. I was so fixated on the hammerheads and the whale shark that I didn’t pay attention to the most vital information. I was so captivated by the extraordinary risks and opportunities that I forgot the ordinary precautions, with potentially deadly consequences.
“It’s not what you don’t know that kills you,” goes the maxim; “it’s what you think you know for sure but isn’t true.” I “knew for sure” that I had enough oxygen in the tank since I hadn’t spent more than half an hour underwater. But what I thought I knew wasn’t true. In my excitement at seeing the whale shark and tearing after it, I had consumed the air in my tank at twice the normal rate.
This episode made me painfully aware of how often decision makers get so fixated on the risks and opportunities they perceive in their local environments that they disregard crucial information about other parts of the system. Put another way: we tend to put all our attention on the “sharks”—the objects of our ambition or aversion—becoming blind to the way our behavior affects the rest of the organization.
This tendency to focus on our own experience and interests creates tremendous problems. In a complex, highly interconnected system, any person’s behavior has a significant impact on many others. However, because most of us consider only the local short-term consequences of our actions, and discount the global long-term impact, we make terrible decisions that put us, and our organizations, at risk.
“People are going to die!” barked Bruce, the chief vehicle engineer. “I don’t give a damn about your fuel economy numbers! This vehicle is already too light. If we take out any more mass, we might as well call them rolling coffins!”
Larry, the executive for regulatory affairs, shook his head vehemently. “If our fleet doesn’t meet the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standards for gas mileage, there will be hell to pay. You may not give a damn, but the government does.”
“You’re going to have to get your compliance from some other vehicle,” said Bruce. “This one is barely crashworthy as it is!”
“Listen, your vehicle is not going into production unless I sign off on it. If you don’t make it lighter you might as well kiss it good-bye…”2
I overheard this argument back in the 1990s when I consulted for one of the major car manufacturers. I was helping the company with the cultural aspects of what they called the VLE (vehicle line executive) system. It was an effort to mirror Toyota’s “heavyweight program manager” organization (which Toyota calls “Shusha”). At Toyota, the “Shusha” is the car boss, meaning that he makes the final decisions about the vehicle. That allows him to balance the power of the functional leaders—that is, the senior vice presidents—who want to optimize for their silos.
For example, design optimizes for “reach” (elegance); engineering for technology; manufacturing for hours per vehicle; procurement for material cost, and so on. In that spirit, safety engineers have a mandate to save lives, while fuel efficiency engineers focus on saving gas.
For safety engineers, the goal is to make the cars as crashworthy as possible to protect their occupants in the event of an accident. There are some things that have relatively little impact on the rest of the vehicle (such as safety belts). But most of their decisions significantly affect the whole vehicle. For example, one way to make the vehicle safer is to increase its mass. A tank, to take an extreme case, is the safest vehicle to be in in a crash, while a motorcycle is the worst.
But mass is “expensive” for many reasons. Beyond its direct cost, it increases the vehicle’s fuel consumption and operating costs. It also increases pollution, which can create regulatory problems since there are legal limits to the fuel efficiency of vehicles. Moreover, a heavier vehicle requires a more powerful engine as well as a stronger suspension. Thus, the ride will be either rougher (due to stiffer suspension) or wobblier (due to less stiff suspension) because of the extra weight. This weight will also make the car take longer to accelerate and, perhaps more important, to brake. So even though the extra mass makes the vehicle safer in the event of a crash, it could be less safe overall because of the extra time and distance required for braking.
Larry and Bruce were each pursuing important goals. Bruce wanted to protect the occupants; Larry wanted to protect the environment. But they were at an impasse, and a timely resolution seemed implausible. While Larry and Bruce discussed what to do, the company was losing big dollars for every week that went by without a decision.
Of course, a natural question arises here: Isn’t it management’s job to settle these kinds of arguments? After all, their job is to take in all the available information and make objective and informed decisions for the good of the whole. That’s why they have the authority and get paid the big bucks.
The problem with this is that the experience of each “blind man” about the part of the “elephant” he touches is so rich and nuanced that it’s practically impossible to describe accurately. A true description of the elephantine organization would have to include all relevant information about the organization in its present and potential future states: how it is structured; what its processes are; who its employees, clients, suppliers, contractors, and consultants are; what its resources are, such as raw materials, properties, plants, equipment, finished and semifinished products, component parts, cash, lines of credit, and so on; what its liabilities are; et cetera. The list goes on, and on, and on. And that’s less than half of it, as the list would also have to include the organizational environment in its present and potential future states.
