All for one, one for all?

This famous and oft-quoted line, the epitome of good teamwork, comes, as everyone knows, from Alexandre Dumas père’s novel published in 1844, The Three Musketeers.

“Tous pour un, un pour tous.” It is intended as a lifelong bond of loyalty, brotherly love and mutual support between Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan. Through thick and thin.

It’s so often used as a keystone nowadays in teamwork training exercises.

But how difficult it is to realise in the world of today, where team members are changed with such frequency, and where individuals within a team are in practice competing with each other for recognition and preferment.

Teamwork today is for Christmas, not for life.

Ahead of its time?

In my first blogpost, I wrote about how much I had learned about innovation from working intensively on the launch of Jellytots for Rowntree’s back in 1967. Jellytots passed its fortieth birthday in 2007.

In that same year, the agency I was working for, Garland-Compton (which was later to become Saatchi and Saatchi), ran a competition amongst staff members – the aim being to create an innovation of some sort or other in the petfood market. I came up with the winning entry – a new product geared specifically to feeding puppies and kittens. There was nothing of that sort on the market back then.

And last week, sorting out an old file, out tumbled this photograph of me, a cocky twenty-three year old assistant account executive, being given the winner’s cheque by the agency chairman, Leonard Garland.

I was a bit dismayed that the agency didn’t immediately call Mars Petfoods to pitch my idea. No, they said. Although it was a good idea, well argued and well presented, they thought the market would be too small to be of interest to any major petfood manufacturer.

Of course, you know what happened next. Within a few years, all the major players had entered the market, fighting day by day for share.

Was it a question of “ahead of its time”, or just plain short-sightedness? Either way, it’s a syndrome that blights innovators and their best ideas constantly.