In contrast, we hardly ever think about the valiant efforts of the extended engineering team who config- ured the undercarriage of the airplane; we don’t hear stirring tales of the key meetings at which a group of executives took the bold decision to focus final assembly of their product in Scunthorpe rather than Antwerp; nor do we hear of the late-night meetings at which teams of managers reconfigured the customer service experience for shoppers in their newest sales outlet in Wembley.
But the truth is, that while solitude and introspection are critical for us to develop creative new ideas, if all work was done alone, we wouldn’t have progressed much beyond the Palaeolithic age.
There’s something truly moving about the way that the collective activities of tens or hundreds of thou-
