Given our continuing obsession with solitary genius, reflected in everything from the worship of film directors to our fascination with Bill Gates and other high-profile entrepreneurs, it is no surprise that we tend to underestimate just how much creative work is accomplished by groups. Today an important scientific paper may represent the best thinking and patient lab work of hundreds of people. Collaboration constantly takes place in the arts as well. A classic example is the Michelangelo masterpiece, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In our mind’s eye, we see Michelangelo, looking remarkably like Charlton Heston, laboring alone on the scaffolding high above the chapel floor. In fact, 13 people helped paint the work. Michelangelo was not only an artist; he was, as biographer William E. Wallace points out, the head of a good-sized entrepreneurial enterprise.

We must turn to great groups if we hope to begin to understand how that rarest of precious resources–genius–can be successfully combined with great effort to achieve results that enhance all our lives. It is in such groups that we may also discover why some organizations seem to breed greatness, freeing members to be better than anyone imagined they could be.

–  Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman