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It’s the notion that the most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it.
According to English bookmakers, Hungary’s 500-to-1 upset of England remains one of the longest-odds sports bets ever to pay out.
What distinguished them was a style of play that erased specialization, forced players to subordinate their egos, and coaxed superior performances out of unlikely characters.
A. It has five or more members. One thing we can say with certainty is that the smaller a team, the more its results depend on individual performances. If a team has two members, for instance, each person’s contribution should account for something close to 50 percent of the outcome.
B. Its members interact with the opponent. A big part of the mysterious alchemy of a team is how well its members respond in real time to another set of athletes that is trying to clobber them.
better than the sum of its parts.
there must have been a rare bond between the players that coaxed superior performances out of people who wouldn’t have achieved them somewhere else.
American football coach Vince Lombardi, who led the Green Bay Packers to five NFL titles in the 1960s, was a proponent of this idea. “Individual commitment to a group effort,” he once said, “that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”
The crucial component of the job is interpersonal. The captain is the figure who holds sway over the dressing room by speaking to teammates as a peer, counseling them on and off the field, motivating them, challenging them, protecting them, resolving disputes, enforcing standards, inspiring fear when necessary, and above all setting a tone with words and deeds.
Ferguson added, a captain chosen to transmit the manager’s intentions to the team was equivalent to the manager chosen to run a division. “He is the person responsible for making sure the agenda of the organization is pursued.”
“The single most important ingredient after you get the talent is internal leadership. It’s not the coaches as much as one single person or people on the team who set higher standards than that team would normally set for itself.”
however, were five frequently cited qualities of superior teams that seemed at once both plausible and researchable. They are: the presence of an otherworldly superstar, a high level of overall talent, deep financial resources, a winning culture maintained by effective management, and, finally, the most widely accepted explanation of all—superior coaching. I set out to kick the tires on each of them.
