Does teamwork really work? Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• Groupthink: the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility.
• Despite its bad press, teamwork and its cousin, collaboration, are ubiquitous buzzwords in the current business realm.
• As is the case with many a slogan in the corporate world, most of those involved secretly hate it yet will rarely admit it.
• In our marketing & advertising racket, for instance, teamwork is a euphemism to describe the pesky and pervasive practice of letting a creative director take all the credit for a successful campaign in which dozens of people took part.
• Teamwork is the way we sugarcoat the fact that the client and the CEO of the agency will appear on trade pubs and festivals trophy in hand when a campaign they did everything at their reach to kill wins an award.
• Socialized failure, privatized success.
• Hey, quit whining.
• Grow a pair, you little hipsters.
• The day will come when you will be proudly wearing other people’s medals.
• Start your own agency or shut your trap.
• This kind of faux teamwork has a silver lining though: if someone is stealing the team’s limelight and accolades are won, at least it means that the collaboration produced something meaningful.
• An awful lot of times, corporate teams produce nothing of value.
• Or nothing at all.
• IMHO, this outcome occurs when the team itself can set its own rules and its own deadlines.
• In such cases, teamwork becomes a self-sabotaging proposition condemned to a recurring scenario of false starts.
• A dog chasing its own tail.
• Or, to use a more graphic zoological metaphor, a snake eating its own rear end.
• Mind you, I’m not declaring the demise of teamwork here.
• Quite the contrary.
• Teamwork is here to stay.
• Let me ‘splain.
• We are confronting a future in which human labor will be, at best, a nice-to-have.
• Frosting.
• An afterthought.
• In most cases human labor will be useless, a nuisance.
• We will need to find ways to protect our sense of self-worth and out collective sanity.
• Imagine a world in which all our needs and responsibilities are taken care of by machines.
• In an unconscious way, just for the sake of finding something to do with our meaningless sorry lives, we will allocate more and more human resources to jobs requiring less and less output.
• How many humans will be needed to change a lightbulb come the day when nothing requires human labor?