On Gala, Ewa Agonyin, and great collabos

After a hard day’s work, a man begins his journey home but just like yesterday, and the day before yesterday, the traffic stretches all the way. The band of Satan pounds hard in his head. His stomach growls impatiently and he knows he must appease it. So he calls a Gala hawker and buys two. He looks around to find the ‘other half’ but is unsuccessful. So he munches away, and as he does so, he begins to choke, and he chokes, till his head is a few coughs short of exploding.

Pause.

This is not a work of fiction. This is a man who has suffered the consequence of not striking the balance. He had great Gala, but he choked nonetheless, because the great wingman, the one thing that would have struck the balance, was missing –La Casera. Because Gala and La Casera make a great team, and they’ve taught me a thing or two about teamwork.

A Group and a Team are not the same thing.

A lot of the time, we mix this up. A group is made up of individuals who work independently to achieve an organisational goal. A team is made up of individuals who might work independently, but will collaborate over time to achieve a goal.

Take the Gala man for example, he bought two units of Gala, but yet the second sausage couldn’t save him from coughing. A third one would probably have choked him to death. A carton of Gala still wouldn’t have stopped, but just about anything drinkable would have;

Because, a team is made up of individuals who complement each other.

According to research, all the teams who have won the FIFA world cup are made up of players with different roles who work together as one unit (yeah, serious research).

Think of a football team with 11 strikers and no goalkeeper. Disaster.

The best teams are made up of people with different skill sets who complement each other, with their roles in the team clearly defined. For example, there’s the Art Director and the Copywriter, the Operations person and the Finance person, the Danfo driver and the conductor, even stuff as basic as rice and stew.

The ‘Me’ dies for the ‘We’ to be born.

I’ll give you one example. Ewa Agonyin is a specially made bean porridge popular in Southwest Nigeria. People love their Agonyin, but most people love it best with Agege Bread, because the bread and beans combo is what creates the mouthgasm.

In fact, its arguably one of the greatest tag teams in Lagos, high up with greats like the Gala and La Casera, Pap and Akara, etc.

Till date, it remains a mystery why two bread sellers hawk together when they can find better, more profitable partners.

There are great drummers, great violin players, and great trumpeters. But when they come together to form an orchestra and create music, that’s when the magic happens.