Work with People Brighter than You Posted on February 20, 2006 David J. Kupfer (bio) talks about the need to work collaboratively in a diverse environment.

The areas of expertise are very interdisciplinary, so you can't think that you have all the knowledge base to do it yourself anymore. Things are too complex, so you've got to figure out what areas you want to work in to help you with your research, and then you've got to identify people who are willing to help you who are also smart, which leads to another sort of obvious statement. If you can't tolerate working with people brighter than you, then this is not a good business to be in because the only way you're probably going to solve the problems you want to solve intellectually is to work with brighter people. That's one thing.

Second thing is while we're talking about characterizations of individuals, never work just with guys or just with gals, or, men and women. If you don't mix them, you don't have a social climate in which people collaborate, and people miss that sometimes when they're thinking about a group working on a problem. An obvious thing that leads to is never work with just Ph.D.s or just M.D.s. That's a big mistake also.

You need to bring to bear not a huge village or huge family, but you need to bring to bear people who have different areas of expertise; you've got to be gender blind and degree blind in order to get these things done. Even with what you think is a "small problem", it's not as small as you think.

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