Innovation Footprints

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Psychology

#ChainReaction: Who Will Own The Age of Cryptocurrencies?

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Brian + His Pencils

Notes:

  1. This blog post represents my opinions only.
  2. My first blog post in the #ChainReaction Series is #ChainReaction: Notes on Centralized, Decentralized, and Distributed Systems.

As I read The History of Money, I have started understanding the monetary and currency systems of the past. It is becoming clear to me that we are inevitably going to transition from the current age of paper money and into the age crypocurrencies. It’s just a matter of time. I also think, the move towards a decentralized cryptocurrency regime will give way to a more centralized system because the alternative would lead to socioeconomic chaos and disorder which would be too destabilizing to society. So fiat cryptocurrencies are the future. This still leaves plenty room for privately issued digital tokens that are used to fulfill various other functions in global trade and commerce, just not as a decentralized substitute for what we consider money today. The social engineering behind money is a centralized function. To get to the age of fiat cryptocurrencies we need cryptography that is so easy to use that “even a caveman” could use cryptocurrencies without even having to think about it. So regulations, social psychology, and technology have to move well beyond the current state of the art. I am thinking a lot about this because trade finance is a massive pain-point in global supply chain networks, and distributed ledger technology offers a promising way to attack some of the issues that cause trade finance to be a choke-point for global trade and commerce.

If the history of commercial banking belongs to the Italians and of central banking to the British, that of paper money issued by a government belongs indubitably to the Americans.

– John Kenneth Galbraith, From The History of Money

Who will own the age of cryptocurrencies?

Notes On Strategy; What Can We Learn From Religious Leaders About Building Early-Stage Startup Culture?

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Alternative Working Title: Notes On Strategy; Engineering Your Early Stage Startup’s Culture For Longevity

The topic of culture has been in the news quite a bit since the New York Times published an investigative piece describing what it is like to work for Amazon. While culture is something I think about all the time, that article got me thinking about religion and culture . . . and how that relates to the early stage startups in which we invest.

In this post I plan to:

  1. Examine what we mean when we say “culture” and tie that to the work that startup founding teams do during business model search and discovery.
  2. Examine the structural characteristics of religious communities; How do they maintain a sense of purpose, direction, and elicit devotion and commitment from members of the community?
  3. Provide some pointers about how first-time startup founders might get things off on the right footing as far as culture is concerned by making certain deliberate choices early in the lifecycle of their startup.

I am thinking specifically of startups raising their first institutional round from seed stage venture capitalists, or perhaps a Series A round of financing. These teams are usually small, often fewer than 10 people.

To get things started; What is Culture?

Culture is the learned and shared behavior of a community of people which distinguishes that community from other communities. ((J. Useem and R. Useem. (1963). Human Organizations, 22(3). Page 169. See: The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) “What is Culture?” http://www.carla.umn.edu/culture/definitions.html. Accessed Aug 29, 2015.))

Some of the things that distinguish a culture: ((Adapted from: Richard-Hooker.com; Clifford Geertz, Emphasizing Interpretation))

  1. It embodies a way of life, an approach to thinking, feeling, and believing about the world.
  2. It endows the members of the cultural community with a social legacy from prior members of the same community.
  3. It provides a framework that enables members of the community to think abstractly about how they should behave;
    1. It provides lessons about how members of the community should react towards recurring problems by pooling the collective wisdom of past and present members of the community.
    2. It provides a guide for community members when they need to interact with the external environment.
  4. It is the process by which the history of the community is created and brought into permanent existence.

In this analysis I am most interested in religion as a cultural system.

According to Clifford Geertz religion is: ((Clifford Geertz, Religion As A Cultural System. In: The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Pp. 87 – 125. Fontana Press, 1993.))

  1. A system of symbols which acts to
  2. Establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in people by
  3. Formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and
  4. Clothing these moods and motivations with such an aura of factuality that
  5. The moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.

It is not difficult to see that a religion is in fact a specific type of culture and further, that every cultures is a kind of religion. In the rest of this post I will use the term “religion” and “culture” interchangeably. I also assume that a symbol may be tangible or intangible.

The structural characteristics of a religion are: ((William E. Paden, Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion. 2nd edition. Pp. 51 – 161. Beacon Press, 1994.))

  1. A religion inhabits a unique world: Religions create, structure and propose a universe that is unique to adherents of that religion such that members of the community can explain, make sense of, and differentiate what is within their world from what is outside their world. This helps establish lines of commonality as well as lines of difference, and helps confront change and challenges.
  2. A religion is grounded on certain myths: Every religion possesses sacred myths that tell a story about something that happened during the genesis of the religion and that continues to have great influence on contemporary realities experienced by adherents of the religion. Myths:
    1. Help devotees of a religion make sense of the past, the present, and the future.
    2. Are a powerful means of engendering a certain mood and attitude within the devotees of a religion.
    3. Focus our attention on that which is sacred and important within a religion.
  3. A religion possesses rituals: Rituals help to focus the devotees of a religion on specific concepts or ideas at a specific point in time, also rituals enable the adherents of a religion to express their beliefs about the world in the form of a tangible display that appeals to the senses through action.
  4. A religion possesses gods: In the context of religious worlds, gods represent instances of language and behavior that is held up by the religious community as exemplary, worthy of emulation, and possessing interpretive power in terms of how that community understands the world.
  5. A religion possesses systems of purity: These systems of purity help to differentiate what is acceptable from what is unacceptable, right behavior from wrong behavior. This is a system that enables members of the community deal with negativity within the community.

What role do symbols play within a culture?

