The Vital Few

What Price’s Law gets right, what it gets wrong, and the job it leaves for you

In 1948, a young British physicist named Derek de Solla Price took a teaching post at Raffles College in Singapore. The college was still building its library, so Price ended up looking after its complete run of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, volumes reaching back to 1665, in his own home. He stacked them against the wall in chronological order. Then he noticed something odd about the stacks themselves. They formed a curve. Each era of science had produced more volumes than the one before it, and the growth was not gradual but exponential. That observation against a Singapore wall launched a career spent doing something almost nobody had thought to do, which was measuring science itself. Fifteen years later it culminated in his 1963 book Little Science, Big Science, which contained a claim that would outlive him. In any scientific field, Price argued, half the published papers would come from the square root of the total number of authors. By way of illustration, if 25 authors produced 100 papers, roughly 5 of them would account for 50. We call it Price’s Law, and you know I love eponymous laws.

Six decades later, that tidy little formula has become one of the most quoted and most abused ideas in management. Leaders love the half that flatters them. They tend to skip the half that obligates them. So my argument is not that Price’s Law is true. It is a three-part case: that concentrated performance is common enough to manage, that the square root formula is too shaky to worship, and that wherever performance concentrates, leadership inherits an obligation it almost never fulfills. Protect the people carrying the load, understand the system helping them carry it, and build more people who can.

A Real Pattern, a Tempting Story

The idea sticks for a good reason. Leaders feel this pattern in their bones, and they are not imagining it. Decades before Price, Vilfredo Pareto had documented the stubborn concentration of income and wealth across countries. Joseph Juran later turned that observation into the management shorthand we now call the 80/20 rule, and the phrase he coined for the small group driving most of the results was the vital few and the trivial many. Modern research points the same direction. A large study of researchers, entertainers, politicians, and athletes found that individual performance does not follow the tidy bell curve most HR systems assume. It is highly skewed. Output in creative and knowledge work is lumpy. It clusters. A few people really do produce a lot.

Take an engineering organization of 36 people. The square root of 36 is 6. If Price’s rule applied to that organization, those 6 would produce roughly as much as the other 30 combined. Say that out loud in a room of managers and watch the heads nod, because it matches what they see every day: the same handful of names on the hardest problems, the same people the team turns to when something is on fire. The nodding is exactly where the trouble begins, because recognition feels like understanding, and it is not the same thing at all.

Here is where most writing on the subject stops, usually a sentence before drawing a conclusion that does not follow. Start with the formula itself. When the square root claim was finally treated as a hypothesis and tested against real publication data, the results did not support it. Bibliometricians largely set it aside in favor of more flexible descriptions of a pattern that is real. Price’s tidy equation is not. Management kept the tidy equation, where few people check the original evidence.

Then there is the leap. Going from “half the publications come from the square root of authors” to “a few people do all the work and everyone else is dead weight” is a leap. And you do not have to take my word for it. Even Price’s grandson, Thomas DeMichele, has written that the popular workplace version has drifted away from what his grandfather actually measured, which was publication patterns among scientists, not a verdict on who works hard or who has talent. When DeMichele went looking for rigorous studies supporting the version that lives on keynote slides, he could not find good ones.

I have made a related point before, in The Measurement Trap, about how the most confidently repeated lines in management are so often misattributed or stripped of their original meaning. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” was not Drucker, and Drucker would have winced at it. Price’s Law belongs in the same drawer. The aim is not to debunk it. The aim is to take the swagger out of it before you pick it up, because a half-true idea carried with full confidence is precisely how clever people talk themselves into foolish things.

How the Law Gets Weaponized

Watch what happens once a leader fully buys the cynical reading. A series of quietly corrosive moves tends to follow. The bottom of the distribution gets treated as disposable. Stack ranking can harden into something close to contempt. And the people anointed as the vital few begin to operate under a separate set of rules, because surely the rules were written for everyone else.

This is the soil in which the brilliant jerk grows. I have argued before that the talented but toxic teammate is a terrible trade, because the damage they do to the people around them eventually swamps whatever they produce on their own. A misread Price’s Law becomes the permission slip. If Dana ships more than anyone, the reasoning goes, then Dana’s habit of cutting people down in reviews must be the price of genius. So you let it slide. And in letting it slide, you teach everyone watching a single, durable lesson: output buys impunity. The brilliant jerk does not merely damage morale. They make the organization more dependent on the one person least willing to build capability in anyone else, which is to say they take your concentration risk and quietly make it worse.

There is a deeper problem with the cynical reading, though, and it took a Harvard researcher and a decade of Wall Street data to expose it.

