I read an old article this week. "Let's Hear It for B Players," Harvard Business Review, June 2003. The argument is that companies chase stars and neglect the steady performers who keep the place running, and that this is a costly mistake. 23 years later it still circulates, which is either a compliment to the writing or a sign nothing changed.
What caught me was the label, more than the argument itself. B player. We took the grade from school, where a B means good but not top, and we now apply it to adults as if a whole working life could sit on one scale. The scale measures something. I am less sure it measures what we think it does.
An A player is usually someone whose contribution is easy to point at. They closed the deal or gave the talk, work with a clear name attached. A B player often does work spread across other people and across months, so no single moment carries their name. That work is real. It is just harder to see, and when we grade people we grade what we can see.
So the B in B player might not describe the person at all. It might describe our instruments. We reward the visible part of a job because it is the part we can attribute, and the visible part is not always the part that matters.
It goes further than neglect. Organisations tend to promote the loudest people, and loud is easy to mistake for able. Some of them are genuinely strong. Many are just better at being noticed than at the work, while the quiet ones who do more get treated as ordinary. Then we are surprised when the steady performer we ranked below the stars turns out to be the one the work depended on. The grade said B. The gap they leave says otherwise.
I don't think the answer is to turn every quiet worker into a star, which is roughly what the follow-up advice suggests. The stranger question is why we kept a grading system built for exams and pointed it at people whose value shows up in the things we never learned to measure.