I wouldn't say that building around one pokemon is the most effective style, as there are several ways to go about team building. However, for the sake of example, I'll explain how I built my Azelf team, which was very, very successful in setting up Azelf to sweep.
I needed multiple ways to beat Azelf counters, mainly Blissey, Cresselia, Weavile and Heatran. The first thing that came to mind was Lucario, who also makes a pretty good Tyranitar switch in. Specs Lucario with Vacuum Wave (which was very uncommon at the time) could switch into Weavile, and beat Cresselia and Blissey. Now I also needed a back up way to beat Blissey and Cress. So I added Life Orb Gengar with Explosion. Shadow Ball beat Cresselia, and I could bait Blissey with Focus Blast, before finally exploding. Now I had my core, Azelf, Lucario and Gengar.
I added SingBliss, because back then I really needed something to fall back on to take hits, and SingBliss is just plain awesome, probably not the best addition though.
Now, I was Gyarados and Garchomp weak, and I also needed Stealth Rock. Mesprit came along, wielding Thunderbolt, Ice Beam, Stealth Rock, good defenses and Levitate. Finally, I added Scarfchomp, since I had an open slot, and I was lacking speed and physical power. Now the team on paper is super-weak to pursuiters and such like Weavile and Tyranitar, yet I had absolutly NO problem with them, thanks to the way the team was designed to take them down.
This team took quite a while to build, but was a very, very successful team, that had quite an impressive record on Shoddy. As of today, it is the second best team I've built.
Also, I would like to point out something else in this post that's important. On paper, my team is incredibly weak to Tyranitar, Weavile, and Pursuiters in general. However, I never had any problems with any of the before mentioned pokemon, except for TyraniBoah (which was really, really annoying). Azelf swept an estimated 66%-70% of my wins, which means the team pulled off what I needed it to, despite the horrendous weakness's on paper. Basically, even if something looks a little off on paper when building a team, you HAVE TO TEST to actually see what's truely wrong.