A few people really can generate a disproportionate share of the output. But the lesson is not to worship the “vital few.” It is to understand why performance becomes concentrated, protect the people carrying the load, and build an organization where more people can eventually carry it.

If you look closely at almost any team, you will probably recognize the pattern.

There are a few people everyone calls when the problem is difficult, the deadline is close, or something has gone badly wrong. They seem to know where to look, what questions to ask, and how to get complicated work moving again.

Then there is everyone else.

That does not automatically mean the rest of the team is unproductive. It means that knowledge work often produces uneven results, and a relatively small number of people can account for a surprisingly large portion of the output.

This is the useful insight behind Price’s Law.

The dangerous mistake is turning that observation into an excuse for building an organization that depends permanently on the same handful of people.

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Derek de Solla Price noticed a striking pattern while studying the history of scientific publishing. In his 1963 book Little Science, Big Science, he proposed that roughly half of the publications in a scientific field could come from the square root of the total number of authors.

With 25 authors producing 100 papers, for example, the idea would suggest that about 5 authors account for half the papers.

That is where the familiar workplace interpretation comes from: a small percentage of people can produce a disproportionately large percentage of the results.

There is something valuable in recognizing that pattern. Research into creative and knowledge-based work has also found that individual performance can be highly skewed rather than neatly distributed around an average.

But the square-root formula itself should not be treated as a universal law of organizational performance.

The original observation concerned scientific publication patterns, not employee productivity, talent, or whether certain people are “worth more” than everyone else. Research testing Price's specific formulation did not support the neat equation as a general rule.

That distinction matters.

You can acknowledge that performance concentrates without pretending that a mathematical formula tells you exactly how your team should be managed.

Tip: Use Price’s Law as a question rather than a verdict: where is performance concentrated, and what organizational conditions are creating that concentration?

Once leaders decide that a small group is responsible for most of the important work, it becomes tempting to treat those people differently.

The strongest performers receive exceptions. Their bad behavior gets tolerated. Their workload keeps expanding because they are reliable. Meanwhile, weaker performers can quietly become viewed as disposable.

That is where a useful observation turns into a damaging management philosophy.

A high-performing employee who produces exceptional results but consistently damages everyone around them is not necessarily an organizational asset. The output of one person can be overwhelmed by the damage they create across the team.

The so-called “brilliant jerk” is particularly dangerous because concentrated performance can become a justification for tolerating toxic behavior.

If one person is always delivering, leaders can convince themselves that the behavior is simply the cost of having exceptional talent.

But there is another cost: dependency.

If the organization continually relies on the same person, that person becomes harder to replace, colleagues become less capable of operating independently, and even more work gets routed toward the same individual.

The organization has not solved its concentration problem.

It has reinforced it.

Tip: Never confuse exceptional output with organizational health; evaluate whether your strongest people are making the people around them stronger or making the organization increasingly dependent on them.

One of the most important findings in the article comes from Boris Groysberg’s research into more than a thousand star Wall Street analysts.

The assumption was straightforward: if someone is exceptionally talented, their performance should travel with them when they move to another company.

The evidence complicated that assumption.

When star analysts moved between firms, their performance often declined, sometimes for years. The organizations they joined could suffer as well.

But the exceptions reveal something much more useful.

Stars who moved into companies with stronger capabilities, or who brought members of their teams with them, did not show the same decline.

That tells you something important about exceptional performance.

It does not necessarily live entirely inside an individual.

Performance can be connected to relationships, institutional knowledge, colleagues, systems, and organizational capabilities.

The person may be excellent, but the environment is part of the equation too.

That should fundamentally change how you look at the people carrying your team.

If someone is producing extraordinary results, do not simply conclude that they are extraordinarily talented.

Ask what surrounds them.

What tools do they have? Who do they work with? What knowledge have they accumulated? What decisions are they empowered to make? What systems make their work possible?

Because some of what looks like individual brilliance may actually be organizational capability that has become attached to one person.

Tip: When someone consistently performs at an exceptional level, study the environment around their performance instead of assuming the entire explanation is individual talent.

This is where the concept becomes painfully familiar.

Think about the people who are always given the difficult assignment.

They are the default reviewer. The person brought into every escalation. The one who gets the complicated customer problem. The person everyone asks to “just take a quick look.”

Each request seems reasonable on its own.

The problem is that they all land on the same people.

Competence attracts responsibility, and responsibility attracts even more work.

Eventually, the organization starts treating its strongest people as an unlimited resource.

That is backwards.

