WAY 43Be a Talent Magnet: Striving to be the best team makes the best people want to work with you.
About the Way
Acquiring talent and retaining talent are two of the top challenges for all groups—and especially for moonshot organizations. In the book Leading Organizations, which covers the top 10 timeless issues facing leaders, the authors start their list with this talent challenge.1 The authors found that superior talent is up to eight times more productive than usual job hires, and this performance difference widens dramatically by job complexity.2 As moonshot work is inherently complex and complicated, the pressure to ensure a high‐performing team becomes even more critical.
Founder Steve Jobs of Apple strongly believed in the importance of talent, once saying,
In most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is, at most, two‐to‐one. But, in the field that I was interested in—originally hardware design—I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. Given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. That's what I've tried to do.3
Management guru Jim Collins made a similar point: “Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”4
A group's ability to bring out the best in everyone is a prime indicator of its potential to innovate. Keeping ...
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