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Who discovered the lightbulb? If you answered “Thomas Edison,” you’re not aloneand you’re also not quite right. Despite conventional wisdom that associates great inventions with lone geniuses, breakthrough inventions are team efforts. Incandescent light bulbs existed before Edison was born. His patent built on prior versions of the light bulb, aiming to make it practical and affordable. Even then, it wasnt a solo achievementEdison collaborated with a team of skilled collaborators, known as the Muckers, whose contributions have largely faded from memory. Yet it was Edisons name on the patent, and thats the version of history that stuck. Were suckers for lone genius narratives like Edisonsthe brilliant scientist, the fearless military general, or the savvy CEO. The version of history we glean from popular books, movies, and the internet attributes greatness to single individuals. But individual greatness is rarely the whole story. Research shows that teams are the main creators of new knowledge across most industries. New ideas dont emerge fully formed from the mind of a single personit takes collaboration and teamwork to develop them to their full potential. In reality, the engine behind sustained successwhether in science, business, or governmentisnt a singular mind. Its a well-designed team. The illusion of individual success We tend to over-attribute both success and failure to individuals. Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error: we explain peoples behavior by their traits, rather than their context. If a product flops, we blame the CEO. If a startup takes off, the founder is a genius. We rarely ask about the teams that surround them. It gets worse. Even inside groups, people regularly overestimate their own contributions to collective endeavors. In one study, researchers asked each team member to estimate what percent of the groups success they were responsible for. The total? A whopping 235%. Thats a lot more than 100%! Our individualistic tendencies lead us to build groups and organizations around the wrong assumptions. If you believe success comes from star individuals, you hire stars and hope for fireworks. But for complex problemsand most of our work now is complexit takes more knowledge and skill than any individual has to solve it. Thats why we need to put the conditions in place for individuals to combine and build on what each alone can bring. What good teams do differently In my research, Ive found that high-performing teams arent built through charisma, happy accidents, or trust falls. Theyre designed for success. There are four key elements of group structure that maximize your chances of creativity: Composition: Many teams are composed haphazardly, based on whos available and office politics. But the best teams are small (i.e., three to seven members) and have a task-appropriate, diverse mix of knowledge and skills. Goals: Its hard to achieve a common goal when members have different ideas about where theyre headed. Thats why clear, measurable, vivid goals are a critical antecedent for building teams that can outperform individuals. For instance, innovation at NASA spiked when John F. Kennedy swapped the vague goal of, advance science by exploring the solar system, to the vivid goal to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Task design: Teams can bring ideas to life when they have well-designed tasks that require a variety of skills, give members autonomy over how to conduct their work, and allow members to see progress toward their goals. For creative work, poorly designed tasks are repetitive and control the process, like a manufacturing assembly line. Well-designed tasks give teams whole pieces of work and the freedom to explore, such as the design firm IDEOs effort to redesign the shopping cart to better fit the needs of users. Norms: Too often, groups are places where members fall into bad habits. In many organizations, workers are used to sitting passively in meetings. They worry that experimentation and suggesting new ideas will be scornedor even punished. But the most innovative teams actively fight these norms. Leaders actively encourage members to share their ideas, experiment, and learn from one another. And the battle against norms toward conformity and the status quo never ends. IDEO, for instance, plasters reminders of these norms on the walls of their buildingsthings like defer judgement, encourage wild ideas, and build on the ideas of others. The real edge We live in an era that celebrates ideas: TED Talks, startup pitches, visionary founders. But ideas dont execute themselves. And many great ideas die in bad teams. The reverse is also true: A good team can turn a mediocre idea into something extraordinary. Not because theyre smarter, but because theyre structured to think together better. The great innovations and businesses of today were never built by a solitary lone genius. For all the credit Steve Jobs gets, he couldnt have built Apple and its collaborative innovation engine without the help of his cofounders and teammates. As you dig deeper into stories of great innovations, you almost always find a great team just under the surface. The next time youre tempted to credit a lone genius, remember the people behind the curtain. The collaborators, the editors, the dissenters: the ones who made the idea betteror made it real. Good ideas matter. But good teams matter more.
