It's Not the How or the What but the Who

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The Best and the Rest

What’s the difference between a typical performer and a highly productive one?

Back in the 1990s, I reviewed the research on this issue and was pretty amazed by the findings. For people in simple jobs—manning an assembly line, for example—a “star” worker was about 40 percent more productive than a typical one. The distribution was bell-shaped (what statisticians would call normal or Gaussian), with a standard deviation of about 20 percent; most people were close to the average and only a few performed well above or well below it. Strikingly, however, I found that the distance between the best and the rest grew exponentially with the complexity of the job. A top life insurance salesperson, for example, was 240 percent ...