Poets and Plumbers: Successful teams have a diverse mix of dreamers and doers

Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel were an effective team. Yet a diary entry from jail in 1934 by Nehru about Gandhi says, “Our objectives are different, our ideals are different, our spiritual outlook is different and our methods are likely to be different.” Severalchapters of Nehru’s autobiography published in 1935 were a respectfully worded ideological polemic against Gandhi. Patel’s disagreements with Nehru and Gandhi are well known. But they worked effectively together because each had different strengths and knew that diversity is crucial to high performing teams.

Entrepreneurial success
I’d like to make the case that curating diverse teams and cultivating diverse personal networks substantially improves the odds of entrepreneurial success. Most seasoned entrepreneurs agree with Steven Spielberg who says that “directing is 90 percent casting”.

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Effective teams balance the poets (people who dream big and think about the future) with
the plumbers (people who get things done). Most entrepreneurs, like most humans, tend to gravitate to people who look like them, who went to the same schools as them and who tend to think like them.

But successful entrepreneurs create cultures that encourage dissent and seek physical, cultural, and intellectual diversity.

The two most interesting books about diversity leading to high performance teams are Team
of Rivals by Doris Goodwin and Organizing Genius by Warren Bennis. The first not only chronicles the leadership genius of Abraham Lincoln in getting all his rivals to join his cabinet but vividly lays out how this diversity was crucial to their civil war victory.

The second details number of high performance teams like those who developed the Atom Bomb, Apple, Fighter Jets, etc. as a bunch of carefully shepherded geniuses.

Cultivating networks
Building a team is about kissing many frogs to find your princess. But you must build diversity as purposefully as you build competence. Because, as Vinod Khosla says, the team you build is the company you build.

Besides building diverse teams, most seasoned entrepreneurs spend a lot of time cultivating
diverse networks. They know that networks are the most important capital they bring to the
table-often more important than money. Their networks include customers, potential employees, press, regulators, investors, and academics. Their networks are a combination of strong and loose ties but they know that the power of their networks mostly comes from their loose ties because those nodes are the ones that increase the access to diverse.

The most practical advice on building a personal network is section 4 of the book The Start-Up of You by Reid Hoffman. He classifies networks into professional allies (relationships of deep trust that you build over time) and weak ties (people with whom you spend less amounts of low intensity time but are still friendly with).

This includes people you meet at conferences, old classmates, co-workers in other divisions, etc. People believe you can have about 8-10 professional allies and about 150 weak ties. But recent research suggests that this number can be much larger based on your industry, age, technology usage, pin code, education, extroversion, and much else. The best professional network is both narrow/deep (strong connections) and wide/shallow (weak ties). And it’s notjust the people you know but the people they know - your second and third degree connections.

Leadership team diversity has strong historical precedent in India; Akbar (who had Tansen,
Todar Mal, and so on) and Ranjit Singh (who had Zorawar Singh, Hari Singh Nalwa, etc.) were two great leaders who combined big dreams and flawless execution because of deep and diverse meritocracies.

These were also leaders who built diverse networks and alliances across varied constituencies to resource and execute their dreams. They have much to teach entrepreneurs.

This article first appeared in Entrepreneur India magazine.