and one of them is to some extent, individuals on a team can win while the team loses. You can be an all-star basketball player in the NBA and be on a deeply mediocre team, and you can have the $10 million a year contract and be hugely wealthy and have beer endorsements and all sorts of stuff, and be succeeding, and yet the team isn't doing particularly great, the coach gets fired, and is in tumult, and attendance in the town may not be great. The model that we thought, that we actually talked about, in the second edition, was a different kind of team. And once you think about it, it fits perfectly. The team, the analogy of teamwork and software projects goes with musical groups - musical teams, so to speak, a glee club, a chorus. When you were a teenager, your rock band that played in the garage. Where the idea of internal competition just doesn't exist. You know, you're not saying, well I hope this person doesn't do so well, so I can look better. You're a 16-year-old kid, you just want the best drummer you can find for your rock band. And the better the drummer plays, the better for everybody. And you know, maybe it's my era, Carol, but the Beatles are a great team, where they have different personalities and bring different things to the table, but they weren't competing in that sense. You know, Ringo on the drums didn't worry about George Harrison - he wanted George to be as good as he could be. And I think that's the kind of teams projects… The great project teams are more like a great chorus than they are a great football team.
Carol: And if somebody is off, if it's an orchestra or something, and somebody is completely out of tune, it makes the whole group seem bad, and I think that's a pretty good analogy. If you've got somebody that's working against the team, or you've got a lone wolf, that sometimes happens on software projects, or you get, like the Software Engineering Institute talks about the ad hoc way of system development that isn't very mature and isn't very productive, where you have "heroes," and I always get a notion of somebody flying in with a Superman cape or something. And I think you're right. I think that really, software, to really build something good, takes a coordinated, choreographed effort.
Tim: Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, for everything but trivial software, where you have got a group of people, you need a level of agreement, a level of communication, and a level of discipline. All the people in our business who complain about methods or process robbing them of their creativity, actually I thank my wife for pointing this out to me. She suspects that we have never been in the creative arts, because if you look at every creative art, it has huge discipline. You mentioned choreographed - my wife, we live in New York, and my wife loves the ballet, so we have a subscription to the New York City Ballet, Balanchine's old company. And I must admit, I wasn't a big ballet fan until I met my wife, but from a systems point of view, it's amazing to watch. The discipline of dance is awesome. The choreographer isn't saying, "Now, twirl around a few times if you feel like it." It's down to finger motions. And the work of the dancer to prepare for the dance is just total concentration. And so the creative… Yes, you
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