Because I apparently have trouble saying no, I’ve been a member of several boards of directors (or, in some cases, boards of trustees, although the differences, as far as I could tell, were negligible). Some of these boards were more dysfunctional than others. Eventually I noticed that as the size of the board increased (i.e., number of people), so did the dysfunction. According to the research, the same is true of nearly all work teams.

So now, as a writer, I ...