I'm a Money Grubber

How to Build the Perfect Team

I’ve had a few interesting assignments since starting my MBA program.

Last week we were split into groups of 7 and given a hypothetical situation: our entire team had crash-landed on the moon and we had to hike 200 some miles to reach the mother ship. We could only carry 10 items with us. The goal was to come to a group consensus on what 10 items to bring and list them in priority order.

We were given a list of 15ish random items, such as: water, pistols, a raft, and parachute silk.

The kicker was that we were videotaped as we worked. The intent being that everyone would get critiqued on teamwork skills.

It was intense to see how people interacted on screen. We had three guys be really aggressive, and just dominate the conversation. A few people would try to chime in only to be drowned out by the more dominant voices. I actually ended up being one of the quieter guys.

It was also enlightening to see tiny visual cues from body language. One person in my group asked if there was water on the moon, to see if we needed the raft. It was kind of a weird question because there is obviously no water on the moon. But another teammate gave this guy a look of pure disgust – something not exactly appropriate in a team setting. The guy that asked the question didn’t see the face at the time, but fortunately it was captured on film.

Assignments such as this remind me of just how hard it is to work in teams.

Working with a big team

When I used to work for a large company, poor communication flow was a huge problem. A lot of information was provided on a need to know basis. And this resulted in a lot of wasted time and energy.

Not saying that this was a problem with management because we were pretty lean and I know those guys were doing the best they could at the time. But when I was working on a project, I rarely knew if a peer from another site was working on a similar idea, or if they had already found a viable solution.

Even within the same team, there would be huge time delays because it just took time for information to get communicated through the right channels. For example, I would ask someone to complete a task, only to be redirected to their supervisor where I would then have to tell the supervisor exactly what I had just told the worker, so that the supervisor could tell the worker the exact same message.

A quantitative explanation for why large teams suck

It goes without saying that communication flows much more easily on small teams than large teams. If you’re the only person on a project, communication is simple. The only communication path is between you and the customer.

As the number of people on a project increases, however, so does the number of communication paths. It doesn’t increase additively, as the number of people increases, it increases multiplicatively, proportional to the square of the number of people.

I’ve always known this intuitively, but I’ve only recently learned that there is an actual term for this.

It’s called Metcalfe’s Law.

Metcalfe’s Law states that “the value of a communication system grows at approximately the square of the number of users of the system.” The corollary for teamwork essentially boils down to: The efficiency of the team is approximately the inverse of the square of the number of members in the team.

How to build the perfect team

What does this mean? Keep the team as small as possible.

To be more specific, in terms of entrepreneurship, I’m beginning to think that three people is optimal for a version 1.0 product release.

You can start out by reducing the number of people you plan to add to the team, and then reduce some more. If you can’t build your initial product prototype with three people, then you either need different people or you need to slim down your initial version.

Keep in mind, it’s ok to keep your first version small and tight. The main goal is to launch as quickly as possible to see if your idea has wings and, if it does, you’ll have a clean, simple base to build on.

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