As organizations shrink from 10,000-person bureaucracies to NBA-style teams of a few hundred highly valuable people, Joe argues success comes down to three games: the outer game of taking care of your body and sustaining endurance, the inner game of not getting in your own head (the lesson of The Inner Game of Tennis), and the team game of working together without friction. Of the three, the team game is where companies live or die.
“Every single massive downturn in a company or even long-term decline of a company is based on teams not working together well.”
The specific failure is the conversation that doesn’t get had — the unresolved conflict between a CEO and COO, the pivot that wasn’t made because no one would name the hard thing. That avoidance costs years, months, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Conversely, when teams can have those hard conversations and get closer through them, they become “more human together, more wise together,” and that closeness is itself a massive competitive advantage. With knowledge outsourced to AI, the quality of human relationships and decisions is precisely what teams will hire for.
“When teams work together great, they execute wonderfully and they have a massive competitive advantage.”
Related Concepts
- Safety enables productive conflict rather than preventing it
- Organizations must remove fear to enable innovation
- In the AI era, wisdom — being good at being human — becomes the scarce skill