"A few honest men are better than numbers." (Oliver Cromwell, [Letter to William Spring], 1643)
"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready." (Henry D Thoreau, Walden, 1854)
"It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a
subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to
the enterprise, thought and perception of an individual." (Alexander Fleming, [Address
at Edinburgh University] 1951)
"Top management work is work for a team rather than one man." (Peter F Drucker, "Memos for Management: Leadership", 1983)
"Teamwork is consciously espoused but unwittingly shunned by most people in business because they are deathly afraid of it. They think it will render them anonymous, invisible." (Srully Blotnick, "The Corporate Steeplechase", 1984)
"The whittling away of middle management is further reinforcing the trend for companies to smash the hierarchical pyramid and adopt new people structures such as networks, intrapreneurs, and small teams." (John Naisbett & Patricia Aburdene, "Re-inventing the Corporation", 1985)
"Teams are less likely [than individuals] to overlook key issues and problems or take the wrong actions." (Eugene Raudsepp, MTS Digest, 1987)
"The manager must decide what type of group is wanted. If cooperation, teamwork, and synergy really matter, then one aims for high task interdependence. One structures the jobs of group members so that they have to interact frequently [...] to get their jobs done. Important outcomes are made dependent on group performance. The outcomes are distributed equally. If frenzied, independent activity is the goal, then one aims for low task interdependence and large rewards are distributed competitively and unequally." (Gregory P Shea & Richard A Guzzo, Sloan Management Review, 1987)
"We know we need better teamwork; the question is how to achieve it. Very few people defend the adversarial relationship, but no one has a clear idea of how to do away with it. The usual method is exhortation. But this approach has failed us time and time again." (Robert F Daniell, Harvard Business Review, 1987)
"Managing requires setting aside one's ego to encourage and develop the work of others. It requires a 'big picture' and team perspective rather than an individual-achiever perspective." (Sara M Brown, 1988)
"When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality." (Joe Paterno, American Heritage, 1988)
"Complacency is the last hurdle standing between any team and its potential greatness." (Pat Riley, "Winner Within Success", 1993)
"Even when you have skilled, motivated, hard-working people, the wrong team structure can undercut their efforts instead of catapulting them to success. A poor team structure can increase development time, reduce quality, damage morale, increase turnover, and ultimately lead to project cancellation." (Steve McConnell, "Rapid Development", 1996)
"Software projects fail for one of two general reasons: the project team lacks the knowledge to conduct a software project successfully, or the project team lacks the resolve to conduct a project effectively."
"We think most process initiatives are silly.
Well-intentioned managers and teams get so wrapped up in executing processes
that they forget that they are being paid for results, not process execution.
(Peter Coad et al, "Java Modeling in Color with UML", 1999)
"The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn't change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes." (Kent Beck, "Extreme Programming Explained", 2000)
"A well-functioning team of adequate people will complete a project almost regardless of the process or technology they are asked to use (although the process and technology may help or hinder them along the way)." (Alistair Cockburn, "Agile Software Development", 2001)
"Team leaders have to connect with their team and themselves.
If they don't know their team's strengths and weaknesses, they cannot hand off
responsibilities to the team. And if they don't know their own strengths and
weaknesses, they will not hand off responsibilities to the team." (John C
Maxwell, "Teamwork Makes the Dream Work", 2002)
"Good bosses provide a constant flow of clear and concise
information and encourage you and the rest of your team to do the same." (John
Hoover, "How to Work for an Idiot", 2004)
"On a team, trust is all about vulnerability, which is
difficult for most people." (Patrick Lencioni, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team:
Participant Workbook", 2007)
"Nothing has a more profound and long-term degrading effect upon a development project than bad code. Bad schedules can be redone, bad requirements can be redefined. Bad team dynamics can be repaired. But bad code rots and ferments, becoming an inexorable weight that drags the team down."
