Intangibles

Joan Ryan

104 annotations • Dec 2023 • data

Preface

American psychologist Harry Harlow built on Spitz's research. Anyone who has taken an intro to psychology class probably remembers Harlow's disturbing experiments on rhesus monkeys in the 1950s. Baby rhesus monkeys were taken from their mothers soon after birth and put in cages with two inanimate surrogate "mothers." One was a bare-wire figure with a square plastic head; it offered 24-hour access to milk. The other figure was layered with soft terrycloth and had a round face with big eyes and a smile. But it offered no food. The monkeys spent nearly all their time cuddling and embracing the terrycloth surrogate. They left it only to feed quickly at the bare-wire mother. The researchers then took the terrycloth mother away for up to nine months. The babies eventually lost interest in eating. They behaved erratically. They curled up in a ball. Vital body rhythms—heart, respiration, sleep—were disrupted. Like the orphanage babies and my widowed father, they died from "failure to thrive."
I came across a story in the New York Times with the headline "The 'Love Hormone' As Sports Enhancer" about a neuropeptide called oxytocin. This is the stuff that is produced in the brain and released in our bloodstream when, for example, we fall in love or when women go through labor or breastfeed, fostering strong feelings of trust and connection. It can also be triggered by meaningful touch.
Male athletes are so much more physically affectionate with one another than men in general (at least American men). They always seem to be touching each other—hugging, high-fiving, slinging their arms around one another, holding hands at courtside as the final seconds tick down in a close basketball game. In the Giants' clubhouse, I've seen guys on the couch draped over each other like puppies as they watched TV. I watched a player in the dugout rubbing the top of a teammate's head for good luck through an entire inning. Teammates embrace with full-bodied gusto, not with the shoulder bump that passes for a hug in the outside male world.
Oxytocin helps them to bond and to operate as a close-knit tribe. A gesture of trust, such as a reassuring arm around a teammate's shoulders, triggers the release of oxytocin in the recipient's bloodstream, creating a reciprocal feeling of trust and connection. Evolutionary psychologists theorize this is why oxytocin developed in humans (and lower primates). We needed a trustworthy pack with whom to hunt, gather food, and fend off enemies. The human brain had to figure out a way to create bonds so strong that members would sacrifice themselves for the survival of the group.
Iacoboni's research has found that the more people like each other, the more they seem to mimic. "Couples have a higher facial similarity after twenty-five years of marriage," he wrote. "The higher the quality of the marriage, the higher the facial similarity. The spouses become a second self."
To that point, in the years following the Giants' reunion in 2009, I couldn't help noticing that every World Series champion was said to have great chemistry. Every single one, from the 2009 New York Yankees to the 2019 Washington Nationals. "Proof" of team chemistry included one or more of the following: matching hairstyles (face or scalp), celebratory rituals (e.g., pie in the face), elaborate handshakes or dance moves, clubhouse pranks, humorous nicknames, hand gestures (e.g., the 2010 Texas Rangers' claw and antlers), catchphrases, big team dinners paid for by a magnanimous superstar, and a manager who "lets his players be themselves."
Conversely, what about good-chemistry teams that don't win? The 2007 Washington Nationals come to mind. Spring-training stories gushed about their fun team dinners and how they brought back the old-school kangaroo court to foster camaraderie. That team finished sixteen games out of first place. They didn't have the talent. The satirical Onion once ran a headline that captured this perfectly: "Great Team Chemistry No Match for Great Team Biology."
"Let me tell you this," he said. "Good veteran players are the best tonic your team could have. The younger players see that if the veteran players believe in the program, they'll follow suit. But if you get veteran players that are pissed off they can't play anymore, that's the worst scenario you can have."
In short, he said, chemistry can be distilled to three values: respect, trust, and caring.

