In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that talent and ambition are much less important than practice.  De acuerdo.

I grew up without an apparent talent for anything:   I was too skinny for sports, too tone deaf for music, had too much ADD for serious study, and was way too awkward for social/political pursuits.

So, I was delighted to see a cohesive argument for the efficacy of practice & dedication.  It’s the only way I’ve become decent at anything in my life – by working my ass off, despite the fact that (in almost every case), I lacked any discernible talent or proficiency for the stuff I loved.  Now, at 32 years old, there are even a few things that I might be ready to call myself an expert at…after a few more years and several hundred hours of practice!

In a simplified version of Gladwell’s model, you are an expert after you put 10,000 hours into something. Then, if your culture and general situation is fortuitous, you have a shot at being one of the best in the world at your pursuit. 

After enjoying the way his arguments applied to my life, I began thinking of how this applies to teams – specifically to global teams.  At Monsoon Company, many of us have been working together for close to a decade, just around the number of hours (and years) that Gladwell believes create true expertise.

In one of his examples, Gladwell takes a look at classical musicians.  Early in their careers, there are clear standouts – people with the immediate & obvious talent I have always lacked.  However, when you track their careers, the successful musicians were almost always the ones who simply practiced more.  Period.  Talented or not, if these musicians  spent 10,000 hours or more dedicated to their craft, they were most likely successful concert musicians, while their counterparts became teachers and went on to other fields.

There are programmers and designers who dedicate themselves to both their craft and their team’s system.  A significant portion of their 10,000 hours are spent this way: meeting, arguing, collaborating, iterating, etc. As a unit.

Those that dedicate to practicing and internalizing team processes routinely leapfrog team members who were far more talented.

Over time, these hours of dedication turn a bunch of solid individuals into an expert team.  Things simply begin to flow.

All too often, business literature puts far more emphasis on ‘fresh perspectives’ and ‘thinking outside of the box’.  And when your team is creatively stagnant or bogged down in process, there is a definite need to prioritize these thing things. 

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Dan Twing writes an excellent piece about squeezing outsourced vendors on price.   He starts by citing a study by the London School of Economics, although he could have just called me:

Clients do not win by squeezing outsourcing vendors on price to the point that they cannot deliver good results and still make a fair margin.

(A London School of Economics) study found that one in five IT outsourcing deals are doomed to failure because they favor the client at the expense of the vendor from the outset. This effect, labeled the ‘Winner’s curse’ is a very real issue from my experience as both a vendor and a client.

The main question is, why do we vendors not walk away from terrible deals?  Twing proposes an insightful answer:

You might think that vendors would just walk away from deals where the price is too low. So as a client, you can just push for the absolute lowest price that a vendor will accept. It is a bit more complicated than that. The term loss-leader applies to selling behavior in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing.

A very low price is used to get a customer relationship started with the intention of building on that relationship and making additional sales where the ultimate profits will be made. This is not a bad concept when applied with reason, but it can manifest some negative outcomes when it becomes unreasonable.

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