“A middle performer at Bell Labs talked about being stumped by a technical problem,” Kelley and Caplan observed. “He painstakingly called various technical gurus and then waited, wasting valuable time while calls went unreturned and e-mail messages unanswered. Star performers, however, rarely face such situations because they do the work of building reliable networks before they actually need them. When they call someone for advice, stars almost always get a faster answer.”