Chapter 1

Two doors down from the No Name Bar in Sausalito, California, sandwiched so tightly between two tourist shops I almost miss the entrance, is the office of UC San Francisco psychiatrist and psychotherapist Thomas Lewis. He's the principal author of A General Theory of Love,* a beautiful mindblower of a book that includes this sentence: "[No human] is a functioning whole on his own; each has open loops that only somebody else can complete."
Our eyes changed from almost completely brown—like the eyes of other primates—to having bright white sclera around our corneas, allowing us to convey immediately where we were looking—Pay attention to that snake over there!—and also enabling others to get a glimpse of our intent: deceit, kindness, malevolence.
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar concluded that our brain grew so large not so much to house our intellect but to accommodate our massive amount of social wiring
In a clinical session, he said, he is so attentive to everything about his patient that he notices how he is changed from hour to hour, depending on the client. "Everything about another person is contagious," he said. "You can tell that a part of who you are in the moment comes from who the other person is. You're not the same person. Not radically different, but different enough that it's noticeable."
"You just feel like: Oh, I'm funny with this person," Lewis said. "Or I'm smart, or have more ideas, or can't think of anything to say. You get changed. And that's because part of who you are is determined by other people."
He had just published The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. It's about the extraordinary relationship between Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who summoned from each other such profound work on behavioral economics that it earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize. (Tversky had died by then, and Nobels are awarded only to the living.) Each was brilliant in his own right. But together they changed how we think about thinking. Lewis's book describes how they supplied new facets to one another's personality. The men could hardly be more different: Tversky was funny, self-assured, and sharply critical; Kahneman was quiet and, as Michael Lewis put it, "a welter of doubt." But in Tversky's company, Kahneman felt funny and confident, something he'd never experienced. With Kahneman, Tversky was agreeable and uncritical. Their relationship was about who and what the two of them became in each other's presence.
The "Lost Generation" of writers and artists in Paris after World War I—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso—inspired each other to take risks in their work, to be bold and audacious.

Chapter 2

"Trust doesn't mean that you trust that someone won't screw up. It means you trust them even when they do screw up." —Ed Catmull, former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios
With Barry Bonds gone, the hierarchy within the team flattened. No emperor meant no minions, no one walking on eggshells, afraid of drawing the star's criticism. The judgment fell away.
What happened that season reminded me of E. O. Wilson's description of an arrowleaf plant. When one grows on land, its leaves are shaped like arrowheads. In shallow water, they look like lily pads. Underwater, they're long, seaweedy ribbons. The environment awakens something in the plant, freeing it to transform into the shape best suited to its surroundings.
Huff knew they'd be well aware of his reputation as a shitty teammate. He set down his equipment bag at his locker and braced for the chore of introducing himself to men who might be less than excited to have him on the team. He was stashing deodorant and shaving cream when pitcher Matt Cain appeared with his hand out, welcoming him to the squad. Then Tim Lincecum came by. One by one, players greeted him. "There was an aura in the air, the way everybody talked to each other," Huff said later. "The way everybody looked at each other. It just felt so much different than anything I've been a part of."
Huff laughed when he told the story later. "He had no fucking idea what my name was. And it was perfectly OK with me." Huff had his own quirks. He once ambled toward the clubhouse bathroom buck naked, asking if anyone had seen his toothbrush. It was protruding from his rear, a sight that broke up his teammates as intended. ("Now, the bristles weren't in my butthole," Huff made sure to tell me.) Later he began wearing a red thong under his uniform pants to rally the team out of a losing streak.
Zak is an economics professor and the founder and director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University. His economics studies had piqued his interest in the nature of trust. The most prosperous countries had the most trusting cultures; only when people trust that banks, governments, and businesses are behaving fairly and honestly can economies flourish. Zak got to wondering what made one person trust another. Was there a biological mechanism of trust?
The military has long operated on the premise that bonding and trust are essential to performance. This is a big reason for boot camp: hardship fosters bonding. It's also why soldiers still march during training. Marching into battle is an absurd strategy in modern war, as antiquated as muskets and bayonets. But it is still a staple on military bases around the world because marching in unison, like synchronous chanting and singing in religious rituals, facilitates connection and cooperation. Similarly, the ritual of sports teams warming up before practices and games with synchronous stretches strengthens their bonds as it loosens their muscles.
Woolley warned that the experiment might accomplish none of those things. He is critical of scientists who jump to sweeping conclusions that make interesting headlines in the New York Times science section but whose results, it often turns out, cannot be replicated. So he couched his own postulations with "We don't know yet," "That's what I'm thinking now," "This is just a first step."
Huff and Burrell felt trusted and valued, triggering the release of oxytocin and dopamine and creating a newfound sense of commitment and connection to their teammates. They, in turn, showed trust in Lincecum, revving his own brain chemicals to shift how he believed in himself. This contagion of beliefs and emotions, the very core of team chemistry, changed the course of the Giants' season.
Lab experiments found that in a group of strangers, high-testosterone people were the most highly regarded by the other members. They didn't gain such status by overpowering the group, as you might expect from this somewhat misunderstood, macho hormone. Quite the opposite. They did it by fitting in, listening, helping out.
The researchers found that high testosterone fuels a drive for stature. This drive makes us adjust our mindset and behavior to whatever the group values most, thus allowing us to win over its members. In this way, testosterone is an arrowleaf. On the climb up the social ladder, the environment influences how testosterone expresses itself.
But the research also showed stark anomalies. Some high-testosterone athletes weren't leaders at all. In fact, some were among the lowest-status players. What was going on? Scientists found that another hormone, cortisol, was altering testosterone's impact. Though cortisol is commonly known as the stress hormone, its actual purpose is to counteract stress. The more stress you feel, the more cortisol your body produces to get you back to equilibrium. Thus, high levels of cortisol indicate high stress.
"If you have high testosterone, then you're motivated for status among teammates. If you have high cortisol, maybe you're an anxious person, stressed out. You don't realize your [negative] impact on teammates. That results in low status. In other words, you want status, but you're not good at achieving it."
I remembered what Jim Leyland had told me: "When you get the veterans to buy into the program, that is a treat for a manager. When the veterans don't buy into the program, and they can't really play anymore, and you have to start replacing them with younger players, you got fucking chaos on your hands. Trust me."
By 2010, with the veteran cliques gone, a new openness settled over the clubhouse. "It's given all the younger guys a chance to be themselves," Lincecum said that year. "They're not just in their lockers staring at the wall or sitting at the table not talking." Players seemed to feel a sense of belonging and trust that allowed for lots of joking and honest conversation. They looked forward to coming to the park every day. They knew they'd have fun. And they were winning.
In that 2010 clubhouse, players ragged on each other with insults that, to me, would be knives in soft flesh but drew howls of laughter, even from the target. Nothing seemed off-limits. No one ever seemed wounded. Little did I imagine that this humor, as juvenile and crude as it was, showed how much they trusted each other. Successful teasing requires mutual trust. You trust that the target understands the goodwill you feel toward him. The target trusts that your teasing means he's part of the tribe.
"Joking cultures are trusting cultures," said social psychologist Gary Alan Fine, who has been writing about and studying humor since the 1970s. "You can't have a teasing relationship with people you don't really care about."
When we good-naturedly suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous insult, we show commitment to the tribe. It's a form of hazing. The teasing asks: Do you trust us, and can we trust you?
The opposite of a trusting culture is organized paranoia. "You start over-processing everything, scrutinizing everything everybody says, looking for unfairness and criticism," said Rod Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "It's a productivity killer."