"Mission is at the heart of what you do as a team. Goals are
merely steps to its achievement." (Patrick Dixon, "Building a Better Business", 2005)
"The facts are in: diverse companies and teams consistently
outperform all others. It's not only the smart thing and the right thing, it
makes getting the job done much more interesting." (Marilyn C Nelson, "How We
Lead Matters: Reflections on a Life of Leadership", 2008)
"Teams should be able to act with the same unity of purpose and focus as a well-motivated individual." (Bill Gates, "Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy", 2009)
"If your team is filled with people who work for the company,
you'll soon be defeated by tribes of people who work for a cause." (Seth Godin, "The
Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?", 2012)
"Ultimately, leadership is not about glorious crowning acts. It's about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter. It is about laying the groundwork for others' success, and then standing back and letting them shine." (Chris Hadfield, "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth", 2013)
"A software team can get severely constrained when a velocity target is imposed on it. Velocity works well as a measurement, not as a target. Targets limit choice of actions. A team may find itself unable to address technical debt if it is constrained by velocity targets. At a certain threshold of constraints, team members lose the sense of empowerment (autonomy)." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Although essential, governance is an activity, not an outcome. This makes it risky to grant autonomy to a pure governance team. Instead, it is better to constitute each area of governance as a community of practice consisting of practitioners from various capability teams." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"In order to control where a team devotes its energies, all you need to do is to impose a bunch of targets and track progress at regular intervals. For greater control, increase the range of targets and track more frequently. This is called micromanagement and is universally detested by teams. Doing so increases reporting overhead but rarely improves team performance." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Self-organizing teams need autonomy. […] Autonomy allows us to act on the opportunity that purpose provides. Mastery then lets us service the opportunity with a degree of excellence. Targets distort purpose, limit autonomy, and disregard mastery." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Teams motivated by targets tend not to take ownership of problems. They attend only to those aspects that affect targets and leave the rest to be picked up by someone else. To some extent, the problem isn’t the target itself but rather the incentive behind the target." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"Whatever way we organize, the unit of organization is a team, and any team can turn into a silo if it acts in an insular manner. Therefore, in a sense, we can’t eliminate silos but only try to design around their side effects." (Sriram Narayan, "Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery", 2015)
"The higher the price of information in a software team, the less effective the team is." (Yegor Bugayenko, "Code Ahead", 2018)
"To make technical decisions, a result-oriented team needs a strong architect and a decision making process, not meetings." (Yegor Bugayenko, "Code Ahead", 2018)
"A 'stream' is the continuous flow of work aligned to a business domain or organizational capability. Continuous flow requires clarity of purpose and responsibility so that multiple teams can coexist, each with their own flow of work. A stream-aligned team is a team aligned to a single, valuable stream of work; this might be a single product or service, a single set of features, a single user journey, or a single user persona."
"Organizations that rely too heavily on org charts and matrixes to split and control work often fail to create the necessary conditions to embrace innovation while still delivering at a fast pace. In order to succeed at that, organizations need stable teams and effective team patterns and interactions. They need to invest in empowered, skilled teams as the foundation for agility and adaptability. To stay alive in ever more competitive markets, organizations need teams and people who are able to sense when context changes and evolve accordingly."
"Teams take time to form and be effective. Typically, a team can take from two weeks to three months or more to become a cohesive unit. When (or if) a team reaches that special state, it can be many times more effective than individuals alone. If it takes three months for a team to become highly effective, we need to provide stability around and within the team to allow them to reach that level."
"The culture of your organization comprises your stated principles, and to a far greater extent, the actual lived principles as reflected by the attitudes, communication styles, and behaviors of your teams." (Eben Hewitt, "Technology Strategy Patterns: Architecture as strategy" 2nd Ed., 2019)
"One of the great enemies of design is when systems or objects become more complex than a person - or even a team of people - can keep in their heads. This is why software is generally beneath contempt." (Bran Ferren)