Page 73-75: Introduction to Part III - Pep Guardiola visits MIT Media Lab:
In 2013 Joseph Guardiola, the former coach of Barcelona and current coach of Bayern Munich, visited the MIT Media Lab. Guardiola—or Pep, as he is informally known—had accepted an invitation to visit MIT from his friend and MIT treasurer, Israel Ruiz. After some emails involving Israel, Joi Ito, and me, I was put in charge of preparing for Pep's visit, a responsibility that I accepted happily.
Pep's visit was easy to organize. Students from my group and other groups at the Media Lab were exited to present their work to the soccer celebrity. Yet, since students from other departments also wanted to meet him, I decided to organize a short Q&A session. It was in this session that a student asked, "Pep, if we built a team of robots, would you come and coach it?" His reply was short and cunning. He said, and I paraphrase: "The main challenge of coaching a team is not figuring out a game plan, but getting that game plan into the heads of the players. Since in the case of the robots I do not see that as a challenge, I kindly refuse your offer."
Pep's answer summarized succinctly one of the main challenges of working with teams of humans. His years of coaching experience had taught him that one of the most difficult aspects of his work was not just figuring out a game plan but distributing the plan to his players. Pep's challenge was not simply one of communication—after all, it is clear that he was not interested inhaving players merely recite his plan. He wanted players to be able to act according to his plan in the heat of the game. The plan had to be internalized, and that embodiment was what made coaching challenging.
Pep's problem involves physical embodiment, although in this case it involved embodying knowledge and knowhow in players, not just information in atoms. Just as products are made of matter and information, sports teams—and firms and musical groups—are made of people who embody knowhow and knowledge. Knowhow and knowledge are embodied in the nervous system of the soccer players, but also in the team as a whole, since players need to process information collectively to coordinate offensive maneuvers and repel attacks. The knowledge and knowhow embodied in a soccer team, however, hinge largely on the team's diversity, since goalies and strikers (much like drummers and guitar players in a band or like quarterbacks and offensive linemen on a football team) differs in the individual knowhow they possess. This means that the players contribute to the team by adding knowledge and knowhow that is not completely redundant with that of others. This diversity is what allows teams to perform actions that cannot be achieved by single individuals, whether it's the actions needed by a soccer team to win a game or those needed by an orchestra to play one of Beethoven's symphonies. This division of knowledge and knowhow, not just labor, is what endows networks of people with fantastic capacities, such as those required by soccer teams to win the Champions League. Yet, as we will see in this chapter and in the nextones, accumulating knowledge and knowhow in a network of people is not easy. Ultimately, it is this challenge that makes the growth of information difficult and the problem of economic development hard.