Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance – Review

Posted by Anne Hamill

One question which has always intrigued me is whether people become stars because of their own skills or because of the teams they’re in. This book by Boris Groysberg set out to answer it through examination of the careers of more than 1000 Wall Street “star analysts”.

Whilst almost entirely focused on Wall Street, there were a number of take-aways which I felt made the book a worthwhile read –

• In terms of success, even for the brightest stars moving organisation could result in a drop in performance which continued five years after moving.
• Being an excellent analyst is as much down to the team and systems that support you (your environment) as your own judgement (your ability).
• If you hire someone externally they may not be as good as you’re expecting as, for example, they have to rebuild all of their support networks to get the same quality of information they need to perform well.

Women in the financial sector tend to use more external sources of support and information so are less affected by this drop in performance, enabling them to make successful moves to other companies much quicker than their male counterparts.


You can make your organisation ‘sticky’ – so that people can’t necessarily take their high performance with them to your competitors.

Overall, if you’re involved in talent recruitment – particularly in pulling in talent from outside your organisation – I’d highly recommend taking a look at Chasing Stars. It contains some very hard evidence about how shifting to new companies can hold careers back, and will give you some guidance as to how to make sure your external recruits are set up to make the change as quickly and painlessly as possible. It also might make you think twice about whether you want to chase stars – or grow your own top talent.