The Part Nobody Puts on a Slide

Boris Groysberg spent years on a question that ought to unsettle anyone who treats top performers as free agents carrying their value around in a backpack. With his colleagues, he tracked more than a thousand star Wall Street analysts and laid out the results in a Harvard Business Review article called The Risky Business of Hiring Stars. The finding was blunt. When a star jumped from one firm to another, the star’s performance often dropped, sometimes for years. The group they joined tended to suffer rather than improve, and even the market value of the new employer could take a hit. The expensive genius turned out to be far less portable than the bidding war had assumed.

The exceptions were just as revealing. In a fuller academic study, stars who moved to firms with stronger capabilities, and stars who brought members of their teams along, showed no significant decline at all. Their performance had not lived entirely inside them. Some of it lived in the capabilities and relationships around them, and when those came along, so did the results.

The reason matters. A star’s output is rarely purely their own. It is braided into the systems, relationships, institutional memory, and colleagues that surround them. Pull the person out of that web and much of their apparent brilliance stays behind, uncredited and invisible, because no one ever thought to put it on the ledger. Which means the impressive square root you are looking at is partly a property of your organization, not just of the individuals in it. You built some of that performance. And if you built it, you can build more of it.

That single fact reframes the whole job of leaders. If a small group genuinely carries half the load, the dangerous failure mode is not failing to identify them. You already know their names. The dangerous failure mode is quietly overloading and under-supporting them until they break or walk. The vital few are a load-bearing wall, and most organizations treat them like an unlimited resource. Every urgent project lands on the same three desks, because those desks deliver. Every fire goes to the person who always puts fires out. The reward for carrying weight is more weight.

Under-support rarely looks dramatic. It looks like being the default reviewer on every change, the name added to every escalation, the person whose calendar is shredded into thirty-minute fragments by everyone who needs “just a quick thing.” It is death by a thousand reasonable requests, each one individually fine, all of them aimed at the same small number of competent people, because competence attracts work the way low ground attracts water.

And these are exactly the people who feel an unfair system first. I wrote recently about the leadership math behind being too nice, the way an unaddressed problem never really disappears but instead gets silently redistributed as a tax onto everyone else. Your vital few pay that tax at the highest rate. They are the ones who notice the teammate who is not pulling their weight, who quietly absorb the slack, who stay late to close the gap nobody named out loud. Often they will not file a complaint on the way out. They will simply, one ordinary quarter, be gone. Three projects will stall at once, and only then will you discover how much of your company had been resting on one person’s shoulders.

Stewardship is the actual work. It means giving your strongest people air cover, not just assignments. It means defending their focus from the steady drizzle of interruptions that drifts toward competence. It means offering them growth rather than merely more volume, and fighting the reflex to drop the next critical thing on the proven desk simply because it is proven. Groysberg’s own conclusion, after all that data, was not to buy stars but to build them, and to build the conditions that made them stars to begin with. Read honestly, Price’s Law is a warning about concentration risk. It is not an invitation to celebrate it.

The Caste That Isn’t

There is one last assumption the cynical reading smuggles in, and it deserves to be hauled into the light: the idea that the few are few by nature and the many are many by nature, now and forever. That fatalism is popular because it is convenient. It excuses the leader from doing anything at all. It is also weaker than it looks. Whatever role raw talent plays, the Groysberg data shows that performance is also built from opportunity, accumulated experience, team quality, and the systems surrounding the work, which are exactly the things a leader controls. In my experience, people move along that distribution far more often than fatalistic leaders admit. The only real question is which direction your leadership pushes them.

A leader who treats the bottom as permanent dead weight will usually turn out to be right, because the prophecy fulfills itself. Starve people of growth, trust, and good problems, and you will manufacture exactly the underperformance you predicted, then point to it as proof. But the opposite is just as available. The best leaders I have watched are not the ones who stand guard over a tiny inner circle of the irreplaceable. They are the ones who keep widening the circle, who build systems that make more people capable of carrying load, who quietly measure themselves by how many names could hold the company up rather than how few. And the widening rarely starts at the bottom. It starts in the broad middle, the people nobody is worried about and nobody is investing in, who are one good problem and one committed manager away from joining the few. That is how you genuinely reduce concentration risk. Not by protecting your square root, but by growing it.

So here is the exercise: picture the three or four people on your team who, if they handed you a resignation letter tomorrow morning, would do the most damage on the way out. You did not have to think hard. You already know precisely who they are.

Now answer the question you have probably been avoiding. What have you done this quarter to support those people, as opposed to simply handing them the next hard thing? Not praised them. Supported them. Taken weight off, bought back their focus, invested in their growth, made it more likely they are still here in three years and, just as important, made it more likely they are no longer the only ones who can do what they do.

Because a company that runs on its square root is not a strong company. It is a fragile one wearing a strong company’s clothes, and the people holding it up can feel the difference long before the org chart ever will. Go find out whether yours can tell.