  1. Anat Rafaeli and Monica Worline: Symbols in Organizational Culture – A symbol is a visible and physical manifestation of an organization. It is an indication of organizational life that derives its meaning from the social and cultural conventions and interactions among the people who belong to the cultural organization. Symbols can be experienced through the senses. Symbols play the following functions:
    1. They reflect organizational culture: Symbols communicate information about what we think we know about an organization. They act as a bridge between our emotional and cognitive responses towards an organization.
    2. They trigger internalized values and norms: Symbols serve as a cue to trigger certain expected, desired, and acceptable behaviors once a person enters the physical environment of an organization or whenever the person is acting explicitly as a representative of the organization to the outside world.
    3. They frame conversations about experience: Symbols act as a frame of reference for guiding the communication that takes place between members of the same organization, or between members of a specific organization with people who do not belong to that organization.
    4. They integrate organizational systems of meaning: Symbols integrate the culture, norms and values, and shared experiences of members of an organization into a coherent whole within which members of the organization experience the world.
  2. Sherry Ortner: On Key Symbols – A key symbol is an element of a culture that is crucial and distinctly unique to the organization of that culture. They perform the function of carrying and conveying cultural meaning to people within the culture as well as to people outside the cultural community. Key symbols might be identified when:
    1. Members of the cultural group discuss the symbol’s cultural significance,
    2. Members of the cultural group are positively or negatively aroused by the symbol, and none are indifferent towards it,
    3. The symbol appears in many different settings and contexts,
    4. There is much elaboration around the symbol, and
    5. The group imposes numerous restrictions around the symbol. For example, misuse of the symbol can incur severe sanctions.

There are two distinct categories of key symbols. Summarizing symbols express meaning in an emotionally powerful way that is of uniform significance for all members of a given culture. They are generally accorded sacred status. Elaborating symbols make it possible for members of the religion or community to communicate ideas and feelings with one another, and to translate such feelings and ideas into tangible action. Elaborating symbols are generally analytic in nature and rarely attain sacred status.

What does this mean in the context of building an early-stage startup?

  1. Communicate a clear world view internally and externally. One question I ask myself when I meet with a founder is this; Why is this specific person uniquely suited to solve this problem in this market and why do I believe this team will succeed in its effort to accomplish this incredibly difficult task?
  2. Preserve and embellish important stories, particularly those that reflect qualities and themes that the founder wants to become aspects of the startup’s long-term culture and identity. I listen for founders who express enthusiasm for the work that the other people on the team are doing. Team cohesiveness matters.
  3. Create and maintain rituals:  For example, does every team member understand what would get existing customers/users to become more engaged with the product, and reduce churn? Does every team member know what needs to happen for the startup to increase its growth enough to get to the next funding milestone? Does the founder have a firm grasp on the startups key performance indicators? Has the team chosen the right indicators to focus on at this stage?
  4. Focus on finding product/market fit: A startup that fails to find product/market fit is doomed. Are the founders experimenting enough to find an ideal early market for the product, or are they stuck in a cycle of dogma regarding an initial point of market entry? What indications are there to help me ascertain the quality of their decision-making processes?
  5. Create systems of accountability: At the very early stage of a startup’s life the individuals on the team have an enormous impact on the organizational culture that eventually evolves. What steps are the founders taking to ensure that the early team has the right mix of people?
  6. Create a sales and marketing plan: What steps is the startup taking to create strong bonds with its earliest customers/users? Is anything being done to create a brand? Are the choices that have been made so far cost-effective and appropriate for the startup’s stage of maturity and its funding status?

Closing Thoughts The job of an early-stage technology startup founder is basically akin to that of a religious evangelist. The founder must recruit believers. Early team members join the cause because they believe in the founder and in the vision that the founder wishes to bring into reality. Early customers become believers because they have a problem they believe the startup’s envisioned product can solve. Early investors join the cause because they believe in the founder and believe that the startup can create the future reality that it describes during investment pitches. Basically, at the outset . . . Building a startup is exactly the same as creating a new religion.

 

A Story About Startup Cofounder Teamwork: Climbing To The Summit of Denali

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Denali Image Credit: NPS Photo/Tim Rains
Denali
Image Credit: NPS Photo/Tim Rains

On June 30th, 2015, Naira Musallam and her climbing partner, Tim Lawton successfully summited Denali (Mount McKinley). They made history as The First Arab-American Team to ever do so. Naira also became the first Arab woman to stand on the summit of Denali.

Standing at 20,320 feet, Denali is one of the “Seven Summits” because it is the highest point on the continent of North America. From that point Naira and Tim raised a flag with the message “Peace and Security for All” written in Arabic, Hebrew, and English.

I checked my email around 8:00 AM EST in NYC after arriving at work on Tuesday, July 7th 2015, and found a note from Naira telling me the good news. She had sent it at 6:51 AM. I wrote back to congratulate her, and asked if I could write about their story. She and Tim graciously said yes.

This is their story. It highlights everything I discussed in Innovation Footprints: 6 Things I Have Learned About Building High-Performing Teams.

Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton at the summit of Denali on June 30th, 2015. (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)
Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton at the summit of Denali on June 30th, 2015. (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)

I met Naira on Thursday, October 9th 2014 when I was at NYU’s Leslie eLab to lead a lunch and learn. I had arrived early, to give myself some time to work through my nerves – I get super nervous about speaking in front of groups of people.

Naira was the first person to arrive. She came, said hello, and introduced herself. I introduced myself, and asked if she was an undergraduate student, what year she was in, what major she was studying . . . She smiled at me and explained she’s a professor at NYU, and she teaches statistics. Oh, lest I forget. She also mentioned that she “climbs mountains as a hobby” and “runs long distance, as a hobby.”

I thought to myself; “Great! It really would have been helpful if someone had warned me that I’d have professors in the audience! Never mind mathematicians who climb mountains and run long distance races . . . as a hobby.”

So much for calming my nerves. It seemed to me that her arrival was timed to optimize the intimidation factor. Any way, the talk went well – or, so she says. To my great “horror” there are excerpts on video which you can check out here, here, here and here. After the event, I chatted briefly with Naira again and we agreed to meet for coffee. She wanted to pick my brains about something she was working on. Since I have never met a mathematician or physicist I do not like, I said yes. What could be better than chatting with a mathematician?

