On Teamwork What I’ve always felt that a team of people doing something they really believe in is like, is like when I was a young kid, there was a widowed man that lived up the street. He was in his 80’s, and a little scary looking, and I got to know him a little bit — I think he paid me to cut his lawn or something — and one day he told me, “come into my garage, I want to show you something.” And he pulled out this dusty old rock tumbler. It was a motor and a coffee can and a band between them. And he said “come out here with me,” so we went out to the back and we got some rocks, just some regular old ugly rocks and we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and a little bit of grit powder, and he turned the motor on and said “come back tomorrow,” as the tumbler was turning and making a racket. So I came back the next day and what we took out were these amazingly beautiful and polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in — through rubbing against each other, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise — had come out as these beautiful polished rocks. And that’s always been my metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about. It’s that through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, they polish each other, and they polish their ideas. And what comes out are these really beautiful stones. Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview teamworkpassionargument
To prove it in purity The series of photos of the 1959 model ends or stops with the photograph in which Kiesler triumphantly shows us the shell of his house like the remains of a creature taken from the seabed, a kind of Moby Dick harpooned and finally captured after the obsessive pursuit of a project that has taken up ten years of the life of the architect. "I think that everybody has only one basic creative idea and no matter how he is driven off, you will find that he always comes back to it until he has a chance to prove it in purity, or die with the idea unrealized." — Frederick Kiesler Smiljan Radić, Some Remains of My Heroes Found Scattered Across a Vacant Lot creativitylifeobsessionpassion
The management strategy that saved Apollo 11 An Article by Matthew Ström matthewstrom.com In 1969, the people in charge of Apollo 11 trusted a 23-year-old engineer in a back room of mission control to make one of the most consequential decisions of this decade-defining mission. And they did so in seconds, without deliberating or debating. Next time you’re faced with a decision, ask yourself: how can this decision be made on the lowest level? Have you given your team the authority to decide? If you haven’t, why not? If they’re not able to make good decisions, you’ve missed an opportunity to be a leader. Empower, enable, and entrust them. Take it from NASA: the ability to delegate quickly and decisively was the key to landing men on the moon. Central planning gives poor resultsBeware SAFe, an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness managementdecisionstrust