--- title: Fish Food for Thought | daily.dev description: Price's Law — the claim that half of all output comes from the square root of contributors — is one of the most quoted and misapplied ideas in management. The... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/fish-food-for-thought-ydpp8kvlu twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Fish Food for Thought | daily.dev og:description: Price's Law — the claim that half of all output comes from the square root of contributors — is one of the most quoted and misapplied ideas in management. The... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/fish-food-for-thought-ydpp8kvlu og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/ydpp8KvLU.png og:image:alt: Fish Food for Thought og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Fish Food for Thought **[Fish Food for Thought](https://daily.dev/sources/mikefisher)** · 12 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Price's Law — the claim that half of all output comes from the square root of contributors — is one of the most quoted and misapplied ideas in management. The original bibliometric formula was never well-supported by data, and the popular workplace version has drifted far from what Derek de Solla Price actually measured. The real danger is not failing to identify top performers; leaders already know their names. The danger is overloading and under-supporting them until they leave. Boris Groysberg's decade-long study of Wall Street analysts showed that star performance is partly a property of the surrounding system — relationships, institutional memory, team quality — not purely individual. This means leaders can build more of it. The piece argues for three obligations: protect high performers from being crushed by their own competence, understand the systemic conditions enabling their output, and invest in the broad middle to widen the circle of capable people rather than guarding a fragile inner few. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What is Price's Law and does research actually support it? Price's Law, from Derek de Solla Price's 1963 book Little Science Big Science, claims half of published papers in a scientific field come from the square root of the total number of authors. When later researchers tested the square root formula against real publication data, the results did not support it, and bibliometricians largely abandoned the precise equation in favor of more flexible descriptions of the underlying skewed-performance pattern. _For anyone weighing a management framework's evidence before applying it, daily.dev surfaces the research and pushback behind popular ideas like Price's Law._ ### What happens to a star employee's performance when they switch companies? Star performance often drops after a job switch, sometimes for years, according to Harvard researcher Boris Groysberg's study of more than a thousand Wall Street analysts. The team they joined tended to suffer rather than improve, and even the new employer's market value could take a hit, showing that a star's output depends heavily on the systems, relationships, and colleagues left behind rather than being a portable individual trait. _Leaders deciding whether to hire stars or build them can find data-backed context on daily.dev before making the call._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The Manager as Riverbank](https://daily.dev/posts/the-manager-as-riverbank-alwrhwjss) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Don't Blame the Wheel for Missing a Turn](https://daily.dev/posts/don-t-blame-the-wheel-for-missing-a-turn-vn9l3lyfp) · Yegor's Blog · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Everyone Expected AI to Come From the Big Companies](https://daily.dev/posts/everyone-expected-ai-to-come-from-the-big-companies-8q9oyquxc) · SQL Authority · 5 upvotes · 4 comments --- Tags: [#leadership](https://daily.dev/tags/leadership) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/fish-food-for-thought-ydpp8kvlu) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Fish Food for Thought","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/fish-food-for-thought-ydpp8kvlu","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/fish-food-for-thought-ydpp8kvlu"},"datePublished":"2026-07-22T13:11:05.668Z","dateModified":"2026-09-14T06:27:06.222Z","description":"Price's Law — the claim that half of all output comes from the square root of contributors — is one of the most quoted and misapplied ideas in management. 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When later researchers tested the square root formula against real publication data, the results did not support it, and bibliometricians largely abandoned the precise equation in favor of more flexible descriptions of the underlying skewed-performance pattern. For anyone weighing a management framework's evidence before applying it, daily.dev surfaces the research and pushback behind popular ideas like Price's Law."}},{"@type":"Question","name":"What happens to a star employee's performance when they switch companies?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Star performance often drops after a job switch, sometimes for years, according to Harvard researcher Boris Groysberg's study of more than a thousand Wall Street analysts. 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