When people choose not to work somewhere, the somewhere isn’t a company, it’s a team. If we put you in a good team at a bad company, you’ll tend to hang around, but if we put you in a bad team at a good company, you won’t be there for long. The team is the sun, the moon, and the stars of your experience at work. As Edmund Burke, the Anglo-Irish writer and philosopher put it as far back as 1790, “To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections.”

When we push on the data, and examine closely its patterns and variations, we arrive at this conclusion: while people might care which company they join, they don’t care which company they work for. The truth is that, once there, people care which team they’re on.

These aren’t mere gripes. They are evidence of a fundamental disconnect in incentives. Employees in market-facing roles know that if they fail to satisfy user needs, they’ll get fired by their customers. Corporate staffers, by contrast, can only be fired by their overlords, so that’s where their loyalties lie. Internal administrators suffer little or no penalty when they inflate costs, offer substandard services, or insist on compliance at any cost.

Intrinsic rather than instrumental motivation is required at all levels of the successful business and is a hallmark of such businesses. Disney employees are not told to go and make money for Disney. They are told to make sure the guests have fun. They feel they are part of a great business. The result makes a great deal of money for the Disney Corporation. It is all that way around.

Selfishness of motive, narrowness of objective and instrumentality of behaviour are corrosive of collaborative and cooperative activities such as parenthood or education or scientific research.

Henry’s realization about wanting to be around people also teaches us an important lesson—not about retirement, but about work itself: the people we work with matter. It’s important to look around our workplaces and appreciate those coworkers who add value to our lives. Since work is often so shrouded in financial concerns, in stress and worry, the relationships we develop there sometimes don’t get their due. We often don’t notice how significant our work relationships really are until they’re gone.