It's All about the Team

Earlier this week Giuseppe Maxia blogged about joining Continuent as Director of QA.  Creating high quality systems for distributed data management is a hard but fascinating problem.  I have been hooked on it myself for many years.  Guiseppe brings the creativity as well as humor our team needs to nail this problem completely.  I'm therefore delighted to know he will be focused on it.

That said, I'm even happier for another reason.  Beyond solving any single problem, Giuseppe strengthens an already strong team.  Ed Catmull of Pixar gave a great speech a few years ago about managing creative teams and why successful companies eventually fail.  Among other things he asked the question whether it is the idea or the people who implement it that count most.  His conclusion:  great teams implement good ideas to build great products.  But even more important, great teams can turn bad ideas into good ones, then go on to build great products from those ideas too.  Pixar has proved this many times over.

I believe strongly in the power of great teams to create great products.  Giuseppe, welcome to the team.