Conveying what he knows, what he could do, what he would need, and what could happen, would require that the organizational member make gross simplifications that would render the information almost useless. The blind man can only communicate a thin slice of his knowledge to the senior managers who make global decisions. This does not suffice to make rational decisions about the best course of action. (And remember that we are making the heroic assumption that there is perfect alignment behind the global objective, and that no local departmental optimization is going on. If people are incentivized to achieve their KPIs, their information might not be trustworthy, because of their natural bias to benefit their own areas.)
People in maintenance, for example, may know that the plant can’t continue to operate on three shifts for much longer. People in sales may know that customers are angry because there is not enough inventory to meet demand. People in procurement may know that there’s a potential supplier in China that offers semifinished products. People in engineering may know that to process the Chinese products would require an adjustment of the plant equipment. People in government relations may know that regulators would frown upon imports from China—and so on, to an extent that absolutely boggles the mind. No one person, not even the CEO, can assess all the information necessary to create the best global strategy. No one knows what decision is best for helping the team win.
Not only is it impossible to integrate all this information into a common pool to fully evaluate alternatives, but circumstances are also changing all the time. The frequency and significance of these changes require substantial and constant modifications of the plans. As soon as knowledge is communicated, it becomes obsolete—which wreaks havoc on the firm’s regular planning process.
On top of that, no one person can possibly take in and process the vast knowledge inherent in an organization. It’s impossible to get a completely accurate picture of the massive organizational animal as a whole, even for those who sit at the very top. Just as the blind men touching the elephant wrongly (and arrogantly) extrapolated their experience to describe the whole elephant, senior executives, seeing the elephant from afar, wrongly (and arrogantly) think they can make out and factor in its granular features. Furthermore, they believe they can control employees through measurements, carrots, and sticks. The Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek called this “the Fatal Conceit.”3 Many an organization has died from central planning and micromanagement.
When I was a child in Argentina, I played soccer. My position was center midfield. My role was to pass the ball to the player who was best positioned to score. The offensive players would always raise their hand and scream “I’m open!” or “Here!” to get my attention. I could only pass the ball to one of them, so I had to decide which one of my teammates was most likely to help the team win.
No matter what my decision was, someone always blamed me for not passing to them, claiming they were well positioned. They didn’t understand that my challenge was not to pass to a player who was well positioned but to the player who was best positioned, from my perspective.
We were aligned as a team, but we had many quarrels about my passing decisions. At some point, I realized that no matter to whom I chose to pass the ball, there would always be several other players who would be unhappy with my decision. They saw only their own opportunity; they couldn’t compare it to that of the other players.
Many years later, when I was climbing mountains, I learned about what happens when one suffers hypothermia. If the body becomes dangerously cold, it will withdraw blood from the extremities and send it to the core, to keep it warm. That protects the vital organs at the expense of the toes and fingers first, the feet and hands second, and the legs and arms third. Sending blood to the core may be the best strategy for your survival, but I think that if the tissues of the extremities had a say in the matter, they would prefer to decrease a bit the overall probability of survival by keeping some blood flowing to them so that they, too, could survive. If hypothermia responses were up for negotiation and vote, the extremities would surely want to reach a “compromise” that would maintain their viability. The organisms that fell in this trap disappeared from the gene pool. The same is true for complex organizations that try to function democratically.
Even if one could calculate the global aggregate of every local impact today and in the future, one wouldn’t know what the forgone opportunities elsewhere might be because there are always “opportunity costs.” Basically, this means that every time you say yes to something, you say no to every other option you could have pursued with the resources you allocated to do the thing you said yes to. Even a free lunch has an opportunity cost. If you accept my invitation for lunch, you can’t use the same time to answer e-mails, enjoy a book, exercise, call a friend or family member, or go for a walk.
Opportunity cost is the value of the best option not pursued. Whenever you make a choice among several mutually exclusive alternatives, you incur an opportunity cost—that is, the benefit that would have accrued to you by making the best alternative choice. Let’s say you have three projects, A, B, and C, each of which requires the same $200 of investment. Suppose that you choose project A and eschew B and C because you have no resources left to fund them. Suppose further that project A ends up yielding $300, for an accounting profit of $100. Would you say that that was a good decision?
