At elite companies, technical skill is table stakes; the key differentiator is finding high-leverage work that maximizes impact per hour spent.

Managers can't focus on one task like individual contributors; they must juggle competing priorities and interruptions while prioritizing team output over personal work.

Crisis project management at Anthropic taught the author that excellent coordination of complex, interdependent work is high-leverage yet underutilized.

Technical team leadership can be split into categories of responsibility, helping identify what leading involves and enabling responsibilities to be divided among people with different strengths.

Team growth is often limited by lack of trust, which is usually justified when there's insufficient data about capabilities rather than personal bias.