Yep. It's called
The Apollo Effect.
Basically, what happens is you hire a bunch of really smart people who are
independently capable of high performance. The
problem is when you put these people together to solve a problem -- as a group -- they fail to do so
because their intelligence slows them down. They question everything, they create a billion PowerPoints, they turn everything into a debate, they constantly try to one-up each other, etc.
Microsoft suffered from this for years. They probably still suffer from it in some form. Anyways, they had (and still have) a bunch of employees with doctorates and masters trying to work with each other. So for example, at one point, they had a Windows team that was responsible for figuring out how to get their desktop and phone business 'talking' to each other. This was before the disaster that was the Nokia acquisition. From what I was told, the team spent well over 10 million dollars in a little under 6 months (about a quarter and a half), and they came up with, literally,
nothing.
Not even a single print out or a single document that said "this is the work that we've done in the last 6 months". A professor I had was hired to figure out what the hell went wrong, and it boiled down to The Apollo Effect.
This is what the Democrats are currently struggling to overcome. The party's values have attracted some really smart people ... which is fine, except that when you put so many smart people together you can and often do run into the above effect. It sounds backwards, but one of the best ways to get things done (in a group setting) is to have a few dumbf*cks in a team.
