The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get …

Another reason why today's corporations love teams and flat hierarchies is because they turn "responsibility" into a post-modern concept that fluidly adapts to mean everything or nothing. One day the boss is the boss, the next day nobody is accountable for anything, and decisions are really just the magical synergy of team dynamics.

"Their boss looks down and sees Director managing 30 people and getting amazing result X, where X is 90% the effort of the one super star." This is interesting because it was my experience in school as well. In most group projects, 1 or 2 people would carry the rest of the group.

>That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently. Wow. What market/geographic location are you in?

Actually, that's how the world works most of the time. Superstars also know it and are used to it from early childhood. They are expected to carry the load and equally importantly, the team is expected to listen to them. It works like this in all walks of life, because simply put, human beings are not equal in ability. Things break down when the team and management stop listening. That's when the superstar actually gets frustrated and leaves. Truth is, when it comes to a competition between two groups, it's almost always two bunches of mediocres sprinkled with one or two superstars. The group that wins is the one that listens to their superstars. This applies in war, in sports and in the corporate world.

Have you ever tried freelancing or having your own company? I never worked in corporations and honestly cannot see myself ever there, considering the money I’d been making freelancing will never be paid to me by any company in the world if they’d just hire me.

That's why I incorporated a tiny company. Sometimes, companies will interview me and then when I tell them my salary expectations, they usually pretend to be offended and refuse by arguing that it would destroy the salary structure inside their company. But that doesn't really mean anything because many of them are happy to book my consulting company at 1.5x that salary afterwards.

Corporations that win tend to have bought themselves a moat and therefore profit to play with akin to a stipend to spend on staff. The people controlling that spend need more than anything else to look competent in their job of managing it, and so they need to work by numbers and follow safe trends. Whatever will keep them in their high paid jobs. Teasing out superstars and giving them free reign is probably not what they are incentivized to do.

What does it mean “dragging a division of 30 people”? That you need to hire 29 instances of the worst and least talented garbage to push just one lonely little sad super man?