In the early 1980s, Champion International Corporation decided to build a state-of-the-art paper mill in Quinnesec, Michigan. Its aim was to become the leading low-cost producer of quality paper. But most of its competitors shared the same aspiration, and, like Champion, their solution was to invest heavily in big machines. So CEO Andrew Sigler sought another means of differentiating his company from its rivals: a new set of management and operations systems that would help the mill workforce to meet the highest standards of productivity, yield, and quality.

What this meant in practice was that the mills would be run by teams—in those days, an unproven and risky approach. Champion’s quest for team performance eventually spread to dozens of mills and took a decade of effort. There were many stops, starts, and stumbles along the way, but Sigler’s determination and his executives’ conviction ensured that Champion stayed the course. The mills were transformed both technologically and culturally. In 1995, Jaakko Pöyry, a consulting firm that benchmarks worldwide paper-mill performance, rated Champion’s mills in Quinnesec and Brazil as among the best in the world.

Perhaps surprisingly, it was not until four or five years after this transformation that team performance...