How Teams Succeed (with Colin Fisher)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

What makes some groups thrive while others crash and burn? According to organizational-behavior scholar Colin Fisher, the real villains are rarely individuals, but dysfunctional teams and organizations. Listen as he and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss the reasons for the free-rider problem and the importance of meaningful, well-defined tasks to incentivize synergy. They speak about why most team-building exercises are usually a waste of time, and why the best way to build trust is simply to do the work. Finally, they explore the role of great leaders from Steve Jobs to Bill Belichick in elevating groups into teams, and offer lessons from history's great projects for increasing productivity.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is July 31st, 2025.
0:39.4	And my guest is author and scholar of organizational behavior, Colin Fisher of University
0:44.4	College London's School of Management.
0:47.0	He is the author of The Collective Edge, Unlocking the Secret Power of Groups, which is our topic
0:52.7	for today.
0:53.7	Colin, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:55.7	Thanks so much for having me, Russ.
0:57.9	What is the collective edge?
1:00.6	The collective edge is the often ignored and overlooked power that we have when we're in groups,
1:10.1	and that so much of what we do at work,
1:13.5	what we do at home is in groups.
1:15.6	We're influenced by even imagining that we might be in a group or other people who we identify
1:21.8	with.
1:23.1	And yet, for how important they are in human behavior, we're shockingly bad at them, that we ignore
1:30.0	the influences they have on us, that we're pushed to conform in ways that are incompatible
1:35.7	with our own goals and our own well-being, and that we can see they really make a mess of
	...

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