A recent Inc.com blog post by Jessica Stillman discusses Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point (Little, Brown and Co., 2024). The theme in both works is that you can’t create a high-performing team simply by bringing together individual high performers. They need to gel as a team. Furthermore, they need to benefit from a diversity of opinions, backgrounds, generations, and ethnicity, among other things.

The book draws on classic research by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor and former Baldrige Board of Overseers member, who concluded that diversity alone isn’t enough for a successful team. Success requires a critical mass for each group represented so they feel encouraged to contribute.

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