Last week in New Jersey, the greatest footballer of his generation lost the World Cup final to a team that doesn’t have one. Spain beat Lionel Messi’s Argentina 1-0, and the winning goal was scored — savour this — by a substitute. Ferran Torres came off the bench and, in the 106th minute, did what eleven starters could not. Spain went through the tournament unbeaten, conceding just one goal. Asked afterwards how he did it, Torres said he saw the ball coming and shot. No destiny, no brand narrative, no documentary crew. He just did his job. HR should frame that quote.
Every office has spent the past two decades betting the other way. We hunt “10x engineers”. We build pay bands on the assumption that one rainmaker outweighs twelve competent colleagues. I once watched a firm give its star dealmaker a corner office, a personal assistant, and an exemption from annual compliance training, which the rest of the employees endured like flu season. Eighteen months later, he left for a rival, taking three clients with him. The corner office sat empty for a year, a shrine to key-person risk.
Spain’s manager, Luis de la Fuente, spoke after the final of a generation that had remained loyal to “the idea”. Note the object of loyalty: not a person, an idea. Players rotated in and out and the system barely noticed. When your match-winner starts the final on the bench, you have achieved the thing every CEO claims to want and secretly fears: an organisation that does not desperately need its star.
Companies are surprisingly bad at this. The CEO who says the organisation is empowered but must approve every press release. And the star salesperson whose behaviour would get anyone else fired but is described, with admirable creativity, as “commercial intensity”.
We tolerate all this because indispensability is easily mistaken for excellence. In fact, it is often evidence of organisational failure. If one departure can paralyse a function, the problem is not that the employee was too talented. It is that nobody bothered to build a system around the talent.
None of this is a hymn to mediocrity, which is where managers go wrong the moment they discover the word “culture”. Spain’s baseline was ferociously high. Brilliance was the entry requirement, not the differentiator. A team of average performers holding hands and doing trust falls wins nothing. But eleven very good people who know what the other ten are doing will usually beat one genius surrounded by admirers.
The less glamorous part is building depth. Nobody gets promoted for the disaster that didn’t happen. There is no LinkedIn post beginning: “Humbled to announce that the contract clause I checked contained no catastrophe.” Yet good organisations are full of invisible competence: deputies who can step in, colleagues who share knowledge, systems that survive holidays, resignations, and the occasional promotion.
Torres scoring from the bench was succession planning in real time. The substitute was ready because somebody had built a system in which the substitute mattered. Businesses talk endlessly about succession planning, usually in PowerPoints produced shortly before promoting the obvious candidate. Real succession planning is less dramatic. It means making sure the second-best person gets enough responsibility to become better — even if that makes the best person slightly less indispensable.
So here is the memo for this week. Stop asking where your Messi is. Ask whether the place still works when Messi is ill, poached by a rival, or simply having an ordinary day like the day of the World Cup final. Pay for depth, not just peaks. Reward people who make others better. And train Deirdre’s deputy before the cruise, not during it.
Extraordinary results do not always require larger-than-life talent. More often, they require excellence multiplied, aligned, and rehearsed until it looks like magic. Spain has the trophy. Most offices just have the org chart.