Quotes & Sayings About Groups And Teams

I think what you mostly do when you find you really are alone is to panic. You rush to the opposite extreme and pack yourself into groups - clubs, teams, societies, types. You suddenly start dressing exactly like the others. It's a way of being invisible. The way you sew the patches on the holes in your blue jeans becomes incredibly important. If you do it wrong you're not with it. That's a peculiar phrase, you know? With it. With what? With them. With the others. All together. Safety in numbers. I'm not me. I'm a basketball letter. I'm a popular kid. I'm my friend's friend. I'm a black leather growth on a Honda. I'm a member. I'm a teenager. You can't see me, all you can see is us. We're safe. And if We see You standing alone by yourself, if you're lucky we'll ignore you. If you're not lucky, we might throw rocks. Because we don't like people standing there with the wrong kind of patches on their jeans reminding us that we're each alone and none of us is safe. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Our moral sense really evolved to bind groups together into teams that can cooperate in order to compete with other teams. — Jonathan Haidt

As the world grows faster and more interdependent, we need to figure out ways to scale the fluidity of teams across entire organizations: groups with thousands of members that span continents, like our Task Force. But this is easier said than done. — Stanley McChrystal

Hot groups have members who are task-obsessed and full of passion. They share a style which is intense, sharply focused, and full bore. Members feel engaged in an important, even vital and personally ennobling mission; their task dominates all other considerations; and although such intense teams tend to remain intact only for a relatively short period of time, that time is remembered nostalgically and in considerable detail by its members. — Jean Lipman-Blumen

Dividing into teams doesn't necessarily mean denigrating others. Studies of groupishness have generally found that groups increase in-group love far more than they increase out-group hostility. — Jonathan Haidt

If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom. — James Surowiecki

Loyalties of professional sports teams mystified him; they were rotating groups of paid professionals, usually with no ties other than their employment contract to the local area. One might as well feel loyalty to and cheer on the construction crew repairing the state highway nearest one's town — Joel L.A. Peterson

In addition, there are huge benefits to communal effort in and of itself. By definition, all organizations consist of people working together. Focusing on the team leads to better results for the simple reason that well-functioning groups are stronger than individuals. Teams that work together well outperform those that don't. And success feels better when it's shared with others. So perhaps one positive result of having more women at the top is that our leaders will have been trained to care more about the well-being of others. My hope, of course, is that we won't have to play by these archaic rules forever and that eventually we can all just be ourselves. We — Sheryl Sandberg

In early 2002, as part of a new personal ritual, he took time after the holidays to think and read. (In this respect, Microsoft's Bill Gates, who also took such annual think weeks, served as a positive example.) Returning to the company after a few weeks, Bezos presented his next big idea to the S Team in the basement of his Medina, Washington, home. The entire company, he said, would restructure itself around what he called "two-pizza teams." Employees would be organized into autonomous groups of fewer than ten people - small enough that, when working late, the team members could be fed with two pizza pies. These teams would be independently set loose on Amazon's biggest problems. — Brad Stone

Overcoming barriers to performance is how groups become teams. — John Katzenbach

Companies, in fact, are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out. — Clayton Christensen

There are complaints that it's hard to remember what you can say and what you can't, which words are 'in' for certain groups and which words are not. And yet we started out learning that the 'kitty' on the sidewalk was actually a squirrel, we learned to differentiate between fire trucks and school buses, and many people today know the difference between linguini, fettucini, and rotini. The same people who say they can't remember the 'right' terms in referring to people are often whizzes at remembering which professional sports teams have moved where and are now called what. — Rosalie Maggio

Success comes only for those groups that overcome the all-too-human behavioral tendencies that corrupt teams and breed dysfunctional politics within them. — Patrick Lencioni

I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement. — David Whyte

A team is where a boy can prove his courage on his own. A gang is where a coward goes to hide. — Mickey Mantle

The lost women I need to know their names those women I would have walked with, jauntily the way men go in groups swinging their arms, and the ones those sweating women whom I would have joined After a hard game to chew the fat what would we have called each other laughing joking into our beer? where are my gangs, my teams, my mislaid sisters? all the women who could have known me, where in the world are their names? — Lucille Clifton

Missional leaders know that their church will only grow as large as its capacity to provide ongoing care through a network of small groups and ministry teams. — Gary Rohrmayer