Category:
E-Commerce
Stephen Miran, President Donald Trumps pick to join the Federal Reserve board, said Thursday that he would remain a White House employee even if the Senate confirms him to fill an unexpired term at the central bank. Miran, who was nominated to fill a gubernatorial term set to expire in January, made the disclosure at a hearing before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. He said that on the advice of his lawyers, he would take an unpaid leave of absence as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Miran later said he would only resign from the Republican administration if he were nominated for a longer term at the Fed. His answer instantly triggered alarm bells about the Fed’s independence, suggesting that the central bank could ultimately become subservient to Trump’s whims instead of its congressional mandates to keep prices stable and maximize employment. Political control of the Fed could erode the faith that the American population and investors worldwide place in the U.S. economy, which could threaten global markets and national prosperity. Democrats blasted Mirans plan to keep his day job at the White House. Your independence has already been seriously compromised, Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said. You are going to be technically an employee of the president of the United States but an independent member of the board of the Federal Reserve. Thats ridiculous. Mirans hearing reflected the broader battle over Trumps efforts to gain control of the Fed. Because of the possible negative impacts on the economy, the Fed has tried to act based on the economic data rather than electoral considerations. Trump, however, has engaged in a prolonged campaign of pressuring and mocking Fed Chair Jerome Powell for not cutting the benchmark interest rate to Trumps liking, a move that could end up pumping more money into the economy and creating greater inflationary risks. The Fed has yet to reach its 2% inflation target and has held its rates steady in part because of the uncertainties created by Trumps import taxes. The president has also sought to apply pressure on the Fed over its renovation of its headquarters and other buildings and has tried to fire Lisa Cook as a Fed governor over allegations that she committed mortgage fraud. Cook has said she will not resign and has sued to overturn Trump’s move. Miran, in his answers to senators, played down the controversy over Trumps desire to control the Fed. Miran said that if he were confirmed to fill the rest of Adriana Kuglers term, he would act based on his own judgments about inflation and employment. Look, the president nominated me because I have policy views, that, I suppose that he liked, he said told the committee chairman, Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. If Im confirmed to this role, I will act independently, as the Federal Reserve always does, based on my own personal analysis of economic data. Even Republicans saw the risks to the loss of Fed independence. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., asked Miran to commit to ignore all the rhetoric from all politicians and make his own choices. But Miran arrives with the baggage of having worked for a president who has expressed disdain for the Fed’s tradition of independence. Trump has argued that he knows more about monetary policy as he has called for the Feds benchmark rate to be cut by a full 3 percentage points. In June, a Fed forecast of future rates showed emerging divisions among the policymakers. Seven projected no rate cuts at all this year, two indicated one cut and 10 forecast at least two reductions. This is a crisis moment for the Federal Reserve, for the financial system and for the economic stability of families all across this country, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told reporters before the start of the hearing. Warren added that the Fed boards independence and their efforts to make decisions based on whats really happening in the economy not what the politics are is something that benefits every single American. Donald Trump wants to burn that to the ground. Under questioning by Warren, Miran declined to say whether Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden, saying only that Congress certified Biden as president. Miran declined under questioning to contradict Trumps unfounded claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had faked jobs numbers for political reasons. Trump fired the bureau’s head after severe revisions to the July employment report showed the economy was potentially weaker than Trump’s claims of a golden age. There are also questions about how Miran interprets the Fed’s independence. He said that the president is entitled to express his opinion on monetary policy and that consideration of climate change as an economic force by Fed officials would be a politicization of the central bank. In a 2024 paper he co-wrote for the Manhattan Institute, Miran argued that the Fed was already politicized by highly political, personnel who move freely between the White House and the central banks headquarters. In that same paper, Miran wanted to heighten presidential control, saying that having Fed board members serve at the will of the president would confer greater democratic legitimacy on the Fed. By indicating that he could return to the White House, Miran seemed to undermine one of his own recommendations in his paper. To further insulate board members from the day-to-day political process, they should be prohibited from serving in the executive branch for four years following the end of their term, the paper said. Josh Boak, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
