Making Star Teams Out of Star Players

michaelsogrady
Jan 2, 2013
2 min read

When it comes to an organization’s scarcest resource—talent—the difference between the best and the rest is enormous. In fields that involve repetitive, transactional tasks, top performers are typically two or three times as productive as others.

Justo Thomas, the best fish butcher at Le Bernardin restaurant in New York, can portion as much fish in an hour as the average prep cook can manage in three hours. In highly specialized or creative work, the differential is likely to be a factor of six or more. Before becoming chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts prevailed in 25 of the 39 cases he argued before the Court. That record is almost nine times better than the average record of other winning attorneys (excluding solicitors general) who have argued before the Court since 1950. (For other examples of star productivity, see “What ‘A’ Players Bring to the Table.”) Across all job types, we estimate, the best performers are roughly four times as productive as average performers. That holds in every industry, geographical region, and type of organization we’ve examined.

Why, then, do companies so rarely bring together a team of star players to tackle a big challenge? The easy answer—indeed, the conventional wisdom—is that all-star teams just don’t work. Egos will take over. The stars won’t work well with one another. They’ll drive the team leader crazy.

We think it’s time to reconsider that assumption. To be sure, managing a team of stars is not for the faint of heart. (The conventional wisdom is there for a reason.) But when the stakes are high—when a business model needs to be reinvented, say, or a key new product designed, or a strategic problem solved—doesn’t it seem foolish not to put your best people on the job, provided you can find a way to manage them effectively?

We have seen all-star teams do extraordinary work. For example, it took just 600 Apple engineers less than two years to develop, debug, and deploy OS X, a revolutionary change in the company’s operating system. By contrast, it took as many as 10,000 engineers more than five years to develop, debug, deploy, and eventually retract Microsoft’s Windows Vista.

Common sense suggests that all-star teams would have two big advantages:

Sheer firepower. If you have world-class talent of all kinds on a team, you multiply the productivity and performance advantages that stand-alone stars deliver...