Chapter 3

"Give me one guy who makes five guys better." —Don Wakamatsu, former baseball manager
You go one of two ways when you're a nomad. No place is home, or every place is.
One day, Gomes was sitting in the dugout next to a veteran player who was correctly predicting every pitch their own pitcher threw. Gomes asked how he knew. "He's tipping pitches," the player said. That means he was unwittingly signaling—by, for example, tilting his glove a certain way before fastballs—what pitch was coming, thus giving the batter a great advantage. Gomes was excited. "You have to tell him," he said. But the player refused. "I might have to face him next season," he said.
"In the big leagues, it's all about a race to adjustments," Gomes said, "and whoever can make the adjustments fastest. So to make an adjustment a majority of the time it has to be from input from someone else."
"I hate comparing our game to war, you know, but if you had to pick one guy to go with you into the foxhole, would you pick the best shot? Or would you pick the guy who would jump in front of you? It's like picking teams for a sandlot game. You don't pick the best player. You pick your best friend because he'll play like hell for you whether you're behind by one run or ten runs.
Ever the analyst, McCarthy broke down the trickle-down effect into two general categories: atmosphere and information. Atmosphere is what he referenced above: A relaxed and accepting environment that lifts anxiety and unleashes a player's full potential. The second category—sharing information—seems straightforward and obvious
"We're very guarded," he said of ballplayers. "We don't let people in very often. As a man, especially as a competitive man, when you open up and let your guard down, you're seen as a little bit weak. But Gomes is not afraid to be vulnerable. You can talk to him about anything. What it's like to get released. What it's like to play badly. He's a real person. That doesn't come along as much as you would think in a locker room."
No one sets out to be a Super-Carrier of chemistry. You'd rather be the guy with the multimillion, multiyear contract. Super-Carriers often emerge from that stratum of players hired to fill a gap in the lineup, to step in when the starter pulls a hamstring. They're skilled enough to play in the big leagues, but not necessarily to excel. Like freelancers of every ilk, they're usually short-timers, lurching from contract to contract. They're attractive to teams because they make up in grit and personality what they lack in physical talent.
Super-Carriers possess a complex combination of characteristics not generally associated with conventional sports heroes. Instead of glory and status, they chase connection and purpose. They are empathic, caring, and communicative. Having accepted their own failures and shortcomings, they can allow themselves to be vulnerable. They're self-deprecatingly funny, happy to be the butt of their own—and everyone else's—jokes.
The clubhouse preacher—the rousing-speech guy—oftenwears thin over time, whereas the Super-Carrier's influence is enduring.
Pam Kerwin, one of the early executives at Pixar, once told me how she defined talent: Talent is delivering what the team needs. In this way, Super-Carriers are among the most talented people on any team, whether in sports, business, or anything else.
The Red Sox clubhouse leaders—Dustin Pedroia, David "Big Papi" Ortiz, Jon Lester, and half a dozen others—convened, made a decision, and went as a group into Farrell's office. "Jonny Gomes is playing," Big Papi said. Farrell balked at what seemed like a ridiculous request. The lineup was already posted and distributed. Managers don't suddenly change the lineup, especially during a World Series, without an extremely good reason like a last-minute injury. Daniel Nava was having a great year. He had batted .303 during the regular season, a career best, compared to Gomes's .247. More important, Gomes had yet to get a hit in the series. He'd been awful, even against lefties. He had no hits as a starter in Games 1 and 2 and none as a pinch hitter in Game 3. But his teammates wouldn't budge. The Red Sox had lost Games 2 and 3. If they didn't win Game 4, they'd be down three games to one. They'd be one game away from losing the series. The leaders on the team believed they played better with Gomes out there with them.
The numbers would show that, besides the one home run, Gomes had a miserable postseason. In three rounds of the playoffs—the American League Division Series, the American League Championship Series, and the World Series—Gomes managed just seven hits in forty-two plate appearances for a dismal .143 average. His teammates, however, would show you a different number: The Sox were 10–1 in the games Jonny Gomes started.
A year or so later, I thought about Gomes during a conversation about team chemistry at the famed Chicago improv theater The Second City. When I described Super-Carriers, a director named Matt Hovde lit up. Yes, he said, improv groups definitely had them. "You might have someone in an ensemble who individually isn't the most talented, but if you replaced them with a funnier person, that show wouldn't necessarily be demonstratively better," he said. "Because sometimes that person is serving a purpose that you can't discern from the outside. It's the utility improviser who always makes choices that bring out the best in other people's choices. They're great set-up people. You can't just have all Mel Brooks and Tim Conways. You need Harvey Korman, too."

