My own managerial bias is always toward identifying extraordinary individuals, encouraging their talents, and assigning them to tasks where creativity and expertise and intelligence can trump Business and Usual. That bias got some powerful reinforcement Thursday from an article in the Washington Post about Azyxxi, a digital medical records database designed, not by committee, but by two doctors with unusual backgrounds: Mark Smith (who began his career as a Ph.D. candidate in computer science) and Craig Feied (who, the article says, knows “25 programming languages”). Favorite pull quote:

It is noteworthy that Azyxxi did not come out of the hospital’s IT department, after the appointment of a task force, the drawing up of a detailed needs analysis and approval of a long-term capital budget. There was no request for proposals, no campaign to win “buy-in” from staff, nor was a dime allocated for training. The system was designed largely by two extraordinary doctors who were lured from George Washington University a decade ago with a mandate to fix an under-performing emergency room with nine-hour waits, dissatisfied patients and an unhappy staff.

Give me extraordinary people, every time. Process and projects are necessary, but they only get you in the door. Without unusual and gifted individuals, you’ll either expire at the threshold or find your way to the same dreary, largely ineffectual place all the other committees got to.

The one thing the article doesn’t tell us is who did the luring. Who was that visionary? I imagine she or he made someone unhappy along the way….