From Vision to Great Groups

You started with a vision to create an innovative culture within your recruiting function, HR department, or entire organization.

You decided to leap with it.

Now what?

You need a Great Group, as Warren Bennis calls them.

Hopefully you're not one of those individuals who believes that one person can always out-innovate a group of people. Remember that old saying you learned as a kid? "Two heads are better than one?" They created that saying for a reason. If you think about nearly every great innovation that changed the rules, a group of people were behind it. Not a single person.

Enter the Great Group. Great groups are often the difference between an idea...and an idea that's actually executed. A group of committed, aligned, and passionate people is a very powerful thing. When groups like this get together, cool things happen. Cool things like:

1) The Disney team that created "Snow White," the first full length animated film.
2) Apple and its vision of toppling Big Blue (IBM)...which ultimately led to the creation of many things, least of which is the iPod.
3) Google's team that created Adwords, one of the most successful advertising inventions in the Internet era.
4) The invention of the personal computer by Xerox PARC.
5) The formation of General Electric, perhaps the most valuable organization in the world, from Thomas Edison's original group of 14 scientists.

You get the idea. All these things (and many, many more) were created through the efforts of Great Groups.

So this begs the question: how can I go about creating this Great Group? And what if you're literally the department within an organization? What then? In my next post, I'll talk about these things.

Until then, I'll leave you with this quote from Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

As far as I can tell, Margaret Mead was talking about Great Groups. ;)