I have experienced this several times in people first hand. I had a colleague who we would say sprinkled fairy dust over the customer and us. But once he left t

I have experienced this several times in people first hand. I had a colleague who we would say sprinkled fairy dust over the customer and us. But once he left the room nobody else could maintain the magic for long. He couldn’t teach me directly, but hanging around him, a lot, helped. My own experience tells me that it takes a deep understanding of the area you work in, often intuitive understanding mixed with facts, to get to this point. You also need to be able to communicate easily with people. I am nowhere as good as some, and the little I have took years and years of practice, hard work and immersion in a subject area to achieve. Then, as you say, comes the hard part. How do you embed the magic so well in the organisation that those that follow can keep it up and improve on it, or at least not wreck it straight away. I have tried things like: make sure open source is part of the culture, start a foundation not a company, hire carefully, teach good practice in execution, only work on things that you and other are passionate about and that makes a real difference. Edit: add some hard part