A players: weapons, good operators, workhorses. The term gets thrown around constantly. But we haven't nailed what it actually means.

Sports organisations have mastered elite talent acquisition. Scouts travel continents. Analytics departments run thousands of simulations. Millions get deployed for marginal gains.

The entire apparatus of professional sport asks one question: How do we get the best players?

Yet this obsession rarely extends beyond the field.

The same organisation that agonises over pressing metrics will hire a B-grade practitioner who "seems good enough." Those who wouldn't tolerate an underperforming athlete keeps mediocre staff for years.

This isn't hypocrisy. It's a blind spot.

Athletes perform in public. Every match. Their output gets quantified, analysed, compared. Performance gaps become undeniable.

But the staff shaping those athletes? Their impact is diffuse. Delayed. Harder to isolate. Without visible, measured performance, standards drift.

Here's where it gets interesting. You already know how to fix this.

You've built the machinery for identifying elite talent. You operate under brutal constraints - salary caps, squad limits, draft systems - that force clinical precision.

These constraints are a forcing function for innovation. You cannot afford dead weight on a 25-man roster. You cannot hide a bad signing when caps are tight. The system demands excellence.

But most sports have no such limits on high-performance staff.

This freedom can create complacency. It becomes easier to hire an extra person to "fill a hole" rather than finding the A player. Someone who could do the work of three because they're brilliant.

The constraint asymmetry has created a capability asymmetry. You're world-class at player talent identification. You've overlooked staff talent curation.

The opportunity? Apply what you already know to the area you've been ignoring.

Steve Jobs learned this the hard way. The performance difference between average and best isn't 30%. It's 50 to 1. Sometimes 100 to 1.

A players working with A players create multiplicative value. B players create friction, frustration, stagnation.

David Ogilvy's metaphor became gospel for Buffett and Munger: "If each of us hires people smaller than we are, we become a company of dwarfs. If each of us hires people bigger than we are, we become a company of giants."

Jobs put it directly: "A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can't indulge B players."

Here's how the cascade works. A few B players slip through. They're competent. Likeable. "Good enough." But A players find working with them frustrating. The best start looking elsewhere.

Meanwhile, B players preferentially hire other B players - people who don't threaten them. C players follow. Suddenly you have what Jobs called the "bozo explosion."

The mechanism is simple. And reversing it is hard.

Your competitors are making the same player investments you are. Same caps constrain them. Same markets. Same draft rules.

But they're probably not applying the same rigor to high-performance staff. They're not treating staff recruitment with the same intensity as list construction. They're settling for "good enough" in the rooms where players get developed.

As Li Lu, the only person Munger trusted to manage his money, notes: in any competitive game, you'll run into hardworking people. Hard work is table stakes.

The only edge?

Ensure your hardworking people are also the most talented, coachable, and obsessive.

This is your unfair advantage, hiding in plain sight.

Until next time,

P.S. Next week: Part 2. The resignation test that clarifies who's who in seconds. The A player traits that separate good from transformative. And the cultural dynamics that either attract excellence or quietly breed mediocrity.