I have met many exceptional guys in my life, but I have met very few outstanding teams. In our world it seems like everybody is trying to become a superstar or a prima donna. This is true also of corporations. All those I have in contact with had all kinds of complex procedures and rituals that were only aimed at making people working together or at restraining the individual power so to avoid internal fights. Sometimes the “glue” that holds the team together is some form of social habit or more that is applied with no judgment.

Daniele Bogiatto, Terry Ogburn and Karen Selby

I have a little story to tell about this that comes from my past. In 2001, at the beginning of the new millennium, the .com bubble was in full swing and I sent to work for the major Swedish telco company that had created a special team to build one of the first UMTS portals. In a nutshell it was the first project aimed at bringing the Web on mobile phones. Scandinavia in general and Sweden in particular are very strong on mobile phone network since, due to the wide expanses of the land and the fact that very little of it is actually inhabited, it is not quite economic to build a regular phone network, based on wires or fiber optic. So out of necessity Sweden and Finland have become some of the world leaders in mobile phone technology.

The project was big and was spanning several European nations. I had been chosen as the chief of content development for the Italian portal. The project was exciting both because it was quite innovative (too much for that time as we soon found out) but also because it gave me the chance of flying to Stockholm every so often and meet people from all over Europe and be exposed to very different cultures.

I have never been too good at fixing phones, but I know enough about content to soon find out that there was some major flaw on the project despite the very high paid consultants that had been hired for the job. So I started writing about it to my direct superiors in the project but I got no sensible reply. So I decided to bring the thing up with the typical Italian “energy” (some would say impact) during one of the meetings at the big headquarters in Stockholm. As soon as I finished talking it seemed like I had thrown an atom bomb in the room. Later a Swedish colleague explained to me that it is bad manner to point out mistakes or errors in Sweden as the people responsible for those mistakes could feel offended and you never do that. But he also thanked me for bringing it up because I was dead right and somebody had to say it, although they couldn’t.

This shocked me and proved to be the cause of a massive disaster for that project that went down in flames only two months afterward. And the way the project was shut down was even more astonishing. The headquarters organized a huge motivational event in Stockholm where they invited just everybody. It was mid summer and Scandinavia is fantastic in that time of the year: the sun goes down past 11 pm and the air is mild and fresh at the same time. Everybody had a great time during this huge event, but only two or three weeks afterwards they started to fire everybody. As I later found out, the decision to disband the project had been taken already before the big event. Apparently they were running on the concept that it would have been easier to fire people after making them happy, whatever.

So I know how crazy organizations or cultures can get in order to facilitate the relationships amongst individuals who want instead to live and work alone. Being Italian there is really not much that I can say in my defense on this subject since the creativity that every Italian puts in his own work and life virtually defeats any effort to “organize” anything. But at least we like to tell things as they are.

When I arrived in the US, I found the land of the individual competition. Here everybody is competing against everybody else and many of the partnerships that you see around are tactical in nature and short lived. Yet all this action creates one of the most active economies on the planet. So there is the potential of building very powerful teams by putting together ingredients coming from different cultures and using the Web and social networking in particular as a big unifying factor.

This long winded story is to tell simply that I feel very fortunate in having a partner, Daniele, with whom I share a complete vision of my future business and future life and with whom I am carrying on a very long term relationship. Being two and being totally aligned we know we can win long term against every prima donna.

Today we have made together an important step for building a very strong team also here in the US, by striking the perfect mix. The other two members of the project that came on board today are Terry Ogburn (business developer) and Karen Selby (broker) of Century 21 Grant. They will help us getting fully familiar with the US business culture and will absorb and implement everything we can bring to the table so to have an unbeatable team.

Roberto Mazzoni