Muthukrishna urges companies to move past lone-genius thinking

Michael Muthukrishna is urging business leaders to stop treating innovation as the work of rare individuals and to focus instead on the systems that let ideas spread. In a commentary for Fortune, he argues that companies risk misreading how progress happens when they build cultures around star thinkers rather than shared knowledge.

Muthukrishna writes that the internet is one modern example of what he calls the “collective brain”: the societies, networks and platforms that allow people to pass along information and learn from one another. He says that collective process long predates 5G, smartphones and online platforms, even though business culture often frames breakthroughs through famous names.

He points to Henry Ford, Bill Gates and current artificial intelligence figures including Sam Altman and Dario Amodei as examples of how public attention gathers around individual leaders. According to Muthukrishna, that focus gives executives an incomplete model of success and can obscure where leaders are most useful inside organizations.

Historical examples

Muthukrishna uses the history of calculus to challenge the idea that major advances come from one isolated mind. He notes that Isaac Newton is often credited with the discovery, while German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published a method in 1684; he says the two are now widely understood to have reached related discoveries independently.

He makes a similar point about evolution. In his account, Alfred Russel Wallace developed a theory of evolution by natural selection in 1858, before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859.

For Muthukrishna, those cases show that discoveries rest on earlier bodies of work and wider cultural inheritance. He argues that calculus depended on algebra and older mathematical traditions, while natural selection was likely to emerge through more than one thinker because the necessary ideas and evidence were already circulating.

What he says leaders should do

Muthukrishna says the practical lesson for companies is to design better connections. He argues that leaders should act as “network architects” by linking people with relevant skills, information and problems rather than relying on a single person to generate the best ideas.

He recommends that organizations map where knowledge sits across teams, identify gaps and reduce silos. In the Fortune commentary, he suggests rotating employees across groups and holding regular sessions where teams bring live problems for others to examine.

His view is that ideas become more useful when they can move across an organization. He says underconnected companies may already have people who can help solve problems elsewhere, but their knowledge remains trapped inside team boundaries.

AI as part of the argument

Muthukrishna also frames generative AI as a tool for drawing on stored human knowledge. He cites large language models such as Claude and ChatGPT, saying they can help surface links that no single person could hold in mind.

He also mentions synthetic audience tools such as Electric Twin, which he says can combine behavioral data, cultural data and a company’s own data to test how specific groups might respond. He argues that such tools can widen the range of perspectives available to teams.

Muthukrishna acknowledges the criticism that large language models work from existing data and recombine ideas. His response is that human creativity also depends on recombination, with new ideas emerging from prior ones.

He says companies should use AI to test product plans, challenge narrow decision-making and compare choices against broader perspectives. He adds that people should still make the final judgment.

Fortune states that opinions in its commentary pieces belong to the authors and do not necessarily reflect the publication’s views.

This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.