There is a persistent story in this industry that great work comes from great individuals. It is a flattering story, and it is mostly wrong.

The work I am proudest of came out of teams where the credit was collective and nobody was counting. That is not sentiment. It is mechanism. When credit is shared, people take risks they would not take if their name were on the line alone. They hand off, they build on each other, they let the better idea win regardless of whose it was. Star systems quietly tax all of that. They make people protective of ideas that should be common property.

Commercial change is supposed to make an organisation stronger. Too often it does the opposite — it strips out the culture that made the work worth doing in the first place, in the name of efficiency or visibility. The harder discipline is to change what needs changing while protecting that culture deliberately.

You can build a brand on a star. You cannot build an organisation on one.