Succeeding at a project in an organization is like pushing a boulder up a hill that is too heavy for any single person to lift. It doesn’t make sense to ask what the “root cause of success” is for an effort like this, because it’s a collaboration that requires the work of many different people to succeed. It’s not meaningful to single out a particular individual as the reason the boulder made it to the top. ¹

The same is true of failure. When it is a collaborative effort there will never (or at least very rarely) be a single point of failure.

Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer - Niccolo Machiavelli