If someone is carrying an unusually large portion of the organization's output, their value should make leadership more protective of their capacity, not less.

Their calendar should not automatically become the dumping ground for every urgent request.

Their reward for being dependable should not be an endless supply of additional weight.

And this is not merely about preventing burnout.

It is about protecting the organization's future.

If one person leaves and several important projects suddenly become unstable, the problem did not begin on the day that person resigned.

The dependency was already there.

Tip: Look at the people everyone relies on and examine their workload, interruptions, and responsibilities; reliability should create opportunities for growth, not an excuse to keep loading the same person.

A team that depends heavily on a handful of people can look extremely productive right up until something changes.

Someone leaves.

Someone becomes unavailable.

A new project arrives.

The organization grows.

The workload changes.

Suddenly, the hidden dependency becomes visible.

This is why the “vital few” should be treated as a concentration risk, not simply celebrated as proof that the team has star performers.

You already know who the important people are.

The harder question is whether the organization is deliberately making other people capable of taking on more.

That requires investment.

People need opportunities to solve meaningful problems, exposure to difficult decisions, good managers, useful feedback, and enough trust to develop judgment.

If all the important work stays with the same few people, everyone else remains inexperienced precisely because they never get the opportunity to become more capable.

Then leadership points to the resulting performance gap as evidence that those people were never capable in the first place.

That is a self-fulfilling cycle.

Tip: When the same names repeatedly appear on the hardest problems, ask who else could be deliberately developed to handle the next version of those problems.

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There is an important nuance here.

The answer is not to pretend everyone contributes exactly the same amount.

They do not.

Some people will naturally have greater expertise, stronger judgment, broader experience, or an unusual ability to solve difficult problems. Trying to eliminate every difference in performance would be unrealistic.

The goal is to widen the circle of people capable of producing exceptional results.

That is a completely different leadership objective.

Instead of asking, “Who are our stars?” and then building everything around them, ask:

“How do we create more people who can become stars?”

That shifts the focus from identification to development.

And it changes how leadership success should be measured.

A leader should not necessarily feel successful because three people can carry an enormous amount of work.

A stronger outcome is having ten people who can carry meaningful responsibility instead of three people carrying almost everything.

The organization becomes less fragile, the strongest people gain more room to focus on high-value work, and the middle of the organization becomes a source of future capability rather than an overlooked population.

Tip: Protect your strongest people while deliberately developing the broad middle; reducing dependency is more sustainable than endlessly squeezing more output from the same high performers.

This may be the most important idea in the entire discussion.

Exceptional performance is not always something an employee arrives with fully formed.

It can be developed through experience, opportunity, relationships, systems, and the quality of leadership around the person.

That means leaders have more influence over the performance distribution than the cynical interpretation of Price’s Law suggests.

If people are given little trust, few meaningful challenges, weak feedback, and no opportunity to build judgment, they are unlikely to suddenly become exceptional.

But give someone a difficult problem, the support to work through it, the authority to make decisions, and the opportunity to learn from the outcome, and their capability can change.

The “few” are not necessarily a permanent caste.

People can move.

The real leadership challenge is creating an environment where they have a reason and an opportunity to do so.

Tip: Look beyond current performance when developing people; potential often becomes visible only after someone is given a problem substantial enough to reveal what they can actually do.

So consider your own team.

You probably know exactly who you would worry about losing tomorrow.

Now ask a harder question.

What are you doing to make sure the organization would be stronger if those people eventually left?

Not because they are replaceable.

Because they should not have to be irreplaceable.

If your strongest engineer is the only person who understands a critical system, the answer is not to simply give that engineer another critical system.

If one manager is the only person who can resolve a particular category of problem, the answer is not to keep routing every problem to them.

If three people are always working late to compensate for everyone else, the answer is not to congratulate them for their commitment.

The answer is to build capability around them.

Document knowledge. Create opportunities for others to take ownership. Spread difficult problems. Protect the strongest people's focus. Develop judgment in the people who are ready for it. Make exceptional performance transferable rather than trapped inside one person's head.

That is the leadership job Price’s Law leaves behind.

The useful lesson is not that a few people do most of the work.

It is that performance can become concentrated—and when it does, you have a choice.

You can exploit the concentration until the people carrying the load eventually break or leave.

Or you can treat that concentration as information about where the organization is strong, where it is fragile, and where the next generation of capability needs to be built.

Tip: If your organization depends heavily on a small number of people, don't celebrate the dependency; use it as a signal to protect those people and build more people who can carry the load.

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