To answer such a question, you would need to know what the accounting profit of projects B and C would have been. Pursuing project A is a good decision only if projects B and C would have yielded a lower accounting profit. That can be extremely difficult to determine. Projects B and C never happened, so you can only estimate their accounting profits counterfactually. To expand the story of the blind men, people in organizations are not just trying to figure out what the elephant looks like by touching a part; they are trying to determine a probability wave of “quantum elephants” that will collapse into a “particle elephant” in the future (in my workshops I call this “Schrödinger’s elephant”).4
It’s extremely difficult to compare the systemic benefits of a particular course of action with the ones of other alternatives that would have required the same resources. The knowledge of available choices and their value is distributed throughout the system. It is held by different organizational members who may not reveal it in order to further their interests. Furthermore, opportunity costs would be enormously difficult to compute even in a gross way due to the system’s complexity. That’s why people tend to use actual expenditures instead of opportunity costs. But using expenditures is mistaken, like the drunk who looked for his keys under the light but not in the place where he dropped them.
Winning the business game requires that the organizational (global) strategy both inform local tactics and be informed by local information. The right interplay between strategy and tactics is very difficult to achieve. As I discussed in the previous chapter, local teams are often incentivized to optimize for their departments or division and compete with other teams. In addition, every manager except the CEO has a dual allegiance.
To get the best from her employees, a manager has to elicit their internal commitment. She needs to engage her employees to pursue the team goals. She does this by giving them a sense of purpose and a feeling of pride in their work. She also does this by creating an emotional bond of trust among her team members and herself. In addition, she provides opportunities for these members to experience achievement, autonomy, and mastery in their work, as well as supporting them to grow in their careers.
On the other hand, she has to subordinate her team goals, processes, and even her employees’ welfare to the organizational mission. This means that she commits to doing her best to achieve the higher-order goal of her team; that is, the goal of her manager. For example, if LinkedIn is to function at its best, the managers of each business unit competing for scarce resources need to “put on their corporate hats,” as it’s often said, and share information truthfully, even if this information detracts from the likelihood that their local plans will be funded—even if it means that some employees might lose their jobs. Though managers need at times to “take a bullet for the (organizational) team,” the ones who most often get shot are their reports—members of their division, department, or team.
In most companies, managers who bond with their teams try to defend the interests of the team to the higher-ups. But this can undermine organizational effectiveness and collaboration. Every level of the organization can end up working like the U.S. Congress, where representatives see their role as to defend the interests of their constituents. As we can see from politics, a collective in which each person represents different interests leads to all kinds of conflicts and operates incoherently.
If the manager takes her primary role to be a member of her manager’s team and subordinates the team she manages, she runs the risk of breaking the emotional bond with her reports. They might consider her “disloyal” or that she “is throwing them under the bus” for the sake of her career. That will lead to disengagement and disillusion.
It’s a terrible double bind for managers. They are damned if they optimize the system, because they will need to suboptimize their departments and their employees will feel betrayed. And they are damned if they defend the interests of their employees, because they will need to optimize their departments, thereby suboptimizing the organization as a whole. And then their manager and peers will feel betrayed. The way to break this bind, as I will explain in Part 2, is through transcendent leadership.
Because organizations have to adapt quickly to changes in their circumstances, decisions are best left to the people who know the most about those circumstances, who understand the most about the changes that need to be made, and about the resources needed to make them. “This problem,” Friedrich Hayek explained, “cannot be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a (planning) board which then issues its orders.” Hayek seems to be arguing in favor of decentralization. However, things are more complicated than that for the blind men trying to figure out what the elephant is. “The ‘man on the spot,’ ” he continues, “cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of his immediate surroundings. He needs more information to fit his decision into the whole pattern of changes of the larger (organizational) system.”5
Put another way, local knowledge is too complex to communicate effectively to global decision makers, so it is best to let the ones who have it make the decisions. Take a war, for example. Field commanders know much better than generals what’s happening in their theater of operations, so it makes sense to empower them to make decisions. But local knowledge is insufficient to evaluate the global impact of any decision. Wars are not won by a myriad of tactical successes; an army needs to fit all its units’ tactical decisions into an integrated strategy.
Conversely, global knowledge is also too complex to communicate effectively to local decision makers. Generals see the big picture much better than field commanders do, so it makes sense to let the generals make strategic decisions. But global knowledge is insufficient to evaluate the best tactic in a particular time and place. Wars are not won just by brilliant strategies; an army needs to execute these strategies through specific tactical operations.
