Your Teams Aren't Good Enough

In this column, the author will paint provocative pictures for innovation managers based on snippets from science, history, demographics, and respected business observers. As an experimental scientist, he promises to be objective and cite his sources. As a former senior manager in a Fortune 100 corporation, he'll strive to make this column worth your attention. As a lifelong rebel against intellectual laziness and unexamined premises, he'll try to make you think. If you sometimes fi nd the conclusions unsettling, that will be because the evidence is convincing and the arrow's found its mark. To accommodate the growing complexity of projects and the limits of any one person's time and knowledge, work is increasingly done in teams, and the teams are getting larger. Business is moving faster. For entire sectors of products, the time from first product launch to market maturity has been accelerating and is now commonly under a decade.