La Vida Robot

What factors are necessary for building a strong team? Joshua Davis, author of the article “La Vida Robot,” and Walter Isaacson, author of “Steve Jobs,” both have perspectives on how to build a strong team, which compare and contrast in many ways. Both authors described their ideas of what the factors to build a strong team are, and they were both similar and different in many ways. Davis’s perspective of what makes a good team is a team that has people with different abilities who can work well together. The article “La Vida Robot” by Joshua Davis focuses on four teenage boys from a poor district in Phoenix, Arizona, who enter a contest for underwater engineering with their robot “Stinky” and win against teams from M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Davis describes why he thought that they worked so well together as a team, which was because each of the four members played an important role on the team, because of their

Walter Isaacson states that a strong team requires people who are committed to and interested in the same ideas, and have different personalities than each other, along with different skills. The two main characters in Isaacson’s biography, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, started one of the biggest and most influential companies in the world together, also known as Apple. Isaacson states that one of the reasons why they were so successful was because both Jobs and Wozniak had a similar interest in computers and engineering. Another reason why they worked well together was because of their differences. “Jobs at times seemed to be driven by demons, while Woz seemed a naif who was toyed with by the angels...but...Jobs was awed by Wozniak’s engineering wizardry, and Wozniak was awed by Job’s business drive.” (Paragraph 37). This quote from the text states that the two had their differences, yet this made them a better team and, in the future, a better