When stars collide, teamwork suffers. Why teams with many stars often lose?

Stars in some sports compete among themselves, rather than against their opponents
By George ILIEV

Research published in Psychological Science finds a satiation threshold of stardom in various sports: having too many stars on a team often hampers the overall success of the team. In a sport like football (soccer), having more than 75% stars on the team turns out to be counter-productive. In basketball the threshold is even lower, at 60%.

When individual stardom turns into collective martyrdom

Having too many stars become a hindrance when the roles in a given sport are not highly specialised. Ten of the 11 players in a football (soccer) team run and kick the ball pretty much the same way. All five basketball players dribble and pass similarly.

On the other hand, in sports with highly specialised roles such as baseball (where one is using a bat and the other a glove), there is no harm in piling on more and more stars… until they fill up the night sky.


Game Theory explains internal competition within "zero-sum" games

When the roles in a team are not highly specific, as in basketball and football (soccer), play degenerates into an individualistic performance where each player views their activity within the team as a zero-sum game. This gives them an incentive to keep the ball longer, to the detriment of fellow team-mates who might be in a better position to score a goal. As a result, instead of competing against the “competition”, the team starts to compete within itself, leading to the poorer performance of "star-spangled teams".

On the other hand, in baseball the players have an incentive to cooperate all the time as each player’s success is a win-win for all team-mates (i.e. a non-zero sum game).

Competition trumps cooperation in the corporate tug-of-war

This sports analogy is directly observed in the business world. Consulting and investment banking teams composed of multiple star performers often fail when the team roles are homogeneous in design and start to overlap. This means a degree of hierarchy may actually make a team more productive: a team composed of a director, a manager, executives and coordinators divides the responsibilities and focus on different tasks, so the team members do not compete against each other. Otherwise, in a high-pressure environment, you end up hearing stories about one flight attendant hitting another with a tray in front of all passengers.

Two key take-aways:

1) To achieve team success, it is plainly not enough to have diversity of backgrounds; diversity of roles needs to complement team design.

2) When stars collide some teams lose out. And I am not talking astrology here. Rooney and Gerrard: take note!

To make the best use of exec education, eat snow like a camel

Executive Education is an expensive resource. So is snow as a source of water for Asian camels.
By George ILIEV

Snow and camels don't usually go together in our mind. Yet they do in the real world. The two-humped Bactrian camels in western China and Central Asia regularly eat snow in the winter or at high altitudes to satisfy their water needs. This is largely true of all animals living above the snowline, as the only water that exists there is in the form of snow and ice. However, the problem of eating snow is that, once ingested, it takes a lot of food calories to melt and heat up the water to body temperature, as the latent heat of snow and ice is very high. This energy sacrifice requires that camels pace themselves and eat only small amounts of snow at a time.

Education and training have a role in the corporate world analogous to the physiological role of water in an animal's body. Without knowledge and skills, it would be impossible for organisations to function. And while mainstream universities provide "liquid education" below the snowline (i.e. for young employees), after a certain age Executive Education remains the primary source of new knowledge and skills that is available and suited to the needs of a busy professional. 

Executive Education courses are delivered by both the leading business schools and the in-house corporate universities of large multinationals (where they exist). Yet, these courses are a very expensive resource irrespective of the channel in which they are delivered. This is why business units pace themselves and use them sparingly, within the limits of their employee development budgets. Getting your company to sponsor you for an Advanced Management Programme is invariably a very competitive process, as the programme fee can be up to $80,000 for this 50-day course at Harvard.

Whether you are a Bactrian camel or a corporate workhorse, you would probably enjoy equally eating snow and taking courses at Harvard. But that's life above the snowline.