“A Players” And The Mathematical Myth Of Exceptional Talent

Who doesn’t want “A players” – those exceptional talents who excel across multiple dimensions of ability and personality – on their team Job descriptions routinely call for candidates who are hyper-smart, calm under pressure, strategic thinkers, exceptionally organized, emotionally intelligent, and consistently high performers.

That’s just wishful thinking, sadly.

While the desire to only hire A players is understandable, it’s the modern equivalent of hunting for the unicorn. Medieval hunters, travelling with blessed virgins (thought to be the only ones able to tame unicorns), sought them in vain.

The thing about the human unicorns is that they are about as real as the mythical kind. Here’s the math to prove it.

Talent Follows a Power Law

In the business world, exceptional talent manifests as individuals who can consistently make superior strategic bets under uncertainty, successfully navigate complex organizational dynamics, and create value through disruptive innovation.

And of course, provide the leadership to grow an organisation capable of delivering.

If I throw out some examples, we know them already preceisely because there aren’t very many of them: Steve Jobs demonstrated an uncanny ability to anticipate and shape consumer desires while building Apple into a technological and cultural powerhouse. Warren Buffett’s investment record isn’t simply the result of dedicated practice – it represents performance so far beyond the mean that it cannot be explained by effort alone.

Or consider Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of Bumble. She showed exceptional vision (identifying the need for a female-first dating app), technical execution (building a platform that could scale), marketing (creating a distinctive brand in a crowded space), and organizational leadership (building a company that delivered on the above).

If we consider each of her achievements to be a top 1% performance, the probability of finding all four in one person is 0.01⁴, or one in 100 million.

Truly exceptional performance operates on a different scale entirely. If we consider business talent as a combination of multiple independent skill or traits – being smart, having vision, having good self-control, and being resilient, disciplined and hard working – the probability of excelling in all areas becomes multiplicative rather than additive.

Exceptional performance at work is defined by a few traits only – being smart, having good self-control, and being resilient, disciplined and hard working. Crunch the data on those who excel in those attributes and you’re looking at about only around 8 people in a million (0.0085% of the population).

The Math of Exceptional Talent

A brand new paper by Gilles Gignac sought to model these traits in the population using simulation methods (N=20 million cases). He wondered “Just how many people are exceptionally smart, organised and even-tempered?”

1. Even if you’re just looking for someone who’s above average (nothing spectacular, just better than 50% of people) you’re cut the pool from 100 down to about 16.

2. Want someone who’s remarkable (those scoring a single standard deviation above the mean on all three traits? Now you’re fishing in a pond containing fewer than 1% of all people.

3. Truly exceptional individuals – those scoring two standard deviations above average across all three dimensions – and you are hunting for only 8 people out of everyone living in Florence Italy.

4. But individuals who are what Gignac called “profoundly exceptional” and in the top 0.15% of people on all three traits: there might be a single individual in the whole of Mumbai (pop 20,000,000).

To put that in context, its similar odds to:

· Being struck by lightning ( 820 people per billion)

· Finding a pearl in an oyster (about 1 in 10,000)

· Becoming a Fortune 500 CEO (about 3 people per million)

Expectations about the prevalence of A players are wildly disconnected from the statistical reality of human capability.

“Unheimlich”: You Cannot Grasp The Rarity Of Exceptional Talent.

There are probably about 200 billion trillion stars in the universe. And while you are used to the three dimensions of length, width and depth, in quantum mechanics there may be up to 11 dimensions.

Can you picture that number?

Consider that of the billions of humans who lived over the last century, only Albert achieved Einstein-level breakthroughs. And it’s the same in business. The combination of technical insight, design sensibility, market understanding, and leadership ability that Steve Jobs displayed would each be rare traits individually. The probability of finding them all in one person? Vanishingly small.

The whole thing is, as the Germans say, “unheimlich” (too weird).

We struggle to accept that exceptional talent is actually as rare as it is, mostly because of our own biased belief that as a person we think are mostly better-than-average, which is, of course, statistically impossible.

But I Want A Unicorn!

The reality is that most organisations are going to be recruiting ordinary folks who will do as well as anyone else. But there are some things you can do to boost the chances of success.

1. Recalibrate beliefs about the available talent pool. When a job posting demands excellence across multiple dimensions, it’s statistically targeting a vanishingly small portion of the population.

2. Do you really want an A player? There are downsides to being super-bright and stable. They may find it difficult to relate to others who process more slowly, or to moderate their standards when working with others and need to actively work on empathizing with those who struggle with situations and tasks they find easy.

3. Make conscious trade-offs. Knowing in advance you are unlikely to find Steve Jobs means you must prioritize the truly essential capabilities for specific roles. Since we are all flawed in some way, it means accepting that with high intelligence and creativity comes less organisation. Mold the role to the talent available.

4. Invest in skill-building. If perfection is impossible, spending to coach and upskill the existing workforce is a better investment than hunting unicorns. Sadly, because its less flashy and requires time and hard work, creating systems and processes to enable good performance more often loses out.

5. It takes a team. Nearly every significant human achievement is the result of teamwork. Greatness isn’t the product of solitary genius, but of ordinary people working together in extraordinary harmony. Consciously building teams of complementary strengths is a better bet than waiting for Oppenheimer to send in a resume.

Rejoice! It’s a World of Flawed and Not-Quite-Perfect People.

The ancient Greek Diogenes was said to have walked through Athens in broad daylight carrying a lamp, and when asked what he was doing, he answered, “I am looking for an honest man.” Corporate unicorn hunters are engaged in a search that’s more philosophical than practical.

Here’s my challenge to leaders: Next time you’re tempted to write a job description seeking perfection across multiple dimensions, pause and ask yourself: Are you looking for an actual human being, or are you writing a screenplay for a superhero movie?

The real art of talent management isn’t finding perfect people – it’s creating the conditions where normal, flawed, trying-their-best humans can do exceptional work together.