Why a Great Individual Is Better Than a Good Team

Why a Great Individual Is Better Than a Good Teamby Jeff Stibel – HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW JUNE 27 2011Anytime a CEO, quarterback, engineer or author is paid ridiculous amounts of money,dozens of investors, armchair quarterbacks, and scholars jump in to debate the valueof individual contributors versus teams. Bill Taylor wrote the most recent of manyinteresting pieces, where he argued provocatively that "great people are overrated," inresponse to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's comment that a great engineer is worth100 average engineers.I have heard plenty of people argue that no one individual is worth the price of many.But interestingly, I have never heard it from a leader. As a CEO, I have run publiccompanies, private companies, startups, turnarounds, and divestitures — in each andeverycase, I have never seen a situation where quantity is better than quality when itcomes to people. Never. Great people are both hard to find and worth an infinitenumber of average people.And as a brain scientist, I know that great individuals are not only more valuable thanlegions of mediocrity, they are often more valuable than groups that include greatindividuals. Here's why:The truth is, our brains work very well individually but tend to break down in groups.This is why we have individual decision makers in business (and why paradoxically wehave group decisions in government). Programmers are exponentially faster whencoding as individuals; designers do their best work alone; artists rarely collaborate andwhen they do, it rarely goes well.There are exceptions to every rule, but in general this holds true.There is clearly not widespread acknowledgment about the benefits of individualcontributors — in many ways, it goes against our inclination towards equality. Andthank goodness, because that gives those of us who understand the real value of greatpeople a huge competitive advantage!Like for anyone interested in making better decisions about their teams, it is worthspending some time understanding the science behind individual greatness.In many ways, individual people follow an inverse rule relative to networks of people.Consider the two fundamental laws of networks: both Metcalfe's Law and Reed's Lawassume that as a network of people grows, the value of the network increasessubstantially. (In Metcalfe's Law, the value of the network is proportional to thesquare of the number of people in the network, whereas Reed's Law demonstrates thatthe value for any individual within a network grows exponentially with everynew member.)But with individuals, the opposite is true: The value of a contributor decreasesdisproportionately with each additional person contributing to a single project, idea,or innovation. This is true across all areas but only so far as there are discrete piecesof work to be done. To be sure, there is clear value in having a marketing person workwith a programmer on a project or a biologist working with a chemist on a problem.

Proper team building is a powerful thing. But whenan activity can be performed sufficiently by one person with adequate skills, doing theactivity as a group should be avoided. The concept of declining incremental value isessentially a "power function" or, more technically, a scale invariance — where thegreatest impact comes from the smallest proportion of the population.There are numerous examples of power functions, including Stevens' law, Keplar's law,the long tail, Zipf's law, and the Pareto principle (or 80/20 rule). And power lawsexplain plenty of events in nature (i.e., earthquakes), finance (i.e., incomedistribution), language (word frequency), and even ecommerce (i.e., book sales onAmazon). Virtually all complex systems follow power laws within the system itself.Here's how power functions relate to the brain. As described in my book Wired forThought, the brain is a complex network of neurons. There are around 100 billionneurons connected to one another in the brain and they follow a network law — thevalue of a neuron is exponentially more valuable as the overall neural network grows.But when the brain becomes highly active, it reverts to a power law where a spike inactivity is followed by a lull. Informally called neuronal avalanches, these spikes havebeen linked to knowledge transfer and storage, communication, and computationalpower — in short, intelligence.The same is true when it comes to people. Our intelligence is incredibly complex andas a result, a great individual can far exceed the value of many mediocre minds. Thisis why it is absurd to ask questions like "how many mediocre people would it take tocollectively beat Kasparov in a chess match?"Mediocre minds can also destroy the value or contribution of a great mind. No matterhow good Kasparov is at chess, he would not do well playing doubles with a mediocrechess player against Bobby Fisher alone. Or take Michelangelo's David as an example. Asecond artist cutting into David would cause massive destruction to the sculpture,even if that artist was Picasso. With each successive stroke of the chisel fromadditional artists, David's value, beauty, and overall impact would diminish.A perfect — albeit destructive — example of a power function. Leaders need to maketough decisions all the time. One decision is easy: find the best people andempower them to do great things.