Chapter 4

The OSS was the precursor to today's CIA. The "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" instructed factory workers and other "citizen saboteurs" on "effective weapons" to undermine the enemy.
This is kind of stunning. US intelligence officers believed a single person's negativity could be contagious enough to affect the work product of an entire factory. It was the "bad apple" theory, which at least in apples is easy to understand. When an apple ripens, it emits a gaseous hormone called ethylene. The ethylene triggers ripening in surrounding apples, which then emit their own ethylene until the whole barrel has gone bad. The OSS's theory was that one malcontent could turn a barrel of good guys into a dysfunctional, low-productivity group.
The Russians have their own version of the bad apple: "A spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey, but a spoonful of honey does nothing for a barrel of tar." For all the charisma and the high emotional IQ of Jonny Gomes, his power as a Super-Carrier requires at least a somewhat fertile environment. Yet one really bad influence in a clubhouse, like the citizen saboteur in a factory, seems able to disrupt a whole team.
For fifteen years, from 1993 to 2007, Bonds anchored the San Francisco Giants' lineup and dominated the sport. During that time, he was a twelve-time All-Star, a five-time Gold Glover (given to the best defensive player at a position), and a nine-time Silver Slugger (awarded to the best hitter at a position). In 2001, at the age of thirty-seven and under gathering clouds of suspicion for steroid use, he broke the single-season home-run record with seventy-three. In 2007, at forty-three years old and with federal prosecutors investigating him for possible perjury, Bonds passed Hank Aaron's 755 career home runs to become the all-time home-run king, finishing with 763.
Bonds and Kent were opposites in many ways. First-round draft pick versus twentieth-rounder. Son of a famous athlete versus son of a cop. Bonds flouted his wealth with sports cars and mansions; Kent tithed to the Mormon Church and sank his money into land for ranching and hunting. Bonds was divorced. Kent married his high-school sweetheart.
The story that unfolded from their teammates and coaches wasn't the one we had seen from the outside. I realized that what we'd been watching all that time was the view from Plato's caves: We saw the shadows and pieced together a narrative. We couldn't see what else was going on—inside the clubhouse and inside their heads. I came to a conclusion I didn't expect: Bonds wasn't a Super-Disruptor. Neither was Kent.
In my memory, the Kent-Bonds teams weren't very good. I'm not sure why I remember them this way. Maybe because the Giants' subsequent championships give the Kent-Bonds era the whiff of failure in comparison. But the record shows that in the six years Kent and Bonds played together, the Giants flourished
Bonds was such a dangerous home-run hitter that pitchers walked him more than anyone else in baseball—sometimes intentionally, sometimes semi-intentionally, and once with the bases loaded.* Better to give Bonds a free pass to first base than a home run. This meant the pitcher had to throw strikes to the batters in front of and behind Bonds to avoid walking two players in a row. Thus Kent saw more pitches over the plate, boosting his chances of getting a hit. And with Bonds on base so often from walks, Kent saw his RBI totals rise.
"I'm moving 150 cows a few weeks ago, separating the babies from the mamas [for medical care], and this one cow won't come in the gate. That cow did not want to do what everybody else wanted to do," Kent said, a toothpick bobbing from the side of his mouth. "She was the strongest and fiercest and smartest of all the cows, and she knew it. But I have to get rid of her. You know why? Because she's the leader. I don't want her teaching my other cows to do the same thing."
Bezrukova studies workplace "fault lines," potential divisions based on race, gender, income, age, religion, and so on. If workers clump together with those most similar to themselves, fault lines can fracture into rifts. Employees start focusing on the concerns of their own subgroup and less on the company as a whole. Distrust and conflict spread. Sharing of information decreases. Productivity suffers. High-functioning workplaces, Bezrukova says, learn how to recognize and bridge fault lines.
Bezrukova and Spell found clubhouses functioned much like any workplace: the more overlap between groups, the better the team performed. But you never want to eliminate factions altogether, Bezrukova said. Subgroups are islands within a team where individual players can take refuge. Players from Venezuela know each other in a way their other teammates can't. They speak the same language, understand the same cultural references, laugh at the same jokes. They can provide the individual mentoring and emotional connection necessary to perform their best.
Cirque du Soleil, which brings in performers from all over the world, has had a long practice of hiring at least two people from a country
