When I was in the midst of researching what caused cross-functional teams to succeed — and finding that many of them failed — I discovered a deeply dysfunctional development project in a huge multinational IT company. The company had invested $100 million in the project, which involved three divisions. Most of the team, and even some executives, knew the project was a dead-end two years before the company finally pulled the plug. As one middle manager told me, “No one was willing to go to management and say, ‘Let’s redeploy everyone, including myself, and do something else because this project isn’t working.'”