My mother gave me a piece of advice that I carry to this day:  “No man is an island unto himself.”

However, in baseball, like business, we tend to fall in love with heroes and individuals.  If we learned anything from this week’s historic world series, it is the reinforcement of my mother’s sage advice:  teams, not individuals, achieve success.  Behind every successful individual, I promise, there is a supporting cast that is making the success possible.

The San Francisco Giants are a collection of talented, team oriented, individuals.  They played the postseason in the only way they knew how, as a means of survival:  they played as a team.  There was not one hero, but a fabric of players that stepped up at various moments, and secured the ultimate prize.

Heroism, despite our lust for it, in baseball, and business, is damaging.  In the presence of a hero, a team relies on that hero too heavily, being lulled into the belief that the hero will carry the day.  The hero, in turn, takes on a disproportionate amount of responsibility, and credit, for the successes and failures of the team, which damages the culture of a business or the clubhouse of a baseball team.

Think of the most successful technology companies today–Google, Apple, salesforce.com.  They have their perceived hero’s.  Page and Brin, Steve Jobs, and Marc Benioff.  And these men are great leaders, no doubt.  However, their leadership skills are more about how they enable their teams than about their individual execution of ideas.  Behind the curtain, these wizards have teams of people that are tightly integrated, motivated, aligned, and brilliant.

The Giants, ironically, experienced the “fate of the hero,” in their quest for the World Series in 2002.  Barry Bonds was the hero;  he shouldered the vast responsibility of carrying the team; the clubhouse was fractured;  and, despite getting close, the Giants lost the world series in a tragic fashion.

Agile businesses should take note of the Giants story.  Agile consulting services, Bluewolf’s speciality, tailors its approach towards ensuring that the team wins, not the individual.  And the team is the collective group of individuals–customer, partner, vendor–that shares a common, well-defined goal, allowing individuals to serve their roles, contribute at the appropriate moments, trusting the makeup of the team and supporting each others individual needs.

The words of Brian Sabean, the Giants GM, give clarity to their success and to the secret of success in business.  ”There’s a reason they won the World Series,” he said, glancing out at his players. “They won it because they were respectful, they showed great humility through the whole ride and they were like junkyard dogs in a fight.  It took a village mentality to raise this team. In spring training, we had the mentality that there was no difference between the bat boy and the owner.”

Now let’s play ball.