The Myth of the Best People — And the Reality of Building Them

For decades, the executive mantra has been simple:

“Hire the best people.”

MBAs repeated it.
CEOs preached it.
Business books worshipped it.
Founders internalized it.

But this advice was never practical.
And in the age of AI, it is no longer even logical.

We now live in a world where:

• elite AI researchers cost $5–20M each
• Meta and OpenAI raid each other for talent
• startups cannot compete in these bidding wars
• remote work has dissolved organizational loyalty
• high performers optimize for impact, not employers
• the frontier is controlled by a tiny cluster of institutions

The “best people” were always a myth for most companies.
Now, even elite organizations struggle to access them.

It’s time to replace the myth with a better strategy:
stop searching for extraordinary people — build systems that create them.

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1. The Zuckerberg Paradox — Proof the Old Model Is Collapsing

Meta reportedly spent over $100 million hiring away AI researchers from competitors.

This was not a hiring strategy.
It was an arms race.

The implications are brutal:

• Elite talent no longer responds to normal incentives
• AI expertise has become a geopolitical resource
• Compensation at the top is unbounded
• The talent frontier is consolidating into a few institutions

If Mark Zuckerberg must spend $20M to hire one exceptional researcher,
what chance does:

• a Series A startup have?
• a traditional company have?
• any SMB have?

The answer is obvious:
They don’t.

The “best people” model no longer scales.

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2. Built to Last Never Anticipated This Talent Economy

Built to Last assumed:

• exceptional talent wants to join exceptional companies
• cultures attract elite performers
• the best people self-organize around vision
• values create long-term loyalty

But in reality:

• the elite are hunted, poached, and bid up
• loyalty is fragile
• vision competes with compensation
• values compete with opportunity
• stability competes with velocity

The modern talent economy is not cultural.
It is positional.

People do not join companies.
They join trajectories.

And if your company’s trajectory isn’t obvious,
no amount of “we hire the best people” messaging will compensate.

This is the modern Best People Trap:

You can’t attract elite people until you’ve already succeeded.
But you can’t succeed without elite people.

AI breaks this loop.

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3. AI Collapses the Skill Gap but Widens the Judgment Gap

AI equalizes:

• implementation
• execution
• research
• analysis
• coding
• writing

This compresses the bottom end of talent:

• average → decent
• decent → good
• good → very good

But the frontier — the top 1% — moves further away:

• judgment
• architecture
• systems thinking
• abstraction
• interdisciplinary reasoning
• prioritization
• strategic narrative

AI magnifies these higher-order skills rather than replacing them.

This means:

The best people become even more valuable —
but they become even more inaccessible.

So chasing them is the wrong strategy.

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4. The Country No Longer Needs More “Rockstars” — It Needs Better Systems

The majority of companies do not fail from lack of brilliance.
They fail from lack of:

• structure
• clarity
• rhythm
• alignment
• knowledge transfer
• memory
• decision hygiene
• process scalability

This is where AI quietly becomes the great equalizer.

AI can:

• embed institutional memory
• standardize execution
• accelerate learning
• bridge domain gaps
• guide decisions
• support onboarding
• create compounding systems
• elevate average performers into top performers

Remove constraints, and hidden potential surfaces.

The old model assumed:

“Only exceptional individuals can produce exceptional results.”

The new model is:

“Exceptional systems produce exceptional results from ordinary individuals.”

This is the future.

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5. Why Most Companies Must Build Elite People, Not Hire Them

The myth of the “best people” collapses in the face of four truths:

Truth 1 — Elite people cluster at elite institutions

OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, xAI, and similar hubs.

Truth 2 — Elite people follow elite trajectories

Not visions.
Not cultures.
Not slogans.

Truth 3 — Elite people are not loyal

They follow the frontier.

Truth 4 — You cannot recruit what you cannot afford

Not financially, not reputationally, not contextually.

This means:

Most organizations must construct their own elite talent.

Not hire it.
Not hope for it.
Not poach it.

Create it.

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6. How to Manufacture Excellence (The AI-Age Playbook)

There are only three ways to reliably create top-tier talent internally:

1. Systems That Compound Judgment

Decision frameworks, context engines, postmortems, AI copilots.

2. Knowledge Infrastructure

Playbooks, SOPs, domain memory, agentic guidance.

3. Problem-Shaping Cultures

Not task-taking cultures.
Not “follow the spec” cultures.

Companies that win in the AI era:

• teach people to think
• give them tools to accelerate
• give them context to align
• give them space to explore
• reduce friction to build

When constraints disappear, people transform.

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7. The Reboot

The original philosophy said:

“Build a great company by recruiting great people.”

The AI-era philosophy is the inverse:

“Build great people by constructing a great company.”

And then greatness compounds.

It’s not the individual that drives the system.
It’s the system that elevates the individual.

That is the secret the old business books never understood —
and the truth AI finally makes possible.

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Recommended Readings in the Talent Series

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