The Giants were playing the Seattle Mariners. Alex Rodriguez ("A-Rod"), with the Mariners at the time, took out Kent on a slide into second base. The next day, A-Rod stepped to the plate in the first inning. Hershiser was pitching for the Giants. Despite runners on first and second and just one out, Hershiser plunked A-Rod, loading the bases. "He backed me up, and he didn't need to do that. That showed me a lot," Kent said. Hershiser gave up two runs that inning, and the Giants lost, 4–1. Kent was OK with that because, he said, sometimes you sacrifice one game so you can win two.
Geniuses have always been recognized as anomalies, individuals whose minds work in ways so different from the rest of us that in ancient times they were thought to be touched by the divine. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson wrote that genius was "like fire in a flint, only to be produced by collision with a proper subject." This definition makes clear that genius is innate, waiting for a specific catalyst. For Mozart, it was music. For Shakespeare, words. For Steve Jobs, design and technology. Thus the word genius requires a descriptor: musical genius, literary genius, technological genius. Genius is a vein of gold in the mine, distinct and specific. Thus it isn't intelligence in a conventional sense like IQ. It's an ability to see and think in ways that others don't. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs's biographer, described the late Apple founder's mind in the New York Times:
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit," wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. "Genius hits a target no one else can see."
The New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell described Jobs's boorish behavior: He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. He gets stopped for driving a hundred miles an hour, honks angrily at the officer for taking too long to write up the ticket, and then resumes his journey at a hundred miles an hour. He sits in a restaurant and sends his food back three times. He arrives at his hotel suite in New York for press interviews and decides, at 10 P.M., that the piano needs to be repositioned, the strawberries are inadequate, and the flowers are all wrong: he wanted calla lilies. (When his public-relations assistant returns, at midnight, with the right flowers, he tells her that her suit is "disgusting.")
Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa described it this way: "Trust is dedication to doing whatever you can, every game, to help the team win. You can be a selfish player, but if we can trust that you're going to use your talent to do your best every day, you're OK. But if we can't trust you're going to do that, we don't want you."
Aristotle alluded to the concept when he categorized friendships under three labels: love, pleasure, and utility. Love friendships are the rarest because they require of each friend unconditional acceptance. Pleasure friendships are based on shared interests and activities. And utility friendships serve a particular, often short-term purpose. Task chemistry is a relationship of utility
No. Negativity can definitely spread and diminish performance. But the culprits are not arrogant superstars or antisocial workhorses like Kent. They can be grit in the gears, but they're not enough to ruin the engine. The true Super-Disruptor, and perhaps the most potentially dangerous creature on any team, is the complainer looking for recruits. In baseball, he's known as a clubhouse lawyer.
"Usually the clubhouse lawyer is someone who is dissatisfied himself. He's not happy about how he's being used, and he just can't internalize it. He's got to spread it like a weed, like a poison throughout the team. He needs to be traded as soon as possible." The clubhouse lawyer is often a fading veteran riding the bench who pulls others into his bitch-fest. There's always someone ready to be convinced that—yes!—he's getting screwed, too. "That's why you want character guys who won't get sucked into the misery," one coach said.
Every team and every company has complainers who infect others, like ethylene in an apple barrel. Because we mirror each other's body language and facial expressions, this negativity can spread quickly. "We can retain a mood that stays with us long after the direct encounter ends—an emotional afterglow (or afterglower, in my case)," Daniel Goleman wrote in his 2006 book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. "Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else's toxic state."
Attempts to rise above the negativity are emotionally exhausting for the team as a whole and peter out. Effort dwindles. Performance drops. The antidote is a wise and at times ruthless leader who prevents the Super-Disruptor from gaining influence. He or she can concentrate the group's sense of unity onto the complainer, who either conforms or finds himself isolated. The legendary Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson felt so strongly about the toxic effect of complainers that he got rid of them regardless of their stature.
The malingerer always seems to need a day of rest when the opponent's ace is scheduled to pitch. While others play through aches and pains, the malingerer sits out to protect his stats. Teammates get cranky. Why should they play with iffy ankle sprains and swollen knees when this guy is on the shelf with fatigue? They start to ask for days off, too. "People will cooperate if they think everyone else is cooperating," said Paul Ferraro, a behavioral economist at Johns Hopkins University. If others are not, "you feel like a sucker."

