As a first-time CEO, I struggled to attract great people.
Then I attended a conference at Stanford that changed the way I think about talent. The speaker made a point I have never forgotten:
A-players hire A-players. B-players hire C-players.
The problem with B-players is not always the quality of their work. The deeper danger is what they tolerate. They allow C-players to stay. They lower the standard, quietly and steadily. Over time, the whole organization drifts downward. Their greatest impact is not what they do. It is what they permit.
I left that conference determined to change course. My board was careful with money, and the salary ranges they had approved made it almost impossible to attract top talent. I went back and made the case. Eventually, we found a way.
The result changed the company. We hired an extraordinary group of people who created millions of dollars in value.
What I did not expect was how much those people would change me.
I became less of an operator and more of a leader. With exceptional people around me, I could delegate. I could focus on the few things only the CEO could do. I spent more time working on the business and less time working in it. My work became more strategic, more effective, and more enjoyable.
The old advice proved true: surround yourself with people better than you.
When the company was eventually acquired, the buyer was not buying only a business. They were buying a team. In their view, the depth of talent we had built was one of the company’s most valuable assets.
This lesson reaches far beyond my own experience. Silicon Valley has turned acquiring talent into an industry. The artificial intelligence boom has only made it more visible. In August 2024, Google reportedly paid $2.7 billion to bring back Noam Shazeer (a frum scientist) and his team to Google.
History tells the same story. The trajectory of companies, communities, and even nations is often shaped by a remarkably small number of people.
Uri Levine, co-founder of Waze, makes this point with unusual force. In his book Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, which Steve Wozniak called “the Bible for entrepreneurs,” Levine devotes an entire chapter to building the right team. He titles it “Firing and Hiring,” in that order, and the order is deliberate.
His central claim is startling: “It is more important to fire fast than to hire.”
Levine goes even further: “While it doesn’t sound obvious, firing turns out to be much more important than hiring by far.”
His reasoning goes straight to the heart of culture.
A company’s values are its most important asset, and the CEO is their guardian. As Levine observes, everyone knows when someone should not be there. When leadership acts on that truth, trust grows. People see that standards matter. Commitment rises. Performance improves.
The principle is simple:
The wrong person affects everyone. The right person primarily affects his own role.
A-players want to work with A-players. The moment they see leadership tolerate misalignment, they begin looking elsewhere.
We find this principle throughout the Torah.
Again and again, the Torah commands, “u’viarta hara mikirbecha,” remove the evil from your midst. The phrase appears repeatedly in Sefer Devarim. The response is removal, not accommodation.
The most dramatic example is the ir hanidachat, the city drawn into idolatry. The Torah commands its destruction because corrupting influence cannot simply be contained. The cancer eventually spreads.
The same principle appears in narrative form throughout these weeks’ parshiyot.
The spies condemn an entire generation to die in the wilderness. Korach, together with Datan and Aviram, brings death to hundreds. Earlier still, the erev rav drew the nation into the sin of the Golden Calf and its lasting consequences.
In each case, a small group reshapes the destiny of the many.
Then, in this week’s parsha, Beha’alotecha, the Torah presents a deeper and more uncomfortable version of the same lesson.
This time, the influential figure is not wicked.
He is righteous.
The parsha is famously divided by the inverted nuns. Before them, the Jewish people are moving forward with momentum toward Eretz Yisrael. The inverted nuns frame the journey of the Mishkan and the Aron. After them the downward spiral begins: complaints about meat, the sin of the spies, and eventually the rebellion of Korach.
In his sefer Bemesilah Na’aleh, my late rebbe, Rabbi Berel Wein, points to a conversation that seems incidental but may be central.
Immediately before this turning point, Moshe invites Chovav, identified by many commentators as Yitro, to join the Jewish people on their journey. Yitro responds, “I shall not go; rather, to my land and to my birthplace I shall go” (Bamidbar 10:30).
