Individual top-talents or great team players?
MBA News Barbara Barkhausen / 09-14-2011
Companies like Facebook made headlines in the past looking only for top talent. A wrong approach says a bestselling American author who claims “great people are overrated”. Good teams are much more valuable than single stars, says William C. Taylor.
Taylor himself is the founder of the highly successful economic magazine "Fast Company" that had gone downhill after he had sold and left the company. Despite his own experience, the management-expert has now opened a huge debate in the U.S. about the importance of attracting top talent to a company. He published several blogs on the website of the "Harvard Business Review" and the response by readers was enormous. "Great People Are Overrated", "Great People Are Overrated II" and "How Do You Know a Great Person when You See One?" have caused an internet revolution.
Taylor thinks that US-companies have worked themselves up in a cult for top talent, willing to pay these people millions of dollars, instead of forming a working and balanced team for the same money. Collective abilities instead of individual brilliance, he suggests.
As a positive example he cites IBM and their initiative Extreme Blue that is supposed to attract young talent to the company. Extreme Bluers are immersed in a system that emphasizes group cohesion over me-first individual achievement from the very start according to Taylor. In a kind of manual IBM makes sure that employees understand that the company does not want any “star cult”. Taylor quotes from the booklet: "To be clear, when you leave Extreme Blue and join another group at IBM (or any other company for that matter), we will be watching. And if we find out that you are making the program look like we are producing a bunch of arrogant wannabes, we will forget we ever knew you. Be ambitious. Be a leader. But do not belittle others in pursuit of your ambition."
