Teamwork Is Overrated

So before the talk, I interviewed doctors, scientists, and engineers. They all had very different experiences but almost unanimously agreed that teamwork is overrated. The engineers acknowledged that they need teamwork to get the job done, but most of them explained that their jobs were relatively mundane and involved replicating the work of pioneers from long ago. When I asked them what happens to the geniuses in their field today, they said most get bogged down by the team and are seen as troublemakers when they stray from what has become a very structured way of doing business. They all told me they would be nothing without inventors such as William Shockley who invented the transistor and courageously brought us from the era of vacuum tubes to the semiconductors that define computer hardware today. The message I got from the engineers was basically that their jobs are all about teamwork but without innovators, there are no jobs there in the first place.