This has nothing to do with teams - it is a brain-break!
Forming Successful Entrepreneurial Teams
Forming effective entrepreneurial teams is a critical issue for entrepreneurs. With almost half of all startups created by teams of two or more people, entrepreneurship no longer resembles the old model of a solo entrepreneur braving the elements alone to establish a new firm. Rather, entrepreneurship is very much a social process, involving building effective relationships between people with complementary skills.
Most prescriptive models of team formation emphasize searching for members who bring unique and complementary skills to the startup. By implication, founders should search everywhere for the most qualified people.
Click here for Building the Venture Team videos (5) Stanford STVP.
Guy Kawasaki has suggested that small teams of three seem to work best, at least in his high-tech VC vision of the world. Lets see another take on small teams from cofounder of Zazzle.com:
However, the latest research from UNC–Chapel Hill Sociologist Howard Aldrich shows that most teams are formed with people who already know each other. Despite admonitions to cast a wide net in screening for potential members, most founders stick close to home. Indeed, a high proportion of teams involve family members. For example, about half of all two–person teams consist of spousal pairs. In the hundreds of teams in Aldrich’s study, only seven percent of team members were strangers to at least one other team member.
Aldrich and his colleagues find a strong tendency toward homophily among team members, or to coin a phrase: “Birds of a feather to flock together.” With the exception of teams involving spousal pairs, diversity was the exception rather than the rule. Researchers found similarity in terms of sex, race and ethnicity, and occupation among team members. Men tended to form teams with other men, women with women, whites with whites, and so forth.
As they followed these teams over a period of almost four years, researchers observed very little change in team composition. When changes in membership occurred, they usually pushed a team toward greater homogeneity, not diversity.
Aldrich and his colleagues suggest that homogeneity carries benefits for teams in terms of ease of communication and enhanced trust. However, over the long run, a uniformity of outlook and lack of diversity may spell trouble when conditions change and new viewpoints are needed.
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