No Geniuses Required — How Ordinary People Beat Talent

His high school basketball team was no collection of prodigies — which is precisely why they discovered something. Unable to win on individual skill, they radically clarified roles: the runners, the coordinated defenders, the set-play executors. Design versus talent — and on a tour of Nagasaki they swept teams they had never beaten.

From this came his organizational creed: "My team needs no geniuses. I build teams where ordinary people relentlessly polish their own specialty." I trust this philosophy deeply. A genius-dependent organization dies the day the genius leaves; an organization of well-designed roles absorbs any absence.

Above all, an ordinary person given the right post performs like a genius there. Our company is built this way — masters of their stations, not geniuses. What is your specialty, and do you have a place to polish it to its limit?

What do you work for?