Edward Lazear, an economist here at Stanford, came up with the [tournament model of careers]. If you think about a typical tennis or golf tournament, it begins with a bunch of people in the first round, whose winners then advance to the second round, etc. until you finally get to the end. In the initial rounds, you’ve got some people who are really good and some people who aren’t. By the time you get to the higher echelons of the tournament, the people who aren’t very skilled have been weeded out.
If you think about performance in organizations as being a function of motivation times ability – how smart you are and how hard you work – what makes a difference at the top level is effort; ability has been equilibrated. If somebody does 500 backhands a day and somebody else does only 100, then in the long-term, the person who does the more backhands is more likely to win.
In one of our studies, we found that effort and ability by themselves don’t appear to explain much, but the combination really matters. In other words, people who work harder, who are smarter, are going to have greater success.
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