Chapter 5

Most successful teams have someone like Pence. He's the party guest who circulates the room reinvigorating conversations and shepherding social strays back to the herd. He "lights the candle," as some players say. He gets everyone playing with what he calls a "burning enthusiasm." That was Pence's function in the chemistry of the Giants—to ignite in his teammates a sense of purpose, selflessness, and collective invincibility. That translates into increased confidence and effort, which leads to elevated performance and—in this example—to wins. Pence's role was what I call the Sparkplug.*
The Sage This is Obi-Wan Kenobi, the wise, kind veteran. He has been through the grind. He has weathered the storms. He lifts anxiety and eases the sting of humiliation. He soothes and advises. Biology as well as experience might be at work here, at least in men. Testosterone declines not only as men age, but also when they get married and raise children. "You need grandpa," said former catcher and now scout Brian Johnson. "It's nice to have grandpa because he has seen it all. You can sit on grandpa's lap and tell him everything."
The Kid The Kid throws off energy like a puppy shaking off water. He's Matt Duffy, in awe of the espresso machine in the dining room. The Kid is the first in line to give high fives. The one draping an arm around a teammate for no reason. He's at the far end of the dugout after batting practice, signing autographs and chatting with fans long after his teammates have ducked back into the clubhouse. He isn't yet interested in the Dow, the real estate market, or the resale value of a Lamborghini Veneno. He thinks the team plane is awesome. To the veterans, the Kid reminds them of the person they used to be. He reminds them of what they love about the game.
The Enforcer The Enforcer upholds the standards of the team, taking teammates to task for slacking off in practice, making mental errors, missing signs. It's not a role for the thin-skinned. The Enforcer risks being accused of sticking her nose where it doesn't belong and getting the "Who made you God?" treatment. The Enforcer believes winning is more important than popularity. Consciously or not, she understands that too much camaraderie can be as dangerous a threat to winning as too little. A team that cares too much about each other's feelings might shy from delivering pointed feedback for fear of damaging relationships. Taken to the extreme, a team with too much cohesion can turn cultish in its attachment to being in total agreement. The Enforcer never chooses feelings over winning. When she notices small slippages in behavior and effort, she sounds the alarm, even if the team's on a roll and everybody's perfectly happy with how things are going. The Enforcer recognizes the signs of a team dancing toward disaster.
The Buddy The Buddy is everybody's friend. No one eats alone when there's a Buddy on the team. No one is without a tribe. She asks about your dad's heart surgery, rounds up people for a movie on the road, learns the best Japanese swear words just to make the new Japanese teammate laugh.
The Warrior is so exceptional and intimidating he gives the entire team swagger. Barry Bonds is a Warrior. LeBron James. Sue Bird. Tom Brady. Megan Rapinoe. Mike Trout. The Warrior is the linchpin of the team's belief in itself. We have her, therefore we can win. We have him, therefore we are special. The Warrior doesn't have to be a pleasant person. She doesn't even have to be a team player. She just has to be extraordinary and fearless. Former baseball player and manager Dusty Baker refers to these players as carriers. "Everybody can carry your team for a day or two," he said, "but the carrier, he can carry you for a couple weeks. Everyone else is a helper."
The Jester The Jester is a shape-shifter. He can pump up his teammates like the Sparkplug. He can call out disruptive behavior like the Enforcer. He can foster connections like the Buddy. He can break tension with a well-timed prank, boost camaraderie with back-and-forth joking, ease anxiety with artful teasing. Because he can poke fun without ticking people off, he can say almost anything to anybody. He can shoot the sharpest dart without leaving a scar because no rebuke lands more softly than one wrapped in humor. A truly gifted Jester can wield more influence on a team than the strongest Warrior. "A fool's strength," writes Shanti Fader, writer and editor of philosophy and myth, "lies in the very qualities that separate him from the conventional image of the heroic: humility and the willingness to support others rather than seeking power or glory directly."

