...one last word of advice: build on the ordinary and expect the extraordinary. Build your team of people around the talents and skills of the ordinary person, not just around the special skills and talents of those few extraordinary people. After all, there are many more ordinary people - more [...] C. William Pollard

One of the unique traits that makes humans unique, different from animals, is our ability to use our skills and talents to shape material things to reflect our individuality - and when we do this, we create property. Material things in and of themselves are not property; they become property only when humans creatively find ways to use them productively. [...] Charles Colson

You, the hiring manager, meet the candidates, perhaps for lunch, explain what the job needs are, ask a few questions about their experience and interests, sell the job a bit, and respond to questions. If it looks like a mutual "go" for one or more finalists, your assistant organizes a day of interviews with some key members of your team. Current practice for "organizing" the interview sequence is like a fourth-grade fire drill. On the day of the interviews, two scheduled interviewers have crises to address, and so substitutes are thrown in at the last minute. The candidate is asked to be flexible, interviewing with a partial group. Most interviewers are ill-prepared, fumbling through candidate résumés for the first time --"uh ... tell me about yourself." Interviewees consider this day a hodgepodge of redundant, superficial, shallow interviews. But it's typical.Bradford D. Smart, Ph.D. Topgrading - How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching and Keeping the Best People , (p. 79), Prentice Hall, Inc., 2005

Enron recruited big talent, mostly people with fancy degrees, which is not in itself bad. It paid them big money, which is not terrible. But by putting complete faith in talent, Enron did a fatal thing; it created a culture that worshipped talent, thereby forcing its employees to look and act extraordinarily talented. Basically, it forced them into the fixed mindset. And we know a lot about that. We know that people with the fixed mindset do not admit and correct their deficiencies.Matthew Syed Bounce - Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham and the Science of Success , (p. 142), HarperCollins, 2010

So greatness requires extraordinary hard work on a sustained basis. But some people, even those who also have high levels of natural talent, who do the hard work over a period of years, fail to break through and attain the level of greatness they hoped to achieve. What's missing? James M. Citrin