Collaboration

The idea that creative and commercial output is a team sport, not solo brilliance. In Leonardo Da Vinci this is one of the book’s central theses: “Innovation is a team sport. Creativity is a collaborative endeavor.” The Last Supper and the Florence studio were collective productions, so the better questions are not “which is the original?” but “how did the collaboration occur? What was the nature of the team and the teamwork?” Solo genius was only ever the starting point — vision and execution were both required. Leonardo “enjoyed being surrounded by friends, companions, students, assistants” and his closest friendships were intellectual ones; ideas were “conceived as a collaborative endeavor.” The shadow side runs underneath: Leonardo’s failing was that he “had no real understanding of the way in which the growth of knowledge was a cumulative and collaborative process,” and a more disciplined collaborator (a Luca Pacioli, a Marcantonio) might have helped him ship. This is the same talent-vortex / scenius thread that runs through The Founders and connects to Learning in Public and Talent Vortex.

In Product Led Growth — The End User Era, collaboration shows up in two registers: as a product-driven growth mechanism (the product “drives end user conversion and expansion through increased usage, viral loops, collaboration and word-of-mouth referrals”) and as an organizational hazard — when one team became sole “owner” of Net Revenue Retention, other departments stopped treating it as their concern, producing “a lack of collaboration from other teams on projects that required cross-functional collaboration.” The fix was shifting from “owner” to “champion.”

Where this appears

• Leonardo Da Vinci — “innovation is a team sport”; the studio and Last Supper as collective productions; vision plus execution
• Product Led Growth — The End User Era — collaboration as a product-led growth loop, and cross-functional collaboration as an org-design problem around shared metrics