A-Players


Most people who are very good at their job are driven up a wall by co-workers who are not that good. They usually have two options: either shut up and fret; or call a spade a spade and risk getting termed arrogant (To avoid confusion, let me clarify: I am not talking about people who have delusions about their abilities; rather I am talking of people who really are exceptionally good at their job).

Steve Jobs pointed a not so obvious risk of hiring not-the-cream employees way back in the ‘80’s: “A-players hire A-players, B-players hire C-players”. Apart from the obvious benefit of having A-players (they do their job very well), A-players don’t settle for good, they want great. Which opens the door to a whole world of new opportunities. In many cases (but not all), the self-confidence that comes up with knowing they are that good also allows A-players to be willing to ask others for help in areas they don’t know. They don’t view asking for help as a sign of weakness.

Okay then, so why don’t all companies hire A-players then? Partly, A-players can (and do) pick and choose the companies they work for, so it’s hard to get them. Secondly, most companies don’t need all A-player teams (they just need a few A-players, the rest just need to be good enough to do modern day versions of assembly line work).

So if you think you are an A-player and find yourself surrounded by B and even C-players, maybe your company doesn’t need the crème de la crème. In which case, you need to either make your peace with your co-workers. Or you need to switch to the company that hires only the very best.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more