If you need proof, look no further than the divorce rate, which shows that people can't even put together teams of two. Or the Colorado Rockies, who demonstrate that no matter how highly paid executives are, they are capable of having the judgment of mulch.

The best person ever at putting together a team? That would be Jim Phelps of the Impossible Missions Force, who every week on the old "Mission: Impossible" TV show assembled a high-efficiency interdisciplinary team and orchestrated their actions in a symphony of mayhem. Of course -- and many people are surprised to hear this -- Jim Phelps was a fictional character. Most of the rest of us, I suspect, are not. Still, any project manager can learn from his example.

Lesson 1: Assemble your team only after you know what needs to be done. Jim Phelps would wait for the smoke to clear from his combusted tape recorder before he flipped through his picture album of operatives. If he thought the job would take some muscle, he would select bodybuilder Willy Armitage. But if the job involved infiltrating a children's folk dance company to overthrow an Eastern European despot with a bad accent, Willy would get left at home. The same person who's great in one assignment may fail miserably elsewhere. If you doubt this, just assign your company's Chief Visioning Officer to a complex software installation, sit back, and see how much he contributes to the group's productivity.

Lesson 2: Communicate clearly. Jim Phelps' team didn't need a two-hour PowerPoint presentation to figure out what to do. Thirty seconds in a phone booth was sufficient. That's because his directive wasn't: "We have issues with General Escobido that require attention and resolution in as timely a manner as is feasible considering our constrained resources." No. It was instead: "Stop Escobido immediately."

Lesson 3: Multiple personalities give you several team members for the price of one. Take a cue from the character played by Martin Landau. Rollin was an expert on impersonation and could become anyone he wanted to be on a moment's notice. Executive champion, solution champion, IT champion, operations champion, assistant-to-the-CVO champion. Why waste so many people's time on meetings when you can find one person -- and every company has at least one -- who is more than happy to decide what's in the best interests of everybody?

Lesson 4: Set tight timelines. Anyone who has seen just a few "Mission: Impossible" episodes knows that destroying the reputation of a corrupt African revolutionary strongman demands precision timing. So it is with your team. Timelines, sequences, and deadlines must be firmly set and rigorously followed whether you're rolling out a new software system or trying to prevent the tape recorder from self-destructing before you can get it out of the pocket of your pants.

Lesson 5: Challenge the team to succeed by giving it a name that suggests it can't. "Mission: Pretty Difficult" is for underachievers. For your upcoming BPM installation, I think "Committee for the Optimization of Corporate Performance, Extermination of the Competition, and Rule of the Universe" has a nice ring to it.

Now you know everything you need to put together the perfect team. That's your mission. Get to it, because this page will self-destruct in 10 seconds.

Dan Danbom writes humor for a number of publications. His latest book is "Humor Meets Your Workforce: Make Laughter One of Your Organization's Goals."