The Mathematical Machine: People = Returns
All models are wrong, but some are useful.
The best companies aren't product companies or strategy companies. They're mathematical machines that turn certain types of people into exponential returns.
This sounds abstract, let me make it concrete: If you're sitting on cash, you're failing. If you're paying dividends, you're admitting you can't find better uses for capital. If your shareholder value is growing at 8% YoY while the S&P 500 does the same, you're actually destroying value – you're offering the same returns with much higher risk.
Most people think business is about strategy, product-market fit, or execution. All of that matters, but the underlying truth is simpler: the most powerful capital isn't money. It's people who can turn money into dramatically more money.
After working in different enterprises, founding my own companies, investing in multiple startups, I personally group people in distinct types of value creators in any organisation.
The Builders: Your 2% Who Create Step-Changes
Builders are the people who seem crazy to everyone else because they can't stop creating things. They don't just ship features – they try to re-invent the business.
Most companies totally misunderstand them. They try to make Builders optimize existing systems, which is like asking a novelist to spend their life editing other people's books. It might work for a while, but it kills something essential.
What's fascinating about Builders is that they don't separate work from life the way most people do. To them, building new things is like breathing. When they leave companies, everyone assumes it's about money, it’s only 10% true. Usually it's more basic: they need to build, they need to own their work, and they need to feel that creation is valued and the best way of measuring the value our society come up with → $ value.
Builders are simultaneously your most valuable and most disruptive assets. They'll ignore processes, challenge assumptions, and make middle management uncomfortable. But they're also the only ones who can create true step-changes in value.
The Conductors: Your 5% Who Make Things Happen
Conductors are fascinating because they're almost invisible until you know what to look for. They're not always the ones with the official authority – they're the people who somehow make things happen by connecting the right people and navigating the invisible networks that actually run organisations.
What makes Conductors special is that they can read organisational dynamics like brilliant engineers read code. Where everyone else sees bureaucracy and obstacles, they see paths to get things done. They treat complex organisations like their own orchestra.
You can spot a Conductor by looking for projects that somehow succeeded despite impossible organizational odds. When you find one of these successes and ask around, you'll usually discover a Conductor quietly orchestrating in the background – building coalitions, unblocking bottlenecks, making the impossible look inevitable.
Conductors are why good strategies actually get implemented instead of dying in committee. They're how cross-functional projects succeed instead of getting bogged down in turf wars. They're the reason innovation happens despite the system rather than being killed by it.
The Core Team: Your Essential 90%
Core Team members aren't the people who will change the world, but they're the ones who keep it running. They're competent, reliable, and take pride in their work. They see work as a way to support their life, not as life itself. This isn't a criticism – stable operations require exactly this mindset.
Here's what's particularly interesting: this hierarchy of capabilities works in only one direction. Builders can often be excellent Conductors when needed, and both Builders and Conductors can do Core Team work effectively when required. But the reverse is rarely true. It's like a one-way capability ladder that you can climb down but rarely up.
The Coasters: Your Hidden Value Destroyers
Then there's a fourth group we need to discuss – the Coasters. They're different from Core Team members in a crucial way. Core Team members actually do the work. Coasters are experts at looking busy while adding minimal value.
What makes Coasters particularly dangerous is their sophisticated camouflage. Instead of clear commitments about what they'll deliver, they offer elaborate explanations about why simple things are complex and why most initiatives face insurmountable obstacles.
The really interesting part? Coasters sometimes rise in organisations precisely because they spend their energy on appearing valuable rather than being valuable. While Builders are building, Conductors are conducting, and Core Team members are executing, Coasters are perfecting corporate camouflage.
Why This Matters Now
We're entering an era where the gap between high-performing and mediocre companies is about to become exponential. AI will amplify the capabilities of your Builders and Conductors while making Coasters increasingly obvious. Remote work has made it harder to spot who's actually creating value versus who's just managing perception.
The companies that understand these archetypes – and more importantly, know how to identify and empower their Builders and Conductors while filtering out Coasters – will have an insurmountable advantage.
The question isn't whether you have these people in your organization. You do. The question is whether you can see them clearly enough to bet your company's future on them.