What does it take to make a thousand full professors, each king of their own empire, work together as equals? Sijbrand de Jong, former president of the CERN Council, reveals how the world's largest scientific collaborations actually function, why formal rules of procedure matter more than goodwill, and what particle physics can teach every organization about scaling cooperation. Subscribe for more episodes on collaboration at scale. Sijbrand de Jong's career is a masterclass in escalating collaborative complexity: from 60-person experiments as a master's student, through hundreds-strong collaborations at CERN's OPAL experiment, to presiding over the CERN Council , the governing body that approves billion-euro accelerator projects requiring decades of commitment from member states. Along the way, he founded research institutes, directed a pre-univ ...