Chapter 6

When I asked Paul Zak, the neuro-economist who studies oxytocin and trust, how he would go about building trust on a sports team, he described almost exactly what VanDerveer had done. "There's got to be a stressor," he said. "It should be a little hard. Maybe twice-a-day workouts. But isolating. You can't see your family. This is boot camp. They're suffering together. They help each other. We get away from the cattiness. Let's get down to what's really important, which is being super fit, working as a team, and connecting to each other on a level that's just about us."
He continued. "I need to build trust with you, and the question is how do I do this efficiently? The only way I know is high stress and isolation. The military model. There may be other ways I don't know about, but that seems to be the most effective way."
"If you don't feel like quitting at least three times," she said, recalling those days, "you're not working hard enough."
This is what sweeps us off our feet, the exhilaration of being part of something extraordinary. Together we feel invincible. We feel within us a sense of completeness—of being the perfect you in this moment, with these people, for this purpose.
"There was no added compensation for the harder work," psychology professor Barry Schwartz observed, "just a deeper sense of purpose."
Noble purpose, essential as it is, carries a team only so far. Enduring motivation comes from something much closer at hand: each other. The military has always understood this. Who you are fighting alongside is, ultimately, more important than what you're fighting for. This is why in the SEALs' Basic Underwater Demolition course, trainees are assigned swim buddies. They must go everywhere together, even the dining hall. When someone is caught without his swim buddy, another trainee is punished at random for allowing it to happen. "This is about more than the feel-good effects of 'bonding,'" retired general Stanley McChrystal wrote in his 2015 bestselling book Team of Teams. "It is done because teams whose members know one another deeply perform better. Any coach knows that these sorts of relationships are vital for success."

Chapter 7

Rosenthal theorized that expectation bias probably influences performance in humans, too. This led to what became a classic experiment. Rosenthal then conducted IQ tests on children in eighteen elementary-school classes. He told the teachers which students showed extraordinary academic potential. As with the rats, these children were chosen completely at random. Rosenthal monitored the classrooms for months. Teachers touched, nodded at, and smiled more often at the "superior" children. They gave these students more approval and extra time to answer questions. After eight months, Rosenthal gave each child a follow-up IQ test. The "superior" students gained three times as many IQ points as the control group. Rosenthal called this the "Pygmalion effect."
"Players want to know three things about a coach: Does he care about me? Can I trust him? And can he make me better?"
When the manager of a Bank of America call center needed help figuring out how to boost productivity among his calling teams, he turned to professor Sandy Pentland, who directs the Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs at MIT. Pentland is a bit like the Bill James of social analytics. Forbes named him one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world. He's a geek for human interaction.
They found that the most significant predictor of a calling team's success was time spent talking with coworkers away from their workstations. Their data showed that informal interaction had as much impact on productivity as all other factors—individual intelligence, personality, skill, and the substance of discussions—combined. Like laughter, idle conversation is a bit like the human version of chimpanzees grooming each other

