Executive Interviews: Interview with Bill Fischer on Building High Performance Teams
May 2009 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Bill Fischer
Professor of Technology, IMD

• Professor, it’s almost four years since you (along with your co-author, Andy Boynton) wrote that wonderful piece in Harvard Business Review (Virtuoso Teams, July-August 2005, HBR). And of course, the subsequent book, "Virtuoso Teams: Lessons from Teams that Changed Their Worlds", which rightly received well appreciated recognition. Any updates on this?
  One of the more gratifying experiences relating to the Virtuoso Teams project has been the increased recognition of the power of virtuoso teams as a means for getting more out of an organization’s talent than would typically have been the case. We are now seeing them everywhere: the Apple iPod team, for example, is a great example of a VT; considerable talent was assembled, they had an ambitious goal, they worked in an impolite manner, they thought better of the customer, and, in return, they revolutionized not just one but several industries [music distribution, the listening experience, as well as news/opinion distribution through iPods]; Motorola’s Razrproject team, is another example, and one whose product enjoyed the same type of explosive growth as the iPod. The two Swiss Alinghi teams, which won sailing’s America’s Cup twice, have also been classic VTs, and as a resultwere able to overcome themore natural advantages of the sea-going Kiwis from New Zealand. Bruce Springsteen and his E Street band has operated as a VT duringmost of its 30 year-plus history. Perhaps most interesting has been the new Obama administration; which has consciously adopted many of the same VT attributes aswe’ve seen to be so successful elsewhere. President Obama, incidentally, was apparently inspired by Doris Kearn Goodwin’s history of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet (Team of Rivals), which was also a classic virtuoso team. These new examples provide a broader-based acknowledge-ment of the power of the Virtuoso Team phenomenon.

• You have spent six years studying the inner workings of teams charged with important projects in 20 of the world’s best-known companies. Can you elaborate on the background research for this article/book? What was the trigger point for this research?
  To be honest, it was probably more than six years, and the “trigger-point” for the project was our [Andy Boynton and myself] experience with many well-known companies who, year after year, hire great people and yet achieve, year after year, average results. In effect, what we were seeing were apparently organization and leadership models that were diminishing talent, rather than enlarging it, and we found that result to be professionally unacceptable. So, we set off to find examples of teams that really had assembled great talent and were able to achieve extraordinary results. The most visible of those teams wound-up in our book.

• For the benefit of our readers, can you please elaborate on virtuoso teams at Your Shows of Shows and West Side Story?
  Your Show of Shows and West Side Story were both project situations, but with a big difference. West Side Story was a radically new market offering, in a mature industry, which fundamentally changed both the product offered, and the process by which the project was conducted. West Side Story was a blockbuster Broadway hit that turned the postwar concept of popular theatre on its head. By combining complex music, classical ballet, and social consciousness into one offering, West Side Story violated all of the “product” norms that characterized this industry at the time. It was created by a true all-star team, which believed that the customer was considerably more capable than the traditional industry stereotype, and then it delivered on this promise.

  Your Show of Shows, on the other hand, was a weekly television offering, led by a star-studded teamof writers [Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, etc.], and could be thought of as a project everyweek – or “a Broadway show every week”, as the team put it. At a time when the typical television offering was shallow comedy, Your Show of Shows was a complex product offering, and was produced in a manner quite similar to that of West Side Story: a great team of strong egos involved in internal [impolite] competition, yet working as a cohesive team of comrades; a noncompromising, and totally engaged leader; an abiding commitment to prototyping for learning; and a belief that the customer was ready to be stretched.

• What are virtuoso teams? What constitutes a virtuoso teams? What are their unique characters and distinguishing strengths?
  The best way to answer this question is to reflect on the preeminent management lesson of our time: “Hire for attitude; train for skills.” Read any management book, and this will be the primary message. We think that while this might work fine for managing day-to-day operations, when “big change is necessary”, this is bad advice. Instead, we believe that when “big change” is the goal, the leader is better advised to “Hire for skills [because you need them!], and figure out how to deal with the attitudes that will inevitably come with these highly-skilled individuals.”