The Best People Dilemma: Rebooting Talent in the Age of AI

“Great companies hire great people.”
That was one of the central lessons from Built to Last and a generation of MBA thinking.

But in 2025, this advice feels less like strategy and more like myth.

The “best people” are not evenly distributed.
They are not easily identifiable.
They are not always available.
They are often not loyal.
And most importantly —
they no longer represent a static category.

The AI era changes what “best” even means.

It’s time to reboot the talent philosophy that powered a previous business generation but no longer fits the reality companies operate in today.

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1. The Original Assumption: Great Companies Win Because They Hire Great People

Built to Last argued that:

• great companies were disproportionately staffed by elite talent
• founders built cultures that attracted the “best of the best”
• strong values increased loyalty
• excellence compounds when surrounded by excellence

The implicit logic was straightforward:

Hire the best → build a culture of excellence → outperform competitors.

But this logic hides a fatal flaw:

Only winners can attract winners.

And most companies — especially startups — begin as nobodies.

The companies needing elite talent the most are the ones least capable of acquiring it.

This is the original Best People Dilemma.

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2. The Reality: Great People Are a Luxury, Not a Starting Point

Today:

• early-stage founders lack brand gravity
• most candidates fear joining unproven teams
• charismatic leadership is not a scalable strategy
• top-tier talent lives in power-law clusters
• elite performers gravitate to elite institutions
• compensation arbitrage is shrinking
• loyalty is fragmented across identity, not employer

The Built-to-Last logic assumed that culture attracts talent.
The modern truth is:

Credibility attracts talent.
And credibility is earned through achievement, not declared through vision.

This means the classic advice is backwards:

Companies do not hire the best people to become great.
They become great so they can hire the best people.

AI intensifies this dynamic.

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3. AI Redefines “Best People” — Skill No Longer Differentiates

In the pre-AI age:

• experience
• technical knowledge
• domain expertise
• functional performance
• pedigree

…were meaningful differentiators.

But now:

• AI closes the skill gap
• mediocre performers become decent performers
• decent performers become good performers
• good performers become great performers (with compound learning)
• elite performers extend their frontier even further

The distribution compresses from the bottom
while stretching at the peak.

Meaning:

The “best people” are no longer the most skilled —
they are the most contextual.

They possess:

• systems thinking
• architectural reasoning
• abstraction
• problem-shaping
• interdisciplinary literacy
• communication clarity
• adaptability
• judgment
• synthesis

AI amplifies these traits.
It cannot replace them.

This shifts the talent model entirely.

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4. The Zuckerberg Case: When “Best People” Become an Arms Race

Recent reporting shows that Mark Zuckerberg spent over $100 million to hire away elite AI researchers and engineers to fuel Meta’s superintelligence efforts.

This has profound implications:

• Elite talent is now a capital-intensive resource
• Great companies are siphoning talent away from everyone else
• The frontier is being defined by a tiny cluster of organizations
• AI research is becoming a geopolitical asset, not a job function

This creates a global stratification in talent availability:

• Top 0.1%: poached by FAANG, AI labs, national institutions
• Next 5%: join mid-tier tech or late-stage unicorns
• Remaining 94%: work in normal companies trying to stay relevant

This is the brutal truth:

Most organizations will never have access to the so-called “best people.”

But AI offers a new path.

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5. The Real Talent Strategy: You Don’t Hire Great People — You Create Them

Great performers emerge through:

• long-term mentorship
• domain clarity
• access to tools
• well-designed systems
• compounding internal learning
• structured knowledge frameworks
• environments that reward exploration
• opportunities to stretch judgment
• psychological safety
• organizational memory

This is the core reboot:

The “best people” are not found — they are built.

Built internally.
Built on systems.
Built through compounding.

This is where AI changes everything.

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6. AI Accelerates the Conversion of Talent Into Builders

With AI:

• onboarding compresses from months to days
• knowledge transfer becomes continuous
• decision assistance fills context gaps
• skill acquisition is instantaneous
• iteration speed multiplies
• performance becomes more predictable
• feedback can be real-time and situational
• personal development becomes compounding

AI does not replace people.
It replaces the constraints that held many people back.

This unlocks a new paradigm:

Average performers can become great in the right systems.

Great performers become elite if the organization compounds their intelligence.

This is what Built to Last never anticipated.

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7. The New Definition of “Best People”

In the AI era, the real differentiators are not:

• raw IQ
• technical depth
• elite pedigree
• years of experience

These still matter — but they’re no longer decisive.

The new “best people” are those who demonstrate:

1. Contextual Intelligence

Ability to understand the system they operate in.

2. Problem-Shaping Ability

Defining what matters before solving anything.

3. AI Fluency

Knowing how to use tools to remove constraints.

4. Adaptive Thinking

Updating mental models quickly.

5. Cultural Resonance

Understanding how to collaborate, persuade, align.

6. Systems Architecture Skills

Seeing interactions, not tasks.

7. Judgment

The ultimate irreplaceable human skill.

This is what companies must optimize for — not pedigree.

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8. The Reboot

Built to Last taught us that great companies succeed because they hire great people.

The AI era teaches the inverse:

Great companies succeed because they build great people.

The talent equation is no longer about identifying outliers.
It is about constructing systems that:

• accelerate capability
• remove bottlenecks
• compound learning
• reduce variance
• create internal elites
• retain agency
• unify context
• multiply judgment

The “best people” still matter —
but they are no longer the prerequisite to greatness.

They are the product of it.

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Recommended Readings in the Talent Series

• The Best People Dilemma
• From Coders to Builders
• The Myth of the Best People