Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

by Greg McKeown

I have since gathered data from more than five hundred individuals about their experience on more than one thousand teams. I asked them to answer a series of questions about a time when they had worked on a unified team, what the experience was like, what role their manager played, and what the end result was. Then I got them to contrast this with a time when they had been on a disunified team and what that was like, what role their manager played, and how it affected the end result. The results of this research were startling: when there was a high level of clarity of purpose, the team and the people in it overwhelmingly thrived. When there was a serious lack of clarity about what the team stood for and what their goals and roles were, people experienced confusion, stress, frustration, and ultimately failure.