President Donald Trump likes to boast about how much money the U.S. Treasury is raking in from the massive taxestariffshes slapped this year on imports from almost every country in the world. We have trillions of dollars coming into our country, Trump said Wednesday. If we didnt have tariffs, we would be a very poor nation and we would be taken advantage of by every other nation in the world, friend and foe. But two courts have now ruled that his biggest and boldest import taxes are illegal. If the Supreme Court agrees and strikes them down for good, the federal government could have to pay back many of the taxes its already collected from companies that import foreign products into the United States. Were talking about hundreds of billions of dollars potentially in refunds affecting thousands and thousands of importers, said trade lawyer Luis Arandia, a partner with the law firm of Barnes & Thornburg. Unwinding all that will be the largest administrative effort in U.S. government history. Ordinary Americans, who’ve had to pay higher prices on some products because of the tariffs, are unlikely to share in the windfall. Any refunds would go instead to the companies that paid the levies in the first place. The refunds would also reverse the flow of tariff revenue the president has counted on to help pay for the massive tax-cut bill he signed July 4 and would threaten, he warns, to literally destroy the United States of America. At issue are revenues raised from tariffs Trump imposed this year by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). One set of IEEPA tariffs targeted almost every country on earth after he declared that the United States massive and persistent trade deficits amounted to a national emergency. Another was aimed at Canada, China and Mexico and was meant to counter the illegal flow of drugs and immigrants across U.S. borders. But a specialized federal trade court in New York ruled in May that the president overstepped his authority by ignoring Congress and imposing the IEEPA tariffs. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit last week largely upheld the trade courts decision, though it also ordered the lower court to re-consider whether there was any legal fix short of striking down the tariffs completely. The appellate judges also paused their own ruling until mid-October to give the administration time to appeal to the Supreme Court something that it did on Wednesday. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the justices to take up the case and hear arguments in early November. If the high court strikes down the IEEPA tariffs, importers could be entitled to refunds. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency reports that it had collected more than $72 billion in IEEPA tariffs through Aug. 24. For importers, Ted Murphy, co-leader of the international trade practice at the Sidley Austin law firm, said: Its a question of what youre going to have to do to get the refund. And the options are everything from nothing the government may just automatically refund it; I dont think this is likely, but thats one option. There could be an administrative process, so you have to go to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and apply for a refund of your IEEPA tariffs. Or you could have to file your own court case. Theres a precedent for courts setting up a system to give companies their money back in trade cases. In the 1990s, the courts struck down as unconstitutional a harbor maintenance fee on exports and set up a system for exporters to apply to get their money back. Companies got refunds, Murphy said. One hitch: In that case, the government did not have to pay interest on the tax it collected and had to pay back. Its unclear whether the government would have to pay interest on any IEEPA tariff refunds. The Trump administration might balk at paying back the tariffs its collected. Trump has already said he doesnt want to pay the money back, posting on his social media site in August that doing so would be 1929 all over again, a GREAT DEPRESSION! I would anticipate that if the administration did lose, they would turn around and start arguing why it would be impossible to give refunds to everybody, said Brent Skorup, legal fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. I think there will a lot of litigation about the nature of refunds and whos entitled one. And I expect the administration will raise all sorts of objections.” To make sure they can successfully claim refunds, said Barnes & Thornburg partner Clinton Yu, importers really need to have their records in order. Adding to the uncertainty is the chaotic way that Trump has rolled out his tariffs announcing and then delaying or altering them, sometimes conjuring up new ones. Occasionally, the administration has decided that importers that have already paid one of his tariffs dont have to pay a different one. Tariff are paid by importers, who often then try to pass the cost on to their customers through higher prices. But consumers would not have recourse to ask for refunds for the higher prices they had to pay. Its the importer of record that is legally liable for paying tariffs and duties, Arandia said. They would be the only one to have standing to even get that money back. Paul Wiseman, AP economics writer AP Writers Lindsay Whitehurst and Josh Boak contributed to this story.
Category:
E-Commerce
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