Startup. Marketing. Police. A special report on business in America: : Red tape and scissors. Managing Big Egos So the Entire Team Wins - John Baldoni - HarvardBusiness.org. By John Baldoni | 12:00 PM February 19, 2009 Can you have a team comprised of too many smart people?
“Sometimes too many geniuses is a problem,” said New York Times columnist David Brooks, speaking in early February on PBS’s Charlie Rose. Brooks noted that some of the difficulties that the Obama administration was having initially on his economic and foreign policy teams was caused by the proliferation of so many smart people. While Brooks alluded to “brains,” he was not simply speaking about intelligence, but also about strong-willed people. These are folks who are more inclined to believe in the strength of their own ideas rather than the ideas of colleagues. Understanding Progressive Enhancement. Since 1994, the web development community has beaten graceful degradation’s drum.
A carry-over from the engineering world, the concept was, at its core, about giving the latest and greatest browsers the full-course meal experience while tossing a few scraps to the sad folk unfortunate enough to be using Netscape 4. It worked, sure, but it didn’t really match Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for a universally accessible web. Article Continues Below About a decade later, several smart folks began to question graceful degradation and found it lacking on many levels. Concerned with content availability, overall accessibility, and mobile browser capabilities, they sought a new way to approach web development—a way that focused on the content and did more than just pay lip service to older devices. 9152183.200k.asx (video/x-ms-asf Object)