Team spirit is for losers, financially speaking. It is the glue that binds losers together - a strategy used by employees to shackle useful employees to their desks.
While lives may depend on team spirit and teamwork in professions like soldiering or firefighting, in commerce it acts as a subtle handicap and brake to ambitious individuals. Which, in a way, is what it's designed to do, as you will undoubtedly discover when your own managers trumpet the mantra of team spirit to those who will work for you in the not too distant future.
The truth is uglier. As the owner, you are in a team of one.
Anyone arguing that is an old-fashioned, dinosaur-like approach to business is either an academic or a teacher, probably at a fancy business school. They will be full of hot air and exciting theories concerning 'cooperative alliances', 'partnering' and 'new ways' of doing business.
Note that they will never have risked everything they own on the road to richness. In truth, they are sometimes ashamed to teach red-in-tooth-and-claw-entrepreneurial-capitalism to students or are projecting a kind of wish-fulfillment. Such professors may know a great deal about business theory and management techniques.
But they know nothing whatever about the getting of money.
