Contents
In 1941 a research institute moves into a new building in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The corridors are strikingly long. That is deliberate: anyone walking from their office to the lab or to lunch is bound to run into colleagues along the way – and into their questions. The institute is called Bell Telephone Laboratories. Its history illustrates the Team Principle of Investment: what you invest in a team pays off – with a delay, and with interest.
A Critical Mass in One Place
Situation
Bell Labs is founded on January 1, 1925, as a joint subsidiary of the telephone company AT&T and the manufacturer Western Electric. Its first president is Frank B. Jewett. That same year Mervin Kelly, a physicist from Missouri, starts work there. He stays until 1959, rising from researcher to head of the organization. Kelly is convinced that you need a “critical mass” of gifted people in one place. Phone calls alone are not enough for him. In the new Murray Hill building this conviction becomes architecture: long corridors, with staff encouraged to leave their doors open.
Connection to the team principle
Kelly does not invest first in individual geniuses but in the conditions under which people work together. Proximity costs money: a building of its own, walkways longer than they need to be, time for conversations no project has asked for. No ledger records what a chat in the corridor produced. Kelly makes the deposit anyway.
Mixed Groups and Two Years to Work
Situation
For the work on the transistor, Kelly assembles a group of a kind that had hardly existed before: physicists, metallurgists and electrical engineers, theorists and experimentalists in one team. The work takes more than two years. In 1947 John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley succeed in creating the transistor.
Connection to the team principle
For two years this group delivers nothing that can be sold. The investment consists of salaries, equipment and patience. What matters is what the money goes into: a mixed team that stays together until its members understand one another. A theorist and a metallurgist need time to learn each other’s language. That time is the deposit.
Decades of Harvest
Situation
The list of results is long. In 1948 Claude Shannon publishes his information theory. Then come the silicon solar cell by Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller and Gerald Pearson in 1954 and the communications satellite Telstar in 1962. In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discover the cosmic background radiation. Four years later, in 1969, come Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie’s Unix operating system and Willard Boyle and George E. Smith’s CCD sensor, followed in 1972 by the C programming language. Eleven Nobel Prizes were awarded for work done at Bell Labs; five researchers received the Turing Award.
Connection to the team principle
That is the interest. The return arrives years later and reaches far beyond the telephone the Labs were once founded to serve. Entire industries are built on these results. In 1925 or 1941 no one could have predicted which group would deliver what. The investment went into a way of working, not into a result fixed in advance.
The Condition: Someone Has to Be Able to Afford It
Situation
All this is made possible by a special case. The parent company, AT&T, is a regulated monopoly with a large, reliable income. Researchers are given years, with no quarterly targets. In 1984 AT&T is broken up, and funding drops sharply. The Labs change hands several times: to Lucent in 1996, to Alcatel-Lucent in 2006, to Nokia in 2016. In 2002 the physicist Jan Hendrik Schön is dismissed for falsifying data – the first known case of fraud at the institution.
Connection to the team principle
The example is not a model to copy without qualification. Bell Labs’ patience was paid for by a monopoly. Most companies do not have that kind of latitude. But the logic does carry over: when the deposits shrank, the returns shrank too, after a delay. And the idea can be scaled down. No team needs decades without targets. But almost every team needs more protected time than the next quarterly report allows.
Key takeaways
Key Lessons
- Invest in the conditions for collaboration: proximity, open doors, opportunities for unplanned conversations. They cost little and their effect lasts.
- Mix disciplines – and give the mix time. A mixed group is slower at first than a uniform one.
- Shield at least one project in your team from short-term pressure for results. Decide how long it gets.
- Be honest about what you can afford. Better a small investment you can sustain than a large one you cut after a weak quarter.
Summary
For decades Bell Labs invested in mixed groups, physical proximity and patience. The transistor took more than two years; many other results took even longer. The return sustained entire industries. At the same time, the example shows the principle’s precondition: someone has to be able to pay for such patience, and when money grew scarcer, so did the return. For your team, the question remains how much protected time you can give it – and whether you can keep it up long enough.