Managing Superstars
I wrote about high performance in sport vs. business in my last post and promised I would follow up on talking about how to manage superstars. Superstars are exceptional performers, a long way down the tail of the power-law curve that shows the distribution of performance across skill set in question (playing football, writing code or selling houses etc.).
Superstars perform many times better than average members of the same profession. This is not always easy to ascertain and may seem unwarranted based on the measures available (e.g. number of acting awards won vs. money earned by movies they appear in). The exact nature of the measure and its suitability in comparing people is not the point, though. The fact is that performance does vary enormously along a power-law curve.
So if you can accept that there are always superstars in each profession and if you can see that their exceptional performance […]