Team | Customers, Etc.
The unit economics of successful organizations starts with “we”, not “me”.
I hope you’ll allow me to wax reminiscent about my very-soon-to-be-completed MBA program for a moment. Classes are finished, I’ve turned in all of my finals, and graduation is 8 days away. Hallelujah.
This past Saturday we had a party to celebrate our Executive MBA class and on Sunday I had my capstone team over for a steak dinner. I can’t express enough how fulfilling it was to take time out of everything going on in our lives and truly celebrate our time together.
One of the things that stands out in an MBA program is just how much work is done as a team. Yes, there’s of course individual work, and sometimes group projects aren’t the most fun1, but by the end of the program, your main body of organization and getting work done is your team of five or six people completing projects together.
Learning to work in teams is important, perhaps because so many business failures these days seem to stem from the cult of the individual.
Doing it all yourself
I wrote last week about virtue in the context of the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and the collapse of FTX. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview2 between SBF and WSJ’s Alexander Osispovich, Alexander asks SBF pointedly:
Alexander: How is it that as a 90% owner of [Alameda] and founder of the firm who was close with the leadership, you didn’t know what was going on?
SBF: The thing is, I was busy. I was, you know, FTX was a full-time job. It was more than a full-time job. And I didn’t have enough brain cycles left everything going on at Alameda if I wanted to. I also didn’t want to because I was concerned about conflicts of interest and I felt like it would be inappropriate for me to be looped into, you know, certainly to details of what was going on there. It caused me to not dig in very much, to not try to engage very much on what Alameda was doing. It was a huge oversight, obviously. But, you know, the honest answer is I mean, obviously I should have been.
I struggle getting past the first sentence of Sam’s reply, “I was busy.” There’s just so much to unpack in that short sentence. I mean of course he was busy. Anyone moderately successful in business is going to have some level of busy-ness in their lives, but the way he just casually trumps it up to being busy and having too much on his place, it just galls me.
Part of the reason this story is so shocking to outsiders is just how casually SBF—and those who enabled him—supported a culture where the superhero individual is supposed to get everything done. But that’s not how things work in real life when you’re working on any team larger than, I dunno, fifty people. At some point you’re of course going to be very busy and you have to have teams of people to do very important things that you would personally do if you had the time, but now you can’t because you need to focus elsewhere, so you hire smart people to do the things that are important but that you no longer have time for. In this case he could have hired a board to provide oversight to the management team at Alameda, and sure why not, FTX as well.
The fault with SBF isn’t just a moral fault with Sam as an individual. It’s also a fault with the notion that an individual should be the hero to every story.
From individual to team
I’ve thought from time to time about what it’s like to be recruited to apply to an MBA program and how success is measured, and how that’s different from how you actually want to work out in the real world.
When you apply to an MBA program, success is all about what you will accomplish personally. You’ll make more money. You’ll get the job you’ve always dreamed of. You’ll become the leader you want to be. It’s all about you. And to a certain extent MBA programs have to recruit this way because they have to present rationale as to why you would pay a significant amount of money and spend considerable time investing in the program. Getting a better version of yourself as a result of your time and money is a pretty good outcome.
But going through the MBA program, there’s a considerable focus on how you work together as a team. You can’t do a team project by hero-ing your way through it. Part of being a leader is actually working with other people, even if their skillset isn’t as strong as yours for a particular part of the project. That’s okay. Learn to work together. Figure it out. The team does the work so the team gets the grade.
I’m incredibly proud of the teams I’ve been on in my time in the MBA program at Georgia Tech, most especially my capstone team. We pulled our own weight and learned that it’s not all on one person, that we can lean on each other to achieve a common outcome.
My hope for myself and my classmates as we head out into the world as graduates of the Scheller College of Business is that we see our leadership efforts not only as what we as individuals bring to the table, but what we can accomplish when we work together as a team.
I’m of the opinion—and this is probably fodder for a different post—that group projects aren’t really group projects. Most group work happens because individuals step up in various roles and excel in their specific task or role. When the group tries to “do a project together”, it’s usually tedious and sucks. Still, it’s helpful to work through these dynamics as a team, even in somewhat contrived environments like business school.
Why on earth is he doing interviews? Have his lawyers fired themselves?