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If an engineering manager had only one strength, it should be this.
The Champion Effect
The Chicago Bulls won the NBA (National Basketball Association) championships in the years 1991 to 1993 and 1996 to 1998. The Los Angeles Lakers won three consecutive championships from 2000 to 2002. Perhaps I am somewhat betraying my age here, but the names Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kobe Bryant come to mind from those eras of domination. It almost seems tautological to ask why those teams won; they won championships because they had champions on their team.
To point out that those teams won because they had good players seems as unprofound as pointing out an obvious truism like the sky being blue. Yet this obviousness somehow gets lost when it comes to hiring people.
It’s very easy to remember that a team is not so much a brand as a collection of players, but easy to forget that a corporation is not so much a legal entity as it is a collection of humans.
In fact, corporation comes from the 15th century word corporacion, which means “persons united in a body for some purpose” [1] The fact that we use “corporation” or “company” to refer to an office location, a legal entity, or a brand, distracts us from the truth that a “corporation” is simply a collection of humans.
