Gardner and Matviak confront one of the most persistent barriers to collaboration: incentive systems that reward individual achievement while expecting collaborative behavior. Most organizations say they value collaboration but promote, compensate, and recognize individuals based on solo metrics — individual billable hours, personal sales targets, or single-author publications. This creates a rational calculation for every employee: collaboration costs me time that I could spend on activities that actually advance my career. Gardner argues that until incentives are redesigned to explicitly reward collaborative outcomes, collaboration will remain an aspiration rather than a practice, no matter how many team-building workshops the organization runs.