A closely related idea to the cohort effects, something central to teams and groups is what I like to call the two Cs, collaboration and competition. Let me tell you a story about both of these things so you really understand what it is because it's an unusual idea I think. I interviewed Lorne Michaels a couple of times. He of course, is the Executive Producer from Saturday Night Live for decades and decades, legendary Lorne Michaels. By the time we got to the second interview, we were starting to get a little bit more comfortable with each other, especially me. He says to me one time in the second interview towards the end, "You know Sydney, there's something I wanted to share with you. I invented a management technique and I want to write a book about it." I don't know how I got the nerve to say it. But what I said to him is, "Lorne, once you tell me what that management technique is and I'll write the book." I guess he was okay with that because he told me and it's this. SNL has a particular system in place to go from beginning of the week all the way through to Saturday night. They're creating skits and the way you get airtime on SNL is not by being a stand-up comic. Every single part of SNL is a collaboration. You have actors or actresses, you have writers, you have set designers, you have costume designers. You have a team and there's multiple teams with overlapping people that are each putting together skits. By the time they get to Friday afternoon, before Saturday, they have typically created something like two and half hours of skits of content. In the last 24 hours to 36 hours, they have to go from that two and half hours to one and half hours. That by the way is the definition of competition. Because everybody wants to be on the show. Of course, they all want their skit to be the one when say, a scarce resource, so to speak, because going from two-and-a-half to one-and-a-half hours, a lot of stuff is getting cut out. It's a competitive process. But how do you even get in the running in the first place? How do you get to be part of that two-and-a-half hours? As I said, you've been collaborating. You've been collaborating with other people, the set designers, the writers, etc. In that last 24-36 hours, they're culling this from two-and-a-half to one-and-a-half hours. How are they doing it? How is that happening? Well, they do a lot of tryouts and rehearsals really, as they go through the end, including front of a live audience. Each time you have a chance to fine tune, each time you have a chance to up your game, each time you have a chance to be more competitive with who? With the same people that you're collaborating with. Because not everybody is getting in. If you're just going to collaborate and you're not going to raise your game when the pressure is on knowing full well that if you raise your game and your skit becomes more well accepted or looking to be by Lorne Michaels and others as a more promising one, you're going to get the air time and somebody else is not. If you don't do that, you're going to be bypassed by those people that do have a little bit sharper elbows and go for it. Actually to get airtime, to be on skits, to be on the actual show, you need to have great skills at collaboration and competition. A lot of people don't like that idea. They don't like that idea because they don't like the idea that people should compete within the same team. I get why a lot of people might not like the idea, but it's reality because we're always competing for budget resources. We're always competing directly or indirectly for the next promotion. There is inevitably some degree of competition, whether we give voice to it, whether we talk about it or not. I'm not talking about cutthroat competition because nobody is going to want to collaborate with you. You have to be able to compete let's say, in an appropriate way. But I think people often don't recognize is that if you're only collaborating, then those people that have those sharper elbows that raise their game, they're going to win. Being a nice guy, so to speak, is good, but it's not great. You've got to be able to do both, competition and collaboration, both required. Those are the two Cs. It's not that unusual actually. Paul McCartney said of John Lennon, "If I did something good, he'd want to do something better. It's just the way we worked." Now you don't get any greater collaboration than Lennon, McCartney in the history of pop music. But they were competitive also. When asked what he learned from his year, the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy, the former tennis champion Jim Courier said, "Well, Nick gave us balls, and rackets, and damn good players. We went on the back courts and we just duked it out." Bollettieri put it this way about how he created this tennis lab for talented youngsters around the world. We have a lot of good players at the same place. You put the good against the good and you get excellent. Eventually some of those excellent could become the best. That's how you get better. Competition and collaboration. It's also interesting if you follow college basketball in the US, March Madness, the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. There have been studies that have been done that have shown that your strength of schedule, because every college has a little bit different schedule. You play within your conference, but you play other teams as well. No one has an identical schedule. The strength of schedule as measured by how good your opponents have been throughout the season, actually is a really good predictor for how well you're going to do in the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. The tougher the competition, the better you get. One more story. This time about Motown and the cohort effect and competition and collaboration together. In 1959, songwriter and producer Berry Gordy launched a small independent record company using $800 he borrowed from family members. One of the first acts he signed was William Robinson, a street performer with a melodious voice. He was better known by his nickname, Smokey, yes, Smokey Robinson and his group The Miracles landed a number one hit on the rhythm and blues chart right away in 1960 with their song Shop Around. I won't sing it for you, but if you remember that song, it's great. You better Shop Around. It was the first of many successes for the Motown label, which went on to become of course one of the most famous labels in music history. Other legendary artists signed by Gordy include The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Martha and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, and The Jackson Five with little Michael Jackson. These performers all possessed incredible raw talent to be sure. But Gordy's tutelage was instrumental in helping them rise up to become superstars. Like other super bosses, Gordy created a special setting designed to mold and develop raw talent. Everyone in the Motown label is required to meet weekly for, he called his "quality control and product evaluation." While its standards we're exacting, the atmosphere at Hitsville, and that's what it became known in Motown, Hitsville, allowed people to experiment creatively and gave them the courage not to be afraid to make mistakes. Many young Motown artists lacked social and presentation skills. Gordy even created in-house finishing school, if you will. Teaching them, dress, posture, makeup and even attitude management. Sounds crazy, but that's what he did. Of course, this was an era with incredible racial tensions, which haven't exactly gone away, but it was pretty rough in the '60s. The struggles of civil rights era were already well underway. Gordy packaged his acts for mainstream audiences. He hired experts in choreography and stage presence, among other things. As a Motown artists work hard to perfect their skills and build their careers. They formed the same connections with one another that proteges of other super bosses experienced. Duke Fakir, one of the Four Tops told Vanity Fair, "We were friends. We played basketball together, we played cards together, we ate together. It wasn't like if I got a hit, somebody else isn't going to get one because one after the other, you kept getting hits and more hits. It just became a wonderful place to make music. They were always sessions going on 24/7." This is important. "The bar just kept getting raised higher and higher" because if somebody got to hit, you wanted a hit too. As they worked together at the same time. They also competed and this was this cohort just hanging out together, just living together, breathing together, they got better. Yet with all this fun and more between artists, it didn't mean that Gordy's talent didn't compete with one another. Just as I said, it's pretty incredible. One songwriter and record producer recalled that as time passed, competition became fierce and to stay on top, you had to be on the top of your craft. The drive to claim popularity, attention, and let's face it, financial success was real. It never became excessive or destructive, but it was real. As Stevie Wonder himself reflected, the competition at Motown was not the competition that said, I don't like you. It was more like the Brill Building. By the way, the Brill Building was this classic place where Carole King and others were writing great hits in a similar time. It was a challenge to come up with great music, with great songs and to me, that was cool. Stevie Wonder said, "I love Berry to pieces. Berry Gordy was for my life a blessing." Competition and collaboration. The two Cs, the heart of building capable teams.
