Sublime

Disney, John Andrew Rice, and Steve Jobs not only headed Great Groups, they found their own greatness in them. As Howard Gardner points out, Oppenheimer showed no great administrative ability before or after the Manhattan Project. And yet when the world needed him, he was able to rally inner resources that probably surprised even himself.

Max Levchin, my co-founder at PayPal, says that startups should make their early staff as personally similar as possible.

Socratic leadership attracts and keeps stronger talent than autocratic leadership does.

Supervisors in growth-mindset companies saw their team members as having far greater management potential than did supervisors in fixed-mindset companies. They saw future leaders in the making.

Two people from the same organization tend to perform alike. That means the best performers are clustering in some organizations while the worst performers are clustering in others. This is the effect that software pioneer Harlan Mills predicted in 1981: While this [10 to 1] productivity differential among programmers is understandable, there is

surgeon.

In each case, a brilliant man put his company in jeopardy because measuring himself and his legacy outweighed everything else.

Yet a finding from our research is instructive: the key variable is not how (or how much) you pay, but who you have on the bus. The comparison companies in our research—those that failed to become great—placed greater emphasis on using incentives to “motivate” otherwise unmotivated or undisciplined people. The great companies, in contrast, focused