[dadver]

>But the reality is, that shaping such an organization (or company!) is exceedingly hard and requires massive culture shifts within people of the organization (which bring their own baggage from outside) and incentives. It's easy to say you want to be Apple, but hammering a 3rd tier company filled with backstabbing juniors into a highly performing machine is going to be an impossible task.

(Disclaimer: I have not done any military service) The Swedish military had an educational course, now licensed to private companies, named UGL (Utveckling av Grupp och Ledare (Development of Group and Leader)). I took this course as part of a management position at a company and it focuses heavily on theoretical knowledge and practical exercises with regard to Susan Wheelan's work and research on group dynamics, i.e. what are the characteristics of different team 'levels' (1-4) and ways/prerequisites to get the team to the next level.

I've seen exercises and mentions to this model at other companies I've been at (it's quite popular and Wheelan is as I understand it an authority in this field), too, as well as various distilled forms from motivational speakers (e.g. 'being in the zone').

Very few teams rise to the highest level (before dissolution) and it takes tremendous work and good leadership, but from what I've learned it's hardly impossible. Of course, addressing the culture of backstabbing juniors is part of that process, so I guess you're right that it is impossible without change.

While on the subject, I wonder how many armed forces throughout the world have curriculums containing inter-personal relationship courses and group exercises pertaining to this. From what little exposure I've had to this subject (TV and movies, mostly US such) it seems to be something being taught naturally and 'the hard way', but maybe it's just something that doesn't come naturally to us Swedes so we need extra education in these sort of things.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

I'm not familiar with Wheelan's work, but will check into it.

Just wanted to share that the US military spends a whole lot of effort on trying to understand group and leadership dynamics. One of the things that led into Kahneman and Tversky's Nobel winning research was an attempt to predict future leadership capability among new recruits that utterly failed. Whatever leadership is, it's not easy to predict before it emerges by other traits.

There's a gap between how the US military is portrayed in movies, etc, vs its actual nature. It's the US's largest and most diverse employer, where the bulk of the staff are young people from a low income or otherwise marginalized background. They spend a lot of effort on figuring out the best ways to make that work, even if they fail at it a lot as well.

[dadver]

>Just wanted to share that the US military spends a whole lot of effort on trying to understand group and leadership dynamics.

Yeah now that I think of it in hindsight I'd imagine most armed forces have this in one way or another, after all functioning as a group and solving different tasks in unison is pretty basic/mandatory for a successful unit.

>They spend a lot of effort on figuring out the best ways to make that work, even if they fail at it a lot as well.

They (armed forces around the world) must be doing something right. I don't know if it's the x years of coherent training and purpose or some forced epiphany, but anecdotally speaking I usually find people with military backgrounds -- even if only 10 months of conscription service -- to be generally more adept at overcoming hardships and have a generally more pragmatic stance toward life, as opposed to many young adults that haven't done any such training and live with a sense of loss, inability to cope with certain things (e.g. boredom) and are generally 'later' or missing out on personal development. Most people I've talked about their military service with have said it was both their worst and best time of their life simultaneously. Of course, YMMV and I'm not taking into account extremes on either side. Just makes me wonder if maybe we should have some kind of mandatory self-exploration journey after school that would benefit people.