We met again on November 26th, 2014 at Cafe Reggio near NYU. After spending some time getting to know one another from a biographical standpoint, we spent most of the time discussing many of the types of questions I have come to expect from the first-time founders I meet; What does a VC want to see in order to decide to make an investment? How does the decision-making process typically work? How about fund-raising, how does that work, in general? How does one get a meeting with a VC to whom one does not have a direct or indirect connection? Does sending a cold-email work? And many more.

During subsequent meetings over coffee, and sometimes lunch . . . I learned about a startup she and Tim have been building, Frontier7 is an online data analytics platform. I also learned a lot about Tim, whom I had not yet met.

Eventually, I met Tim . . . I pointed out to Tim that Naira intimidated me when I first met her, and now she’d brought him along to escalate that intimidation factor even more. I remember we were all laughing so hard, the other folks in the bar must have thought we’d been drinking too much.

Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: Starting The Climb on Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)
Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: Starting The Climb on Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)

About Naira Musallam

Naira is currently a full-time professor at New York University, where she teaches Applied Statistics, Analytical Skills, and National Security and Middle East Affairs at the Center for Global Affairs. She also serves as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University and in its collaborative program at the United States Military Academy at West Point where she teaches graduate level research courses. Naira received her doctorate from Columbia University.

She has over thirteen years of applied research experience consulting with multiple industries in the private sector, ranging from financial services, to pharmaceuticals, retail, oil and gas, and the fashion industry, helping them solve business problems through data driven processes. She used applied statistics to develop insights on business issues such as M&A deals, C-Suite executive assessments, employee retention, and sales strategies. She also consulted to governmental agencies and non-profit organizations on projects related to project assessment, and monitoring and evaluation. Naira is the recipient of multiple research awards from the Earth Institute, Columbia University, and the U.S. Department of State.

Naira grew up in a small Palestinian town in Galilee, and has been climbing for the last seven years. When not working in New York City on statistical issues, she enjoys high altitude mountain climbing, scuba diving, and cultural exploration and adventures around the world.

About Tim Lawton

Tim is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and served 5 1/2 years as an officer in various infantry and special operations units. During his time in the Army he was deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan for a total of four combat tours. After leaving the military he attended MIT Sloan School of Management where he received an MBA with a concentration in corporate finance. He spent the next 5 years in investment banking with experience in debt restructuring, equity financing, and mergers & acquisitions in one role and helped to lead a sales effort in another.

As an active member of the veteran community in NYC, Tim is involved with various veteran non-profit organizations and is working to further veteran’s business initiatives in the city. He is originally from the Boston area. His hobbies include mountain climbing, travel, sky diving, scuba diving, and working out.

How They Met

“We first met at a 5k road race that was to support a veteran’s organization that we were both connected to. We had struck up a conversation because we were both wearing the same brand of sunglasses, which are unique mainly to mountain climbers. From then on we continued our friendship and over time began to discuss not only future mountain climbing endeavors, but also a potential business idea that leveraged both of our experiences from the corporate world.”

Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: Camp on Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)
Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: Camp on Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)

Why They Thought They’d Make A Good Team

We both suck at different things.

“In all seriousness, since we initially began our friendship due to mountain climbing and had subsequently climbed together in Ecuador before starting in business together we both had to learn how to trust each other on a different level than is typically required in business and cursory friendships. On that trip we realized that we could trust and rely on each other when things don’t go smoothly.

In one particular recent event while we were climbing together in Alaska, Tim was leading up a steep slope when the ice gave out and he began to tumble down the mountain. As they were connected via a climbing rope, Naira quickly reacted and began to self-arrest. By the time Tim had also recovered enough to self-arrest and stop his fall they had both fallen about 100 feet and 80 feet respectively.  It is this type of event that engrains a level of trust in another’s competence that can be carried over to any other type of situation.

On the actual business front, we both realized that we possessed very different, yet complementary skill sets. Once we began to develop the business plan and put together a strategy, coupled with the trust we had gained with each other from the mountains, we knew we could both move ahead with different responsibilities, yet towards achieving the very same goal.”

Three Things That Have Been Important To Their Success as a Team

  1. Trust,
  2. Complementary skill sets, and
  3. Sharing and believing in the same vision

What successfully Summiting Denali Means for Each One of Them

Tim: “For me it was the culmination of an idea and vision that began years before. In the mountains, it should be about the journey, but getting to the summit is always a sweet addition. This particular mountain and successful summit was by far the most complex and difficult in all aspects as it required more planning and preparation than other mountains I had climbed. Plus, we had spent so long this year attempting to get there. It took two trips, two cross-continental round trip flights, sleeping in airports, hotels, and tents, but we did it. We spent 35 days on the mountain during those two trips. So to have been denied the summit once before, but continuing to try and having the mindset of not quitting until we succeed, and then to succeed, is a great feeling. To have achieved that with Naira, with a mindset that we also share in business makes it satisfying as we look to apply the same tenacity to our new business venture.”

Naira: “While being able to say that I became the First Arab woman to climb Denali has its significance in the mountaineering world, the climbing of Denali with Tim took much deeper meaning for several reasons: Tim and I were the first American- Arab team to step on the highest point in North America. The ability to share a message of hope from there together, especially in today’s turbulent world was extremely unique. In addition, it was elating to reach the top with Tim because we have failed in the past to reach the top. Success becomes way more enjoyable when you achieve it with the same person you failed with before. Finally, reaching the top and being able to make history would absolutely not have been possible without Tim’s partnership and competence on the mountain. In that regards, I feel truly blessed to have Tim as partner.”

Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: View From The Top of Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)
Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: View From The Top of Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)

Their Shared-Vision for Frontier7, The Significance of The Name

“The name Frontier7, which certainly didn’t come to us quickly, has a number of meanings for us. First of all, we are both in love with the outdoors and adventure, so ‘frontier’ in the sense of the furthest known boundary, the last frontier, the beginning of the unexplored, etc. appealed to us. In business we wanted to create an analytics platform that helped push our clients to the frontier of their industries. The “7” has many meanings that we both value: in most cultures 7 is a lucky number, 7 wonders of the world, 7 summits, 7 colors in the rainbow, in Eastern thought the 7th Chakra is the center for trust, devotion, inspiration, happiness, and positivity. (There are also 7 dwarfs in Snow White and who doesn’t love Snow White?)”

