The Dream Team Myth

In a special report, FORTUNE Magazine takes an in-depth look at teamwork and demonstrates why putting a bunch of all-stars together is a recipe for failure.

In the article 'Why dream teams fail", the author took two very good examples:

One is the movie "Ocean's Twelve" directed by Steven Soderbergh starring Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Julia Roberts which received flames from the critics and generated less revenues than the star-free My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

The other famous example is Enron, a FORTUNE 500 company run by a brilliant former McKinsey consultant, paying fat salaries to graduates of America's elite business schools which disappear into fraud and bankruptcy.

From my experience of building multicultural teams, one of the most important factor is TRUST. Without it, no true communication process can take place. Here again transparency is the key, if you try to hide information, to lie or manipulate others, most people will sense it immediately, althought not everybody is able to have enough self-confidence to trust their intuitions or "gut" feelings.

I guess most powerful teams are like long-lasting happy marriages, it is all about being true to yourself and to others and sharing same values.

Combining this teamwork subject with my favorite topics, building online communities and blogs, I investigated if companies and recruiters were using blogs to hire people. Apparently the answer is yes and no as I found in an intriguing blog StlRecruiting dedicated to that subject of using blogs to get people hired, although the author,a marketing consultant, is not in the HR business.

I believe that hiring teams is based on the same principles than marketing any kind of goods; you have to find the right message to deliver to the right people interested to buy "your stuff", in that case people who want to spend their most precious asset, time, to work for you, based on the shared values, vision and mission statement of the company.

Beside Microsoft or Google and other IT related companies, what about other industries ? I am wondering for example if P&G, is using its Vocalpoint network for hiring their staff ?

Anne