My perspective of “top talent” and how to develop them have changed over the years. Reading The War for Talent by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod and Chasing Stars by Boris Groysberg encouraged me to look beyond the idea of individual development and focus on the systems that make that development possible. I’ve come to see that most “stars” succeed not just because of who they are, but because of the environments that bring out their best. When you take someone out of that context, their performance will change. How it will change depends on the organizational culture. Developing talent now means building the right conditions for people to thrive, not just finding the brightest names.
Human capital in context
Both The War for Talent and Chasing Stars challenge the idea that talent is a free‑floating individual asset that can simply be bought and plugged anywhere. Groysberg’s study of more than 1,000 Wall Street equity analysts shows that “mobile stars experienced an immediate degradation in performance,” and even five years after moving, they underperformed similar stars who stayed put. That pattern points toward human capital theory’s distinction between general skills (which travel) and firm‑specific or team‑specific capital (which is embedded in local relationships, processes, and information flows), a distinction anticipated in Theodore Schultz’s argument that knowledge and skill are a form of capital whose value depends on the context in which they are deployed (https://shadrogers.substack.com/p/the-farmer-economist-who-taught-us) .
Seen this way, the “star system” of corporate life looks less like a market for interchangeable geniuses and more like Schultz’s world of situated investments in human capital. The returns come not just from the individual but from the match between that individual and a particular institutional setting, including its tools, colleagues, information, and routines.
This made me think about the power law and if this challenges that notion. However, research on the power law of performance reinforces, rather than refutes, this picture.
Across domains, output is often highly skewed, with a small minority of individuals generating a disproportionate share of results, consistent with findings that individual performance frequently follows a Paretian, or power‑law, distribution rather than a normal curve. But the fact that performance is unevenly distributed does not mean that stardom is freely portable. Groysberg’s data suggest the same individual can slide down the distribution when removed from the systems, colleagues, and information flows that once amplified their contribution.
Deming, systems, and the war for talent
The classic war‑for‑talent playbook, which includes ranking and yanking, aggressively poaching stars, and segregating “A players” for disproportionate rewards, rests on the assumption that performance lives inside the person rather than in the person‑in‑system. Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge and his estimate that the vast majority of performance and quality problems “belong to the system” directly challenge that assumption, shifting responsibility from “fixing the people” to improving the design of work, processes, and management.
Groysberg’s findings reinforce Deming’s critique: when analysts leave the systems that supported them, their output often looks less like a repeatable trait and more like a context‑dependent outcome. In Deming’s terms, organizations that fixate on rating individuals while ignoring the surrounding system are mistaking common‑cause variation for individual merit or failure, and in doing so, they risk tampering with the very processes that enable sustained performance.
Resource‑based view and portability
From the resource‑based view (RBV) of the firm, sustainable advantage comes from resources that are valuable, rare, inimitable, and non‑substitutable, and from how those resources are bundled and deployed. Chasing Stars highlighted that stars moving to firms with comparable or weaker capabilities saw larger performance drops, while moves to stronger platforms, or moves made with an intact team, attenuated or eliminated the decline. That pattern is exactly what RBV would predict if the real “star” is the configuration of systems, colleagues, reputation, and routines, not just the individual standing in the spotlight.
This lens also explains why the war‑for‑talent ideology sometimes produced brittle cultures and disappointing returns. Organizations tried to buy what looked like a rare, inimitable resource (a star) without recognizing that much of its value was co‑owned by the prior firm’s embedded capabilities, echoing Schultz’s insight that investments in human capital yield returns only when supported by complementary structures and opportunities. When those complements are missing or weaker in the new setting, the same individual cannot recreate previous performance, no matter how large the signing bonus.
Learning culture, psychological safety, and stars
Work on learning cultures and psychological safety adds an important social‑psychological layer to these economic and quality‑management frameworks. Amy Edmondson’s research defines psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk‑taking and shows that it predicts team learning behaviors, which in turn enhance performance, while Adam Grant’s work on learning cultures emphasizes that high standards combined with psychological safety enable people to admit mistakes, seek feedback, and rethink assumptions in ways that compound capability over time.
Deming’s emphasis on driving out fear, breaking down barriers between departments, and building quality into the system rather than blaming individuals sits squarely in this tradition. Analyses of the “talent mindset” that grew out of The War for Talent argue that an obsession with stars and constant internal competition can erode accountability, discourage honest error‑reporting, and weaken collaboration, whereas teams with psychological safety and systemic support are more likely to surface problems early and prevent serious failures, even if their members are not individually labeled as elite.
What this means for talent professionals
For talent leaders, the combined message of these frameworks and findings is consequential. Exceptional performance is often far less portable than commonly assumed, especially when it rests on firm‑specific and team‑specific human capital of the kind Schultz highlighted, and on systems that Deming would argue are management’s true lever for improvement.
The most durable “talent strategy” is to invest in the systems and cultures that turn solid hires into stars, instead of assuming that buying stars will fix weak systems. Building psychological safety and a learning culture is not a “soft” add‑on; it is a core mechanism through which human and organizational capital translate into sustained performance, and it is entirely consistent with both Deming’s quality revolution and Schultz’s vision of human capital as the central engine of long‑run productivity