Our vision for Frontier7 is to be the go-to online platform for seamless analytics. We want to enable companies to be able to unlock all of the value of the data they gather in order to maximize their own business performance.

The Announcement They Sent To Their Friends, and Other Associates

On June 30th, 2015, Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton made history together on the highest point of North America, Denali (also known as Mount McKinley) by summiting as the First Arab-American Team to ever do so, and with Naira becoming the first Arab woman to ever stand on the summit. Denali is one of the “Seven Summits” or highest point on the continent of North America, standing at 20,320 feet. From the highest point in North America they raised a flag with the message “Peace and Security for All” written in Arabic, Hebrew, and English.

Their goal to summit Denali began on May 4th, 2015 when they attempted to climb the mountain with a guided group but were unable to due to severe weather conditions, spending a total of 18 days on the mountain. While it would be normal for them to come back another season to attempt the mountain again, they decided to return only a few weeks later in June. The second and successful attempt was a self-guided climb with just the team of the two of them. They raised their flag on the summit after 13 days and took a full 17 days on the mountain. The two months, two cross-continental round trips, red eye flights, sleeping in airports, tents, and hotels, and 35 total days on the mountain was well worth the effort on the evening of June 30th, 2015.

What makes their story even more unique is that they come from significantly different backgrounds. Naira grew up as a Palestinian in Israel where she spent a significant amount of time working in the conflict field, while Tim grew up in Massachusetts, served in the United States Army and served numerous combat tours overseas. They connected because of their love for mountaineering, and drive to send a message about hope, interdependence, and common human values.

Furthermore, today they are also co-founders of a data analytics company, Frontier7 (www.frontier7.com), and are also in the process of starting a non-profit in the form of a social platform that engineers chance for people by connecting those from varied backgrounds and shared passions (like themselves) and aligning people, ideas, and resources for them to address social issues that they care about. They believe that in today’s reality, this message becomes more important than ever.

My Closing  Thoughts

We’ve had numerous discussions about Frontier7, but I have not yet seen a demo. They assure me that day is coming soon. Either way, I am eager to watch their journey, as co-founders and as people who have a vision that they wish to turn into a reality. They each embody the intangible characteristics I look for in founders; courage, grit, vision, determination, resilience, creativity, resourcefulness, conflict management and resolution, discipline, a willingness to assume responsibility, and the ability to learn from others. I could not feel more proud of their accomplishment.

Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: At The Top of Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)
Naira Musallam and Tim Lawton: At The Top of Denali (Image Credit: Naira and Tim)

6 Things I Have Learned About Building High-Performing Teams

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Chelsea FC - Celebrating victory in the 2012 UEFA Champions League. Image Credit: Chelsea FC
Chelsea FC – Celebrating victory in the 2012 UEFA Champions League. Image Credit: Chelsea FC

I spend a lot of time thinking about teamwork; how teams function, how they operate, how they fail or succeed, and how the most successful teams make their success repeatable in the face of changing conditions. This post is my attempt to synthesize what I have learned so far. ((Let me know if you feel I have failed to attribute something appropriately. Tell me how to fix the error, and I will do so. I regret any mistakes in quoting from my sources.))

What is a team? For the purpose of this blog post I will define a team as: A group of people with complementary skills who choose to work collaboratively together towards accomplishing a shared vision and a common objective, within an environment of mutual support in which each team member is empowered to independently set goals, solve problems and make decisions with support from other members of the team, based on an agreed-upon framework, under severe resource constraints.

A team will perform better than an individual in situations where the task at hand can only be completed through:

  1. the creation of new knowledge, or
  2. a novel and unique application of existing knowledge, or
  3. the meshing of different disciplines and subject matter areas, and
  4. there isn’t a single person who possesses all the knowledge and skills that would be required to accomplish the task within a period of time acceptable to the parties involved.

The presence of the following phenomena help us identify a team ((Adapted from Group Behavior, accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at https://www.boundless.com/psychology/textbooks/boundless-psychology-textbook/social-psychology-20/social-influence-104/group-behavior-393-12928/))

  1. Interdependence and Social interaction: Team members depend one one another in order to meet the teams goals and objectives, their interdependence results in social interaction through communication with one another.
  2. Perception of a group and Commonality of Purpose: Team members agree they are part of the team, and they buy into the team’s purpose, its goals, and its objectives.
  3. Favoritism: Members of the group demonstrate positive prejudice towards one another, and discriminate in favor of other members of the team.

In research using Letters-to-Numbers Problems, a task-grouping that combines elements of hypothesis testing, mathematical and logical reasoning, cryptographic reasoning, and collective induction: Groups of size three, four, and five performed better than the best of an equivalent number of individuals, but groups of size two performed at the level of the best of two individuals. Groups of size three, four, and five performed better than groups of size two but did not differ from each other. These results suggest that groups of size three are necessary and sufficient to perform better than the best of an equivalent number of individuals on intellective problems. ((“Groups Perform Better Than the Best Individuals on Letters-to-Numbers Problems: Effects of Group Size”, Patrick Laughlin, Erin Hatch, Jonathan Silver, and Lee Boh, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 90, No. 4. Accessed online on Jun 27, 2015.))

