Harvard Business Review on Building Better Teams

Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?

by Ann Majchrzak, Arvind Malhotra, Jeffrey Stamps, and Jessica Lipnack

THE COLD WAR HAD BEEN good to Rocketdyne, Boeing’s propulsion and power division. Starting in 1958, when the United States launched its first orbiting satellite, all the way through the 1980s, Rocketdyne was the dominant producer of liquid-fuel rocket engines. But after the breakup of the Soviet Union, makers of communications and weather satellites started favoring the cheaper engines coming out of a newly independent Russia.

In response, Bob Carman, a program manager at Rocketdyne, envisioned an engine that was radically simpler and cheaper than anything in its catalog. But to design it, Carman needed people with a depth of expertise ...