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The importance of a peer group

Mike and I saw the new Star Wars movie last night. While not as bad as the first two, the whole prequel series drives home a powerful lesson:

No matter how smart, gifted, driven, visionary, or well-financed you are, you will not think of everything and involving a group of people as spectacular as you are will make your thing better.

Everyone has blind spots, personal biases, and momentary lapses that keep them from achieving perfection. Peer review — even a simple chat among friends — exposes the weak spots, the obvious inconsistencies, the non-sequiturs, and the critical flaws in your venture. Reality checks can save your business.

As our operations/lives/business/jobs/industries become more complex and entwined, maintaining close connections and involvement with a group of your peers becomes even more important. And that’s part of the beauty and value of the blogosphere. It’s a huge distributed peer review system, as well as a tool for filtering news and attention. You can get a lot more of everything (news, analysis, criticism) that you want, but the insights can be tremendous.

But for some people virtual, distributed “mentoring” doesn’t work. And indeed, we all need real life relationships. A colleague, Blair Koch, with who I worked on a Product Management peer group happened to call this morning and tell me about how she was getting involved in The Alternative Board. Check it out - if you’re struggling on your own with these issues maybe you can find a valuable safety net, a trusty community of peers in this group.

It’s true it takes work. The smarter you are, the rarer you are. But that’s not an excuse. Keep looking and you will find them. Find mentors: good mentors collect people like you and can help you assemble peer groups.

It’s even harder here in the Bay area, surrounded by this culture of innovation where we lionize the coder or entrepreneur working independently. Of course we can do it “on our own”. Reading Darknet last night, I hit chapter 12, Architects of Darknet, where JD Lasica writes about Shawn Fanning (Napster), Bram Cohen (BitTorrent), Justin Frankel (WinAmp, later Gnutella) and Ian Clarke (Freenet) as lone warriors (notice these guys are… all guys - PubSub’s Bob Wyman told me women need get out and start more companies; which is undoubtedly true). These are guys waging an epic struggle, pursuing their vision, all on their own. But it’s “just” code. Important code, but scaffolding.

Vision is good. All strategy books say you need vision. But there’s a difference between a collective vision and a personal vision — especially when it comes to crossing from revolutionary to greatness. If you’re a guy with a revolutionary tool - if you’re brilliant and hardworking enough, you can do it. That same mindset doesn’t apply to building a company (or great films).