Other research found that: “Groups are better than individuals in making difficult decisions, but the opposite effect is found when decisions are easy. The model suggests that the reason lies in the different assessment mechanisms operating at the level of individuals and colonies. For a difficult choice, solitary ants have a relatively high probability of accepting the worse nest, because they rely on quality dependent acceptance probabilities that differ little for similar nests. Successive comparisons cause these probabilities to diverge, but the ant is likely to make her decision before this slow process has had much effect. Whole colonies, on the other hand, do much better at difficult choices, because they use social information to accentuate the quality difference between sites. Rather than rely on individual comparisons, the colony’s choice emerges from a competition between recruitment efforts. Recruitment generates positive feedback on the number of ants at each site, with the better site slightly favored by its higher acceptance rate. The quorum rule amplifies this difference, allowing the colony to settle on the better site more frequently.” ((Takao Sasaki et al, Ant Colonies Outperform Individuals When A Sensory Discrimination Task is Difficult But Not When it is Easy.Proceedings of the National Science Academy of Sciences of the United States 2013 110(34). Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at http://www.pnas.org/content/110/34/13769.full.pdf+html))

The importance of the team that is working to build a startup cannot be overstated. The team is the most important aspect of a startup during the earliest stages of its existence, while it is searching for a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business model. Once that business model has been found, the startup has a better chance of surviving team instability. Before that, team instability can be fatal. Also, the traits of the people in that early team determine the culture of the company that might evolve out of that startup.

Lesson # 1 – Every team goes through Development Stages: Bruce W. Tuckman’s model of how groups form is the foundational work on which our understanding of how teams develop and function is built. His paper ‘Developmental sequence in small groups’ was first published in 1965. ((Tuckman, Bruce W. (1965) ‘Developmental sequence in small groups’, Psychological Bulletin, 63, 384-399.))

  1. Forming: “Groups initially concern themselves with orientation accomplished primarily through testing. Such testing serves to identify the boundaries of both interpersonal and task behaviors. Coincident with testing in the interpersonal realm is the establishment of dependency relationships with leaders, other group members, or pre-existing standards. It may be said that orientation, testing and dependence constitute the group process of forming.”
  2. Storming: “The second point in the sequence is characterized by conflict and polarization around interpersonal issues, with concomitant emotional responding in the task sphere. These behaviors serve as resistance to group influence and task requirements and may be labeled as storming.”
  3. Norming: “Resistance is overcome in the third stage in which in-group feeling and cohesiveness develop, new standards evolve, and new roles are adopted. In the task realm, intimate, personal opinions are expressed. Thus, we have the stage of norming.”
  4. Performing: “the group attains the fourth and final stage in which interpersonal structure becomes the tool of task activities. Roles become flexible and functional, and group energy is channeled into the task. Structural issues have been resolved, and structure can now become supportive of task performance. This stage can be labeled as performing.”
  5. Adjourning or Mourning: This stage is experienced by teams that go through the process of dissolution; planned or unplanned, voluntary or involuntary. It was added to the preceding four stages in 1977.

Lesson #2 – To sustain success, leadership matters: Anita Elberse conducted research on Manchester United Football Club’s legendary leader, Sir Alex Ferguson. About Sir Alex Ferguson, she writes “Some call him the greatest coach in history. Before retiring in May 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson spent 26 seasons as the manager of Manchester United, the English football (soccer) club that ranks among the most successful and valuable franchises in sports. During that time the club won 13 English league titles along with 25 other domestic and international trophies—giving him an overall haul nearly double that of the next-most-successful English club manager.” Following are some observations based on her research. ((Anita Elberse, Ferguson’s Formula. HBR October 2013 Issue accessed on Jun 27 at https://hbr.org/2013/10/fergusons-formula. Also, Anita Elberse and Thomas Dye, Sir Alex Ferguson: Managing Manchester United. Harvard Business School Case N9-513-051, Sep 2012.))

  1. Sir Alex Ferguson on building an organization that will last, starting with the foundation: “From the moment I got to Manchester United, I thought of only one thing: building a football club. I wanted to build right from the bottom. That was in order to create fluency and a continuity of supply to the first team. With this approach, the players all grow up together, producing a bond that, in turn, creates a spirit.”
  2. Successful teams are led by people who set high standards, and hold everyone accountable to meeting and even exceeding those standards: “He recruited what he calls “bad losers” and demanded that they work extremely hard. Over the years this attitude became contagious—players didn’t accept teammates’ not giving it their all. The biggest stars were no exception.”
  3. Team leaders, and other team members, should encourage one another as often as possible, especially when a team member’s effort has matched or exceeded the group’s expectations. Sir Alex Ferguson: “Few people get better with criticism; most respond to encouragement instead. So I tried to give encouragement when I could. For a player—for any human being—there is nothing better than hearing “Well done.” Those are the two best words ever invented. You don’t need to use superlatives.”
  4. The most successful teams prepare to win. Under Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United was always prepared to adapt its tactical play in order to increase its chances of winning the game; how to play if a goal was needed in the late stages of a match, training to force a favorable outcome when the going got tough. They used training sessions as opportunities to learn and improve. Sir Alex Ferguson: “Winning is in my nature. I’ve set my standards over such a long period of time that there is no other option for me—I have to win. I expected to win every time we went out there. Even if five of the most important players were injured, I expected to win. Other teams get into a huddle before the start of a match, but I did not do that with my team. Once we stepped onto the pitch before a game, I was confident that the players were prepared and ready to play, because everything had been done before they walked out onto the pitch.”
Denali Image Credit: NPS Photo/Tim Rains
Denali
Image Credit: NPS Photo/Tim Rains

Lesson #3 – Great teams learn how to adapt their leadership structure to match the intensity and difficulty of the task at hand: In a study of 5,104 mountain-climbing expeditions that took place between 1905 and 2012 on more than 100 mountains around the world, researchers found that: “In sum, hierarchical cultural values predicted summiting and fatality rates only for group expeditions. Hierarchy did not predict summiting or fatality rates in solo expeditions, providing evidence that group processes are a critical driver of the observed effects.” ((Eric M. Anicich et al, Hierarchical Cultural Values Predict Success and Mortality in High-Stakes Teams. Proceedings of the National Science Academy of Sciences of the United States 2015 112(5). Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at http://media.outsideonline.com/documents/himalaya-expedition-study.pdf.)) In other words, groups characterized by a higher degree of “command-and-control” style leadership – and a lower degree of egalitarian leadership, were more likely to summit but also faced more deaths than groups with a higher degree of egalitarian leadership – and a lower degree of command-and-control style leadership. Commenting on the study, Cecilia Ridgeway, a professor at Stanford University observed that: ((Devon O’Neil, Summit or Death! Accessed on Jun 27 at http://www.outsideonline.com/1928751/summit-or-death))

  1. The crucial factor in a team’s success or failure under conditions such as those the researchers examined is the leader’s competence. Perhaps that competence is compromised in certain situations due to ingrained social structures, norms and behavioral patterns.
  2. Egalitarian teams are better positioned to survive in the face of potentially dooming conditions which would overwhelm the single decision maker in a non-egalitarian team. “The reason for that is when they hit these complex situations, under best circumstances they share their information, the ideas bounce off, and they come up with things that none of them would have thought of alone about how to survive.”

