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specific hospital
where they
practiced. For every procedure they handled at a given hospital, the risk of patient mortality dropped
by 1 percent. But the risk of mortality stayed the same at other hospitals. The surgeons couldn’t take
their performance with them. They weren’t getting better at performing coronary artery bypass grafts.
They were becoming more familiar with particular nurses and anesthesiologists, learning about their
strengths and weaknesses, habits, and styles. This familiarity helped them avoid patient deaths, but it
didn’t carry over to other hospitals. To reduce the risk of patient mortality, the surgeons needed
relationships with specific surgical team members.
While Huckman and Pisano were collecting their hospital data, down the hall at Harvard, a
similar study was under way in the financial sector. In investment banks, security analysts conduct
research to produce earnings forecasts and make recommendations to money management firms about
whether to buy or sell a company’s stock.
Star analysts
carry superior knowledge and expertise that
they should be able to use regardless of who their colleagues are. As investment research executive
Fred Fraenkel explains: “Analysts are one of the most mobile Wall Street professions because their
expertise is portable. I mean, you’ve got it when you’re here and you’ve got it when you’re there. The
client base doesn’t change. You need your Rolodex and your files, and you’re in business.”
To test this assumption, Boris Groysberg studied more than a thousand equity and fixed-income
security analysts over a nine-year period at seventy-eight different firms. The analysts were ranked in
effectiveness by thousands of clients at investment management institutions based on the quality of
their earnings estimates, industry knowledge, written reports, service, stock selection, and
accessibility and responsiveness. The top three analysts in each of eighty industry sectors were
ranked as stars, earning between $2 million and $5 million. Groysberg and his colleagues tracked
what happened when the analysts switched firms. Over the nine-year period, 366 analysts—9 percent
—moved, so it was possible to see whether the stars maintained their success in new firms.
Even though they were supposed to be individual stars, their performance wasn’t portable. When
star analysts moved to a different firm, their performance dropped, and it stayed lower for at least
five years. In the first year after the move, the star analysts were 5 percent less likely to be ranked
first, 6 percent less likely to be ranked second, 1 percent less likely to be ranked third, and 6 percent
more likely to be unranked. Even five years after the move, the stars were 5 percent less likely to be
ranked first and 8 percent more likely to be unranked. On average, firms lost about $24 million by
hiring star analysts. Contrary to the beliefs of Fraenkel and other industry insiders, Groysberg and his
colleagues conclude that “hiring stars is advantageous neither to stars themselves, in terms of their
performance, nor to hiring companies in terms of their market value.”
But some of the star analysts did maintain their success. If they moved with their teams, the stars
showed no decline at all in performance. The star analysts who moved solo had a 5 percent
probability of being ranked first, while the star analysts who moved with teammates had a 10 percent
probability of being ranked first—the same as those who didn’t move at all. In another study,
Groysberg and his colleagues found that analysts were more likely to maintain their star performance
if they worked with high-quality colleagues in their teams and departments. The star analysts relied
on knowledgeable colleagues for information and new ideas.
The star investment analysts and the cardiac surgeons depended heavily on collaborators who
knew them well or had strong skills of their own. If Frank Lloyd Wright had been more of a giver than
a taker, could he have avoided the nine years in which his income and reputation plummeted? George
Meyer thinks so.
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