1: Why do some teams succeed and others fail?

The People Analytics team at Google had spent two years attempting to answer this question.

The initiative was code-named “Project Aristotle.”  The team gathered survey data, conducted hundreds of interviews, analyzed a mountain of data and statistics, ran regression models, and built software programs.

There were no clear patterns or trends on what makes teams perform at the highest … continue reading

1: What makes a great team great?

Is it simply a matter of intelligence? Do teams with the smartest people perform the best?

Is “group intelligence nothing more than the intelligence of the individuals making up the team?” Charles Duhigg asks in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.

Actually, no.

In 2008, psychologists from Carnegie Mellon and MIT recruited 699 people and divided them into 152 … continue reading

1: Google’s People Analytics group wanted to understand how to build the perfect team.

Google has consistently been ranked by Fortune magazine as one of America’s top workplaces.

This result was no accident. “Even as it had grown to fifty-three thousand employees, Google had devoted enormous resources to studying workers’ happiness and productivity,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.

The People Analytics … continue reading

1: “Julia Rozovsky was twenty-five years old and uncertain what to do with her life when she decided it was time for a change,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.

After graduating from Tufts, Julia worked for a consulting firm, but she didn’t find it satisfying. She then worked as a researcher for two professors at Harvard, which Julia enjoyed, but wasn’t … continue reading