Related questions raised by this study:

  1. How can a team find an optimal balance between egalitarianism and non-egalitarianism, and
  2. How can the team learn to identify the situations in which it should adopt one leadership approach over the other?

Cecilia Ridgeway offers this advice: “The team would have to know itself well and all the members would really have to trust one another and be willing to go with their boss but also pull back from that in a kind of kaleidoscopic way. It’s not impossible but it wouldn’t be easy to do. It would depend a lot on the interpersonal skills, not just the climbing skills, of everybody involved.”

The best teams shift fluidly from one organizational form to another, depending on the circumstance, and depending on the nature of the task at hand. This is a function of the effectiveness of the team’s leadership, and reflects the complex nature of the environment in which startups and other businesses operate today.

  1. Teams can be organized such that interaction between each member and the team leader is the key characteristic of how the team gets its work done. The degree of collaboration between team members is low. The effectiveness of a team organized in this way is largely dependent on the effectiveness of the team leader.
  2. They may be organized such that responsibilities are shared to a large extent, with each team member exerting significant authority and decision-making responsibility for some aspect of the team’s work. Team leadership is not a shared responsibility. The degree of collaboration is high.
  3. A team can also be self-directed, with no official leader. However, such a team will often have one person responsible for coordinating the activities of team members.

Lesson #4 – Great teams are made up of people who each strive for true mastery in their area of specialization. The greatest soccer teams usually have players who each would be selected amongst the very best players in the world for the position that they fill on the team. ((On such teams young players must commit to trying to become one of the best, and the example must be set by the more experienced members of the team.)) To become the best each member of the team must hold a worldview that is keeping with what the Japanese describe as Shokunin kishitsu (職人気質) – translated roughly as the “craftsman spirit” and commit to the following five principles: ((Adapted from Garr Reynold’s Shokunin Kishitsu & The Five Elements of True Mastery. Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2015/05/the-five-secrets-to-mastery.html))

  1. They must be committed to the art, and committed to always functioning in their role on the team at the highest possible level. Commitment to hard work, and dedication to consistently executing at a high level is what sets great teams apart from their peers.
  2. They must aspire to improve themselves and their work, individually and collectively.
  3. They must pay attention to the cleanliness and freshness of their work environment. “Work environment” applies to the physical space in which the team gets its work done, but it also applies to the intangible work environment; Do team members feel free to express opinions that might be unpopular without fear of the consequences? Does every member of the team feel a sense of belonging and inclusiveness? Have cliques formed within the team, how does this affect the team’s overall effectiveness?
  4. The team’s leader is stubborn and obstinate in the pursuit of excellence. This does not mean that the leader has to be a jerk towards other members of the team, but it implies that the team’s standards for excellence, its vision, its mission . . . those are not sacrificed for the sake of consensus building.
  5. They each must be passionate and enthusiastic about mastering their skill, and in doing so they each cause their team to improve and become every day. They must be passionate about their individual and collective pursuit of perfection.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q78xvcnmIMw

Lesson #5 – A team should strive to become collectively more intelligent than any single member of that team could be acting alone. 

  1. Gender diversity helps, or find team members with high social sensitivity. Researchers assigned subjects randomly into teams after each individual had been administered a standard intelligence test, and then the researchers asked the teams to solve several tasks which included brianstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles, as well as one complex problem. The team’s collective intelligence was scored on the basis of their performance on the tasks. Teams with members with higher IQs did not perform much better than the other teams. However, teams that had more women did. The researchers suggest that the higher social sensitivity of women relative to men, explains the higher scores attained by teams with more women. Teams that include people who have high social sensitivity will perform teams that do not. ((Anita Wooley and Thomas W. Malone, What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women. Harvard Business Review, Jun 2011. Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at https://hbr.org/2011/06/defend-your-research-what-makes-a-team-smarter-more-women/ar/1))
  2. In the face of complex problems, teams that solve the problem together will improve their chances of success over teams that rely on a star individual performer. “Swarm intelligence, which brings to mind the image of a hive of bees working together, requires people to gather information independently, process and combine it in social interactions, and use it to solve cognitive problems, according to behavioral biologist Jens Krause.  It has an advantage over other systems in that individuals get the opportunity to lead the swarm and affect what it does.  Moreover, because people act collectively, they can consider more factors, come up with more solutions, and make better decisions.” There are 4 things teams can do to accomplish this: ((Wolfgang Jenewein et al, Learning Collaboration from Tiki-Taka Soccer. Harvard Business Review, Jul 2014. Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at https://hbr.org/2014/07/learning-collaboration-from-tika-taka-soccer/))
    1. Create a common vision,
    2. Leaders should be teachers, not bosses,
    3. Set collective objectives, and
    4. Leaders must be full-time leaders.
  3. Create, maintain, and nurture the team’s identity. Together with culture, identity can provide a powerful means of driving performance. Identity is different from culture. Identity tells a team “who we are.” Culture tells the team “what we do” or “how we behave.” ((Andres Hatum and Luciana Silvestri, What Makes FC Barcelona Such a Successful Business? Harvard Business Review, Jun 16 2015. Accessed on Jun 27, 2015 at https://hbr.org/2015/06/what-makes-fc-barcelona-such-a-successful-business))

A good team has learned how to make one plus one equal two. A great team has learned how to make one plus one equal three.

