"if you're not on the team, you're not on the team"

My favourite set piece in The Untouchables (a film full of great set pieces) is Capone's big celebratory dinner scene, where he exhorts his minions to have what he calls enthusiasms. His own being, of course, baseball.

The menace and savagery of what follows is truly astonishing; it's one of DeNiro's best moments as an actor. But what's also truly weird about the scene is the basic truth of his lines here. How can one of the most devious criminal masterminds actually be speaking any kind of sense about how teams work? (Beyond the obvious answer that David Mamet is a genius.)

Every time I see it, however, the scene makes more and more sense. Capone has to keep his lieutenants in a delicate balance; he has to be in control, because he can't risk one of them freelancing too successfully, but he if he squashes the "individual achievements" of his men he risks making them all less effective. If he upsets the balance either way, he's dead.

Now, to paraphrase the movie's Mountie, "Mr. Capone, I do not approve of your methods." But that basic dynamic – the balance of the individual and the group – is what's happening any time a group of people need to do anything as a team. And everyone on the team needs to buy into that dynamic.

Sometimes people don't. For whatever reason they have a problem with the balance. And I don't just mean prima donnas (the subject of a later post, I'm sure); I've had a couple of creatives who when the proverbial rubber hit the road wanted me or others on the team to do things that were pretty basic to their job, like hire illustrators. While they were doing the bare minimum (or, um, less) they weren't using a lot of initative. Now, why these people chose to be unhappy with the team, or me, isn't clear to me. But the team suffered. And these two individuals had to face the harsh or beautiful truth:

You're either all the way in, or you're out. And one way or the other, they were out. (But remember, and I repeat, I strongly disavow Capone's management methods.)

All of which was brilliantly condensed by Daryl Aitken, one of the best ad people of all time, into a very simple statement, the sum total of which is the title of this post.