The Observation
David Senra asked Brad Jacobs how he differentiates A, B, and C players. Jacobs runs a mental exercise: picture the person in your office saying they’re done. Not a counteroffer conversation. Already moved. Orderly transition only because they respect you. Then feel the reaction.
He walks the scale C to B to A. Restated in rank order:
C (Jacobs): You shouldn’t smile. Nobody likes firing people. You postponed it. Now you don’t have to pay severance. Problem solved. Replace them. Get the courage to take them off the team right away next time.
B (Jacobs): It kind of sucks. You preferred they stayed. Not the end of the world. Hire a headhunter. Someone as good, maybe better. Things will work out.
A (Jacobs): Pure terror and absolute panic. Baseball bat to the stomach, then a punch in the face. You’ll never find someone as good, never get that particular superpower back. You can’t even hear the exit conversation because the panic dialogue is louder.
Senra’s one-line recap of the A tier: if this person leaves, we are fucked. That is his compression of Jacobs’ terror, not Jacobs’ wording.
My takeaway, not his quote: viewed in that light, this is how you build great teams. Not “hire A players” as a poster. One imagined moment that forces the ranking out of your gut instead of the résumé stack. Jacobs says the largest slice of his CEO pie chart is people and talent. The work is firing C players without waiting. And not mistaking a pleasant B for someone whose exit would wreck you.
Connections
I’ve already run the dishonest version of this test at Grafe. I call people “solid” when what I mean is I haven’t pictured them walking out. The A list in my head is short. The polite middle is long. That gap is the whole point of the exercise.
It sits next to Steve Ballmer’s line that teamwork is an implementation detail that follows excellence and respect. Jacobs is upstream of that. You never get the byproduct if the roster is full of people you’d be relieved to lose. Team culture is not a workshop. It is who still has a chair after the quit test.
It also sharpens acquiring capability vs. hiring headcount. If the person leaves and the system stays intact, how much capability did you actually have? Everyone is always rented. The quit test ranks how expensive the rent is. If your body floods with panic, you were depending on a rare unit of capability, not a line item. If the exit would gut you, stop calling it headcount.
There’s a companion problem: security to seat hard people. This card is only the filter for who belongs in the room.
Open Questions
- Who at Grafe is an A by this test, and who am I calling “solid” because I have not run the visualization honestly?
- Where am I postponing a C conversation because severance, history, or discomfort feels cheaper than admitting I’d feel nothing if they left?
- For hires and acquisitions, can the quit test be applied before day one (reference calls, work samples, “what would I feel if this person declined”) or only after enough shared work that the gut has data?