Find starters, not stars.
“It’s a trap to conflate popularity and the ability to build a new property.”
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Forgo the star and invest in the starter.
The starter system is built on recruiting talent to work entrepreneurially — a showrunner, to compare it to pop culture — and building startup (or startup-ish) franchises and products around their strategy and ability to execute.
A few advantages:
Starters are wired to think about the larger opportunity, not just their personal brand.
Starters’ efforts are scalable across more people and not leveraged on a single name.
Starters are almost always less expensive to compensate, fund, or acquire.
Starters’ initiatives come with a built-in business model rather than an incidental one.
Starters are more likely to seek out data to ask the right questions.
Starters are more likely to produce multiple wins than personal brands.
There is a bigger, more dynamic pool of starters out there than bonafide stars.
Wandering Wandering Star 