Hayek wrote in the context of what in economics is called “the socialist calculation debate.” This was a dispute between free market and Marxist economists as to whether it was possible to allocate resources rationally in a centrally planned economy. For members of the Austrian school such as Ludwig von Mises and Hayek, the answer was a categorical no. They argued that the only way to do this was through the price mechanism of the free market, where people’s individual decisions determine how much of a good or service should be produced and to whom it should be distributed based on their willingness to pay for it.
Hayek showed that free market prices give people the information and incentives they need to make economic calculations and act accordingly. For Hayek, the price system is like a dashboard that enables individual producers and consumers to watch merely the movement of a few dials in order to adjust their activities. Mises, on the other hand, argued that the pricing system in a socialist economy can’t work because the government controls the means of production. And since that’s the case, it’s not possible to set market prices for capital goods. Mises’s famous conclusion was that “rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth.”6 He argued that this was so not only due to incentive problems (disorganization) but also due to information problems (disinformation).
Unfortunately, this doesn’t help elephantine organizations. As they grow, organizations substitute the invisible hand of the market for the visible hand of management, to use the term of economic historian Alfred D. Chandler.7 Within the organization, departments don’t set prices for their services. If I work in the PR department, I don’t charge for a press release about a new R&D center. In this sense, a capitalist organization resembles a socialist economy. Another economist, Murray Rothbard, explained how this decision-making problem is due to lack of market prices for intraorganizational transactions. In the absence of a market, it’s impossible to calculate price. And without calculation, there is only economic irrationality and chaos.8
Some companies try to simulate a market using transfer prices between profit centers, but this system can’t quite emulate a real marketplace. Managers are not real entrepreneurs with property rights and residual claims over the economic profits of their centers, so they’re not really incentivized to maximize profits. Inside the company, there is no market for production resources, and therefore no prices. Without prices, economic calculation is impossible. Nobody, especially the planning department, can make rational decisions.
Although large corporations are privately owned and operate in a market economy, their CEOs and top teams find themselves in a situation analogous to that of the Soviet planning boards (or the characters of Asimov’s story “The Machine That Won the War”9), trying to make decisions with highly unreliable information. Imagine trying to run a company without market prices, without profit and loss statements, and without a balance sheet. It would be a guessing exercise not much better than reading chicken entrails. Sadly, that’s how most large companies make strategic decisions.
As a leader, you must also elicit the internal commitment of each and every member of your team (and organization) to cooperate with each and every other member of your team (and organization) to accomplish the organizational mission. In other words, if people have a shared commitment to work together for the good of the team, then the issues of incentive-driven disorganization and disinformation can be managed much better than if they don’t have such a commitment.
This means that leaders need to elicit people’s permission (due to their moral authority, not just their formal authority) to make judgment calls. They need to have a “process consensus” as in a democracy, where people disagree on who should be the president but they all agree on the way in which that person should be elected. When leaders gather information from aligned team members who want to help the team win, and make decisions through a process these team members consider fair and are committed to implement, they can make better global decisions than their competitors. They can integrate more information under their decision rights and better consider trade-offs. This enables the team members to “disagree and commit” without holding bad feelings.
The leader needs to get people to share their information about local opportunities, risks, costs, and benefits, so that they can compare alternatives and make a rational decision. This requires that leaders put down their egos and adopt a position of humility, openness, and service to a higher goal. In doing this, they serve as an example for team members who can put their egos aside and give their best to implement a decision they would not have made if it were their call. Every team member needs to redefine “winning” so that it’s not about who’s right or most influential, but rather who has collaborated with the others to make the best, most informed, most rational possible choice in the circumstances—the choice most likely to help the team win. (In Conscious Business, I called this “adopting the spirit of the learner.”)
This seems obvious when considered dispassionately, but it goes against some of the most basic drives of human beings. We want to be right in order to feel intelligent. We want to dominate others in order to feel powerful. We want to get our way in order to feel validated. We want to win (even against our team members) in order to feel that we are better (than they are). We want to protect and favor those closer to us (our constituents). In short, we want to prove to ourselves, to our followers, and to others that we are worthy, and we do this through behaviors that are the exact opposite of the ones required to play well as a team.
In Chapter 9, “Collaboration,” I will define a process for managing these challenges much better than most companies do now. I have refined this technique with my clients for over twenty-five years, so I can guarantee it works. But there is a catch: it works only if, when you reach the head of the organizational elephant, you touch a transcendent leader.