Xtreme Teams

Have you ever been part of a team that required your all but never had to ask for it? A team in which the work itself was actually the most important reward, and in which teamwork happened with almost no effort at all? A team that, looking back, you just can't imagine not having been a part of?

Jacqui Lopez, a producer with Industrial Light & Magic, has led many such teams. "The trickiest part of the job," she says, "is when you're on your 18th straight day of work, when you've been at it for 14 hours a day, when the director is screaming at you and the studio is up in arms -- and you have to keep all of the stress from filtering down to your crew. In film, we can't miss our deadline. But if I start pressuring artists about time and budget, then creativity suffers."

So has Robert Nagle, an adventure racer with Team EcoInternet. "We stay ridiculously focused for 170 hours," he says. "We don't let team dynamics, mistakes, the weather -- or any of the other bad things that can happen during an adventure race -- get in the way. We just concentrate on our objective."

So has Bob Mitcheltree, a NASA engineer who works on the Mars Sample Return Mission. "Only a few events that occur in my lifetime will be considered large, breakthrough discoveries," he explains. "I'm willing to bet that this mission will be one of those events."

"Extreme teams" are the stuff of business legend: the geeks who built the Apple Macintosh, the rebels who redesigned the VW bug. Lopez, Nagle, and Mitcheltree all belong to those kinds of teams. They work under conditions that are undeniably extreme -- impossible deadlines, long hours -- and they are producing extreme results. They and their colleagues are ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things.

"These teams are passionate about their work," says Harold J. Leavitt, professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and coauthor of "Hot Groups: Seeding Them, Feeding Them, and Using Them to Ignite Your Organization" (Oxford University Press, 1999). "In fact, the people on these kinds of teams don't view their work as 'work.' They view it as fun. They're addicted to it. They don't think about anything else. They want to talk about it, think about it, and do it all day long -- and they want to be around people who feel the same way."

Jean Lipman-Blumen, a professor at the Claremont Graduate School, who is also Leavitt's coauthor, adds, "These are people who want to take on a challenge that they are convinced is earthshaking. It may not look that way to people on the outside, but that's how people on these kinds of teams perceive their task. They are so committed to what they're doing, to their desire to achieve a breakthrough, that they know they will make it happen -- because they supply the combustion. They create the explosion that gets through to the next level."

What follows are the stories of three extreme teams: a production group from Industrial Light & Magic, an international adventure-racing team, and a group of NASA engineers. The projects that they work on are extremely interesting, and the stakes that they play for are extremely high. Most important, their experiences should prove extremely enlightening to people on all kinds of teams.

Extreme Deadlines

Jacqui Lopez jogs into the theater slightly winded, her morning latte sloshing over the edge of its paper cup. Her blond hair is still wet from the shower. "Sorry I'm late," she says to the near-empty room, before realizing that she isn't actually late. The previous day's visual-effects files for scenes from the movie "Wild Wild West" are still being turned into film. "Good," says Lopez, her face relaxing slightly. "I'm going to go move my car so that it doesn't get towed."

Lopez, 36, the film's visual-effects producer, has good reason to feel pressed for time. Her team, consisting of 150 artists and animators from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), has less than three weeks to finish the remaining 140 shots for the movie -- roughly one-third of the movie's digitally created shots. That pace will match the unprecedented speed at which another ILM team worked on "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace." The "Phantom Menace" team, which included far more people and had far more time than Lopez's team, churned out 1,900 visual-effects scenes.

The digital work for "Wild Wild West," a summer movie starring Will Smith, involved adding explosions, fires, fake backgrounds, and a 90-foot-tall mechanical tarantula to the film (which opened on July 4). "Being late is not an option," Lopez says. "The publicity is already locked in, and the studios have schedules to keep. We can't be late."

And ILM teams never are late. Along with the 29 Academy Awards that ILM has won over the past 24 years for visual effects and for other technical achievements, the company (created by George Lucas) has earned a reputation for being fast. Indeed, ILM is so fast that other effects studios routinely farm out last-minute work to it in order to avoid missing deadlines on such films as "Titanic," "Mighty Joe Young," and "Deep Blue Sea."