Does teamwork really work? Part 3
January 23, 2018
By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com
- Oddly enough, as much as our culture pays lip service to teamwork, we tend to end up paying groupie tribute to illuminated individuals.
- It is not uncommon in the marketing & advertising racket, for instance, to let one creative director take all the credit for a successful campaign in which dozens of people took part.
- Happens in all walks of life.
- It is an ancestral human atavism.
- Our brittle brains seem to be wired that way.
- The groupie gene in our DNA is a very powerful one.
- Exhibit 1: the cult of Steve Jobs.
- An alleged egomaniac who, by some accounts, made a habit of stealing industrial secrets, taking credit for other people’s ideas and screwed all his business partners throughout his career.
- As did Mark Zuckerberg (allegedly).
- Vulnerable self-esteem.
- Too much to prove, apparently.
- Hey, don’t say that, there’s plenty proof of teamwork in modern life.
- Democracy is teamwork.
- Sure.
- An awful lot of folks, however, don’t seem to grasp the concept of democracy.
- They believe it is elected autocracy.
- Dictatorship by acclamation.
- In Latin America, of all places, there is indeed an organized attempt at bringing democracy to, well, democracy.
- It is called Partido de la Red (loosely translated as “political party of the network”).
- It is supposed to use social media to bring massive, real-time participation and transparency to the smoke-filled backrooms of legislative horse trading.
- They are sorta based on that old aphorism claiming that “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”
- If you are not part of the solution, you are a part of the problem.
- Hitler didn’t try to occupy Europe all by himself.
- An awful lot of Germans did his bidding or, at the very least, looked the other way.
- The Partido de la Red’s still unaccomplished intention is to appoint elected officials and lawmakers who will only do what constituents on social media tell them to do.
- Politicians without personal opinions.
- Conduits of public opinion devoid of any vestige of bias.
- A great idea in theory.
- Not too sure about how it’d play out in real life.
- Imagine a world in which everybody is giving their opinion about everything all the time.
- No law would ever get approved.
- Nothing would ever get done.
- When I say nothing I mean nothing as in nobody would water their plants.
- Or feed their pets.
- Or take showers.
- Or work.
- Essentially what happens to people on Twitter.
- A never-ending debate over the most inconsequential topics.
- Then again, this might be the solution for the future of mankind.
- A world in which all labor is taken care of by machines.
- In such a scenario, we will need little menial jobs to keep our sanity.
- We will need distractions.
- Bickering over mundane, irrelevant minutiae might be a way to find meaning for our lives.
- Eg; debating ad nauseam over the proper pronouns to address non binary gender individuals.
- It will be either that or an existence of 24/7 drooling self-medicated stupor and virtual reality porn.