Chapter 8

"You see guys not as willing to dive on the floor for a loose ball, or put everything on the line," the coach said, "because they don't feel the same sense of responsibility to each other. When a team is together, the execution is better. They're more likely to set a good screen. And if you set a good screen your teammate is much more likely to get an open shot, right? It might seem little, but all these little things add up. And I've seen it my whole basketball career. When a team has good chemistry, there's a different level of play."
Dynasties are rare for a lot of reasons. First, winning is exhausting. The Warriors' price for reaching the NBA Finals five years in a row was playing 106 extra games. That's the equivalent of adding an entire 82-game season plus 24 games beyond that. The first three years, fueled not only by the novelty of winning but also by the sheer fun of greatness, were like a dream, Kerr said. But in the fourth and fifth years, the players' bodies inevitably began to show the physical toll of hundreds and hundreds of hours on the court and in the gym. The stretches of weariness tested the players' patience, and tolerance for one another could wear thin. Little annoyances blossomed now and then into big ones.
Success changes people. I used to wonder why championship teams that return the following year with essentially the same players so often suffer a drop in performance. I learned that it's because they're not the same players. Suddenly they're sought after for public appearances and endorsements. They feel adored, special, powerful. They have different expectations of themselves and the people around them. They interact with each other differently, changing the dynamics of the locker room.
"That's the irony, which is that success breeds failure. It knocks out the team chemistry that's so vital," said Dacher Keltner, the UC Berkeley professor who wrote The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence. I had driven over to Berkeley to learn more.
Then Keltner noticed another pattern: Highly successful leaders—whether in business, Hollywood, politics, or sports—often lose the very traits that made them leaders in the first place. When we're puffed with power, his research showed, our ability to mimic diminishes. Thus, we're less able to read other people's feelings and intentions. Thus, we're less empathetic and compassionate. We feel exceptional, special. ("A town car? Where's the limo?") Rules and social norms no longer apply to us. Keltner and his team of student researchers did a kind of a loony study on this that turned out to be revealing.
They positioned a student at a clearly marked pedestrian crosswalk on a busy street near campus. California law requires drivers to stop for pedestrians. Nearby, other students recorded which cars stopped and which didn't. They divided the cars into categories from least expensive to most expensive. Among drivers in the most expensive cars, more than fifty percent blew through the crosswalk. Drivers in the cheapest cars? Stopped every time
When Durant joined Curry on the Warriors, people envisioned the two MVPs battling for dominance. Instead, Curry threw open the doors. He passed up open shots to feed his new teammate the ball until Durant finally told him to chill. Don't change how you play, Durant said. Just do you. Curry's welcoming, unselfish behavior put the potential rivalry to rest.
"Our modus operandi is to break the thing we're managing down into its component parts and understand how each part functions and what inputs will yield the greatest outputs.… [But] the more you optimize elements of a complex system of humans and nature for some specific goal, the more you diminish that system's resilience. [It] has the effect of making the total system more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances."
Starters are starters for a reason. They're the rare guys who want to carry a team on their back. They live to compete. If pitchers are regularly yanked by the sixth inning, they can start to believe they're not capable of anything more. It's similar to kids who are so coddled they develop what's known as "learned helplessness." Without the experiences of fighting through rough patches, pitchers can begin to lose the warrior mentality that invigorated not just them but their teammates. For home games, starting pitchers commence play by lead
They're drowning in information but starving for wisdom, as E. O. Wilson says.
It would not have been unprecedented in the world of elite team sports for Green and Durant to have nurtured their righteous anger for the rest of the season. Such is the privilege of star athletes. Indeed, the trend among offended NBA stars is to demand, and be granted, a trade to a franchise of their choosing. Durant and Green talked instead. To make this choice, both had to care more about each other and the team than their own wounded feelings. Only in a trusting relationship could Durant have spoken so honestly and could Green have come away wanting to be a better teammate. This was the essence of chemistry: one person elevating another
"Basketball is a great metaphor for anything," Kerr said. "Five guys all doing slightly different things. If you had five guys who do the same things it wouldn't work that well. And the reason our team works well is the puzzle fits, the pieces of the puzzle fit. Different talents, different skill levels, different skill sets—they all complement one another.

Chapter 9

No matter how much fun the players have together, how many secret handshakes and inside jokes, if performance does not improve, the team does not have chemistry. In sports, chemistry is often used interchangeably with camaraderie. In business, it's often referred to as cohesion. Both are wrong. Camaraderie describes a group's fellowship. Cohesion describes a state of being. Both are static. Chemistry is active. It produces a change in the work product. To be clear: There is no team chemistry if there is no improvement in the work product.
Note that team chemistry does not produce high performance, but rather elevated performance. High performance requires a certain amount of talent. Chemistry cannot manufacture talent, but it ignites the talent the team does have, getting the most from every player and boosting performance.
There's a 2014 study out of Columbia called "The Too-Much-Talent Effect." The researchers found that talent increases performance only up to a point, especially in heavily interdependent sports like basketball and soccer. Then the benefit of talent decreases, and the effect eventually turns negative. Dominant players jockey for status, much like chickens in a coop. Poultry scientists have found that too many high-egg-producing chickens leads to increased fighting over food and space, driving egg production down. The phenomenon has been observed on Wall Street, too. A 2011 Harvard study found that too many high-status equity research analysts in a single office disrupts cooperation and hurts the group's overall performance.