If you think about people, there are two categories of high-quality people: there is the ammunition, and then there are the barrels. You can add all the ammunition you want, but if you have only five barrels in your company, you can literally do only five things simultaneously. If you add one more barrel, you can now do six things simultaneously. If you add another one, you can do seven, and so on. Finding those barrels that you can shoot through — someone who can take an idea from conception to live and it’s almost perfect — are incredibly difficult to find. This kind of person can pull people with them. They can charge up the hill. They can motivate their team, and they can edit themselves autonomously.
I’d heard Ben Thompson (of Stratechery) refer to this idea a few times in various podcasts, so I decided to look it up. This seems to be from a talk called How To Operate that Rabois gave in 2014. The entire talk is very good, and this concept he introduces there is one great takeaway.
This concept rings as broadly true to me. When I look back at all the places I’ve worked at, or seen closely, I can easily identify the very few barrels there were.
One important caveat Rabois mentions in the talk—not included in the quote above—is that barrels are very context-dependent: a barrel in one company may not be a barrel in another.
While the talk is ostensibly directed at CEOs of startups, I think this point applies equally well to any part of the organization, down to the level of individual teams.
I’ve started looking at teams through this lens now, and it has been clarifying. I’m going to be on the lookout for barrels, and am thinking about how to create a culture that can put a lot of ammunition behind those rare barrels.