This is the same Yitro who converted. The same Yitro who, according to many commentators, witnessed the revelation at Sinai. The same Yitro who was deeply moved by G-d’s salvation of Israel.
Yet when invited to enter the Land, he chooses Midian.
Rabbi Wein says something striking. Yitro’s refusal weakened the nation’s spirit. It gave people permission to entertain second thoughts about the journey ahead.
Once the door to doubt opened, it never fully closed.
The spies turned “I do not want to go” into “we cannot succeed.” Datan and Aviram later echoed, “We will not go up.” Eventually, the people completed the descent by declaring that they wanted to return to Egypt.
Just as Yitro spoke of Midian as “my land and my birthplace,” the Jewish people began to speak of Egypt in similar terms.
That is what makes the lesson so powerful. Yitro was not a villain. He may even have had a legitimate reason.
But the effect of his choice was larger than the choice itself.
The influence remained.
Rabbi Wein notes that throughout his rabbinic career, whenever he tried to launch ambitious Torah or educational initiatives, the naysayers often succeeded in discouraging the very people who had first been enthusiastic. Doubt spreads faster than opposition.
That dynamic is more powerful today than it has ever been.
I recently heard a lecture from Eyal Dykan, a former Israeli intelligence operative, who described how social media has become one of the most powerful weapons in the modern world. Adversarial nations do not only use armies, missiles, or cyberattacks. They use posts, videos, images, bots, and influencers to shape opinion, affect elections, and weaken societies from within.
The goal is not always to persuade people to believe one specific lie. Often, the goal is simpler and more dangerous: to make people doubt everything. Doubt the country. Doubt its leaders. Doubt its institutions. Doubt its future. A society that loses confidence in itself becomes easier to divide, easier to weaken, and easier to defeat.
The weapon is doubt. The casualty is will.
The Torah understood this long before the world had social media. A voice does not need to be loud to be dangerous. It only needs to be repeated. It only needs to sound credible. It only needs to make people wonder whether the journey is worth it.
That is exactly what Yitro did. He was not a spy. He spread no slander. He simply said: this land is not mine. And that single sentence, spoken by a righteous man with what may have been a legitimate reason, was enough to open the door.
Rabbi Wein applies the lesson directly to the Diaspora Jew. He acknowledges that people often have legitimate reasons not to live in Israel. Yet he argues that when Jews who are able to build a full Jewish life in Eretz Yisrael choose instead to live as foreigners in a land that is not theirs, the cumulative effect becomes a chillul Hashem, a desecration of G-d’s name. The legitimacy of any individual reason does not eliminate the cumulative effect of the choice.
Israel has challenges. No one who lives here can deny that.
But Rabbi Wein writes that the way to overcome those challenges is through joy.
“Ba’u Tzion b’rinah,” come to Zion in song.
Those who come looking only for difficulty will certainly find it. Those who come looking for blessing will discover something else entirely.
My late father used to quote the verse, “U’re’eh b’tuv Yerushalayim kol yemei chayecha,” see the good of Jerusalem all the days of your life.
He would say that criticism is easy. Finding fault takes little effort. The harder discipline, and the higher one, is to look for the good.
This past week, as we read Beha’alotecha in Israel, my family and I took a trip to the Dead Sea.
At the Shabbos table, I asked my children why they thought we had gone.
They said we needed a vacation.
I told them that was only part of the answer.
Since moving to Israel, between the war, the sirens, and the bomb shelters, more than a year had passed without a real family trip. I wanted them to see another side of Israel. The beauty. The landscape. The wonder. The gift of living in this land.
Perspective is contagious.
In an age of social media and influencers, one voice can shape the outlook of thousands, sometimes millions. The Torah understood this long before algorithms existed.
The wrong influence corrodes.
The right influence builds.
That is why great leaders understand something that seems counterintuitive. Protecting a culture is often more important than adding to it.
Fire first. Hire second.
Then come to Tzion in song.