Products are created by teams, yet traditional (Western) organizations are built around individual accountability. You are held accountable by your manager for your individual performance. This gets reflected in practices such as assigning work to individuals, individual performance reviews, and individual rewarding. These practices promote individ

In the large projects Brooks was speaking about, where teams of hundreds or thousands are working against schedules and initiatives with mutual dependencies, the size of the effort bounds the speed of the work, and the overhead of communication and coordination swamps the impact of individuals, even the geniuses.