You’ve likely noticed that organizational charts, whether flat or vertical, are triangles, narrowing at the top. If you squint and tilt your head sideways you can almost juxtapose a bell curve over the top. We classify talent in the A, B, and C categories thanks to Jack Welsh. A talent tends to live in the top 10% of the bell curve and Cs live in the bottom 10%. Ok, maybe bottom 20%. The belly of the curve represents where the majority of normal people live, work, and fight the good fight every day. The top 10% play by a different set of rules, whether by nature or nurture, but typically both. In the data center business the full package tends to include real estate finance, sales to fill the real estate, technical acumen to appreciate what operates the real estate, organizational leadership, more than a hint of ambition, certainly charisma, and perhaps surprisingly, humility.
The privilege and fun of my day job is to meet the As who have worked through and greatly appreciate the norm, but whose inherent intellect and curiosity just naturally moves them up the stack, populating the top of the organizational triangles. They converse and live among us normally enough, until you start talking business and then genius pops out and my humility meter goes up.