Lesson # 6 – In order to sustain performance teams should be aware of the problems related to intra-group collaboration and intra-group creativity. 

  1. The process of collaboration can lead teams to perform worse than an individual. Julia A. Minson and Jennifer S. Mueller found that teamwork can exacerbate overconfidence, and lead team members to reject outside information. ((Julia A. Minson and Jennifer S. Mueller, The Cost of Collaboration: Why Joint Decision Making Exacerbates Rejection of Outside Information. Psychological Science, Mar 16, 2012. Accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/DPlab/papers/publishedPapers/Minson_2011_The%20cost%20of%20collaboration.pdf))
    1. The study examined the assumption that collaboration leads to superior decisions than decisions made by an individual.
    2. The study found that teams of two people were more reluctant to change their judgements when presented with new information than an individual working alone. As a result the teams made poorer decisions than they would have if they had more willingly incorporated outside information in their decision making.
    3. The researchers found that teams’ tended to be more confident in the inherent ability of the team to reach a decision without outside input, this led them to be less willing to accept outside information. They suggest that the process of collaboration itself, not the quality of collaboration, makes team members over-confident in their collective expertise and leads to the higher degree of rejection of outside input.
    4. This is especially detrimental when the team is confronting a novel problem or task, but fails to explore alternatives that might lead to an improved decision.
  2. The best teams are those in which each member of the team shares the same team mental model, and the team mental model is correct. Beng-Chong Lim and Katherine J. Klein found that team performance is enhanced when team members share the same mental model. ((Beng-Chong Lim and Katherine J. Klein, Team mental Models and Team Performance: A Field Study of The Effects of Team Mental Model Similarity and Accuracy.J. Organiz. Behav. 27, 403–418 (2006) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/job.387. Accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at http://www-management.wharton.upenn.edu/klein/documents/Lim_Klein_Team_mental_models_2006.pdf))
    1. A mental model is “a ‘mechanism whereby humans generate descriptions of system purpose and form, explanations of system functioning and observed system states, and predictions of future system states.’ Mental models are organized knowledge frameworks that allow individuals to describe, explain, and predict behavior. Mental models specify relevant knowledge content as well as the relationships between knowledge components. An individual’s mental model (of, for example, a car, a disease, or a process such as child development) reflects the individual’s perception of reality.”
    2. They found “a direct relationship between team mental model similarity and team performance. This may reflect the context in which the teams that we studied are trained to operate. They are expected to perform under high stress and intense time pressure. Under such circumstances, there is very little time for explicit coordination and communication. To succeed in their tasks (e.g., reacting to an enemy’s ambush), team members must have a shared understanding of the emerging situation and the collective action required. It is precisely in this type of context that shared mental models have been hypothesized to be most predictive of team performance.” Mental model similarity is a measure of the degree to which each team member’s perception of reality differs from the perception of other individuals on the team.
    3. They also found “that team mental model accuracy is also instrumental for team performance. Teams whose average mental models were most similar to experts’ mental models performed better than did teams whose average mental models were less similar to experts’ mental models. We speculate that teams whose mental models were most accurate pursued more effective task performance strategies than did teams whose mental models were less accurate.” In other words, the more correct a team’s mental model, the better the team performed. ((Coincidentally, this is an area of investigation I often pursue when I study early stage startups – does the startup team’s mental model match the mental model that customers have of the startup? What are the implications if it does not?))
  3. The team might fail to benefit from the knowledge of its most knowledgeable member because of pressure to conform with the majority position.  In 1956 Solomon E Asch found that even when one member of a team is more knowledgeable than the rest of the team about a specific task, that individual might choose to agree with the team even if the team is wrong, and that individual would have disagreed with the team’s decision under different circumstances. This happens because that individual feels pressure to conform with the team’s position. This is especially the case if that individual’s self-perception of the power-dynamic on the team places that individual in a position of weakness which makes it advantageous for that individual to protect the social relationships that exist between that individual and the other members of the team. ((Solomon E. Asch, Studies of Independence and Conformity: 1. A Minority of One Against A Unanimous Majority. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, Vol. 70, No. 9, Whole No. 416, 1956. Accessed online on Jun 28, 2015. I have saved a copy here Minority v. Majority – asch1956. A more accessible discussion of Samuel Asch’s research on Decision Making and Social Conformity can be found here))
  4. The behavioral biases present in individual team members can be amplified within a group setting, particularly, the biases of dominant group members can become amplified by the group. Behavioral psychology is the study of observable and quantifiable aspects of human behavior. Behavioral biases refer to the tendency that people have to behave in certain ways under certain conditions. Behavioral biasescan be divided into two groups; Cognitive biases and Emotional biases. Anindividual’s behavioral biases can interfere with that person’sdecision making, and cause theindividual to makesuboptimal choices. The impact behavioral biases have on the quality ofdecision makingcan be worse in the context of a group asindividual team members might have a multiplying effect on oneanothers’ biases instead of reducing bias within the group. For example, two over-confident people might form a team that exhibits a higher degree of overconfidence than either individual acting alone. ((Adapted from Group Behavior, accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at https://www.boundless.com/psychology/textbooks/boundless-psychology-textbook/social-psychology-20/social-influence-104/group-behavior-393-12928/ ))
    1. Groupthink occurs when teams make consistently suboptimal decisions because members of the team have a strong desire to maintain harmony within the group. Groupthink can lead the team to consistently reject creative ideas.
    2. Groupshift occurs when the group adopts a position that is more extreme than the position that any of the individual members of the team would have taken. It is the example I described above of a team of individually overconfident people forming a team that is even more extreme in its overconfidence than any single individual member of the team would be if acting alone, under any circumstance.
    3. Deindividuation occurs as the group gradually becomes self-unaware as individual members of the group engage in less self-evaluation and self-critiquing, subsuming their self-awareness in the face of the behavior of the group. This phenomenon is exemplified in the real world through phenomena like lynch mobs, peaceful demonstrations that turn violent for no identifiable or obvious reason, or groups that form spontaneously and cause destruction, say while celebrating a sport’s teams victory in some sports tournament like the FIFA World Cup.
  5. As a team grows individuals in the team can perform worse than they would have if they were acting alone. Jennifer S. Mueller found that as teams grow larger the performance of individuals on the team can suffer because the social bonds between members of the team grow weaker. In her study relational loss outweighed extrinsic motivational loss and perceived coordination loss in explaining the tendency for individuals on large teams to perform worse. Relational loss is a measure of the likelihood of one team member to obtain task-related help from another team member when it is needed. Extrinsic motivation is the tendency of team members to perform actions because of the likelihood of recognition from  other members of the team. Coordination loss is the tendency for team members to become less capable of taking synchronistic action towards completing a task as the team grows. She states: “This study identifies that, in modern contexts, coordination losses and motivation losses provide an incomplete story in explaining why individuals in larger teams perform worse. Instead, the current study shows that relational losses play an important role in explaining why individuals experience performance losses in larger teams. Better understanding of process in larger teams moves the field past an obsession with finding the ‘‘optimal team size,’’ a line of questioning which has yielded little understanding about performance in larger groups. Indeed, the optimal team size may be completely dependent upon the exact nature of the group task which may have as many variations as there are teams. Focusing on process also moves the field past blanket recommendations to simply keep group sizes small. The reality is that managers tend to bias their team size towards overstaffing, and theory would suggest that larger teams have more potential productivity that can lead organizations to increased competitive advantage if managed correctly. ((Mueller, J. S. Why individuals in larger teams perform worse. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (2011), doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2011.08.004. Accessed on Jun 29, 2015 at https://1318d3f964915c298476-71207924aec76187d46cf4d3ee8ac05a.ssl.cf2.rackcdn.com/or-mueller_2012_obhdp_why-indivdiuals-in-larger-teams-perform-worse.pdf))
  6. Individual team members, and thus teams in general can have an implicit bias against creative ideas. The best teams are those that recognize this and introduce mechanisms to guard against discarding creative ideas that later go on to become the basis for phenomenally successful products and businesses. A study by Jennifer S. Mueller, Shimul Mewani and Jack A. Goncalo suggests that this might happen because people and teams try to reduce uncertainty, and creative ideas are those that confront us with extreme uncertainty.

