The problem with dealing with these concepts quantitatively rather than qualitatively is that the deeper you dig, the less sense this sort of statement makes. T

The problem with dealing with these concepts quantitatively rather than qualitatively is that the deeper you dig, the less sense this sort of statement makes. There's two ways to read your quote. If "the best people" are the best in an absolute sense -- say, the top ten in the profession -- then the chance that /your team/ will sample the long tail of these high performers depends on the size of the team, but is nearly zero for any reasonable team size. And the distribution described is non-normal, with long tails skewing towards high performance. So if /the/ best people outperform /the/ worst by 10:1, /your/ best will outperform /your/ worst by less than 10:1. Alternately, if the statement is true for a typical team, then the expectation varies significantly with team size -- which has changed (in my impression, for smaller overall teams in many cases) since Peopleware was written.