Chapter 5 Teamwork

We humans realized early that a team of average people can accomplish much more than the smartest person on the earth working alone. All of us have seen small teams of people work together and achieve great things. I think of a team as a group of people or an organization working together to achieve a common goal. So all small and big companies are teams. It is pretty amazing that we have successfully built some pretty amazing teams with 100s of thousands people like Walmart, IBM, Boeing and many other. Even bigger teams are the many governments that run our countries.

Are the teams that we call governments productive? It is so tempting to say no, specially in today world of political stalemate and conflict. Look at the big picture though. We have made huge progress as a species with the world being run by these so called unproductive teams. If someone from 200 years ago was to look at the world today, they would not stop praising the governments of today. We get so used to the conveniences made possible by the governments, and even demand these as our rights, that we forget the enormity of the accomplishments. They have successfully delivered mega cities, where complicated traffic patterns allow people to move from one place to another, utilities that allow each of us to live in comfort, work like we have never worked before and have levels of productivity that no human has had before.

But can the governments do better? Yes they can and they need to for us to survive the next 1000 years. The world has been becoming more peaceful over time. The cooperation between governments is increasing. But mostly the society today expects governments to deliver infrastructure services, maintain law and order and ensure comfortable life styles for its citizens. There is no reason for countries to fight with each other. Future survival requires utmost cooperation between all concerned. We need a new kind of team. A really big team with goal of ensuring the survival of human species. You can call it the United Nations or another creative name. This team will be responsible for building the human informant database, exploring outer space and other planets to create alternate survival environments. Infact the goal of this new team is not so trivial that it can be detailed in this blog.

But the level of team work we humans can achieve grows at its own pace. The first step to this growth is the realization of a need for this team. The innovations in social networking technology is an important stepping stone toward this goal. We can now collaborate with a large number of people across the world. It is already helping in scientific research and growth of multiple national companies. As the distances shrink, the team sizes will grow and we will move closer to our goal of one big government.