Concluding Thoughts

If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far go together.

The Big 5 of Team Work and The Coordinating Mechanisms of Teamwork: In Is There a “Big Five” in Teamwork? Eduardo Salas, Dana E. Sims and C. Shawn Burke provide a helpful summary of The Big Five and the Coordinating Mechanisms of Team Work. I am reproducing part of that summary below. ((Eduardo Salas, Dana E. Sims and C. Shawn Burke, Is There a “Big Five” in Teamwork?SMALL GROUP RESEARCH, Vol. 36 No. 5, October 2005 555-599 DOI: 10.1177/1046496405277134. Accessed on June 29, 2015 at http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/INF5181/h14/artikler-teamarbeid/salas_etal_2005_is_there_a_big_five_in_teamwork—copy.pdf. I have saved the relevant pages Salas et al – Big 5 in Team Work.))

The Big Five of Teamwork

  1. Team Leadership
    1. Definition: Ability to direct and coordinate the activities of other team members, assess team performance, assign tasks, develop team knowledge, skills, and abilities, motivate team members, plan and organize, and establish a positive atmosphere.
    2. Behavioral Markers: Facilitate team problem solving. Provide performance expectations and acceptable interaction patterns. Synchronize and combine individual team member contributions. Seek and evaluate information that affects team functioning. Clarify team member roles. Engage in preparatory meetings and feedback sessions with the team.
  2. Team Orientation
    1. Definition: Propensity to take other’s behavior into account during group interaction and the belief in the importance of team goal’s over individual members’ goals.
    2. Behavioral Markers: Taking into account alternative solutions provided by teammates and appraising that input to determine what is most correct. Increased task involvement, information sharing, strategizing, and participatory goal setting
  3. Shared Mental Models
    1. Definition: An organizing knowledge structure of the relationships among the task the team is engaged in and how the team members will interact.
    2. Behavioral Markers: Anticipating and predicting each other’s needs. Identify changes in the team, task, or teammates and implicitly adjusting strategies as needed.
  4. Mutual Trust
    1. Definition: The shared belief that team members will perform their roles and protect the interests of their teammates.
    2. Behavioral Markers: Information sharing. Willingness to admit mistakes and accept feedback.
  5. Closed-loop Communication
    1. Definition: The exchange of information between a sender and a receiver irrespective of the medium.
    2. Behavioral Markers: Following up with team members to ensure message was received. Acknowledging that a message was received. Clarifying with the sender of the message that the message received is the same as the intended message.

The Coordinating Mechanisms of Teamwork

  1. Mutual Performance Monitoring
    1. Definition: The ability to develop common understandings of the team environment and apply appropriate task strategies to accurately monitor teammate performance.
    2. Behavioral Markers:Identifying mistakes and lapses in other team members’ actions. Providing feedback regarding team member actions to facilitate self-correction.
  2. Backup Behavior
    1. Definition: Ability to anticipate other team members’ needs through accurate knowledge about their responsibilities. This includes the ability to shift workload among members to achieve balance during high periods of workload or pressure.
    2. Behavioral Markers: Recognition by potential backup providers that there is a workload distribution problem in their team. Shifting of work responsibilities to underutilized team members. Completion of the whole task or parts of tasks by other team member.
  3. Adaptability
    1. Definition: Ability to adjust strategies based on information gathered from the environment through the use of backup behavior and reallocation of intrateam resources. Altering a course of action or team repertoire in response to changing conditions (internal or external).
    2. Behavioral Markers: Identify cues that a change has occurred, assign meaning to that change, and develop a new plan to deal with the changes. Identify opportunities for improvement and innovation for habitual or routine practices. Remain vigilant to changes in the internal and external environment of the team.