Study performance inside any organization and one finding leaps out at you. It’s one of those revelations that is at once obvious and surprising, the sort of discovery that’s as clear as day, and yet makes you realize that you’ve never seen it written about in the business press. This discovery is range—that is, variation in performance between two teams in the same organization doing precisely the same kind of work. Whether that performance is measured as per-person productivity, quality, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, accidents on the job, or lost workdays—and even if you study highly controlled environments, such as retail or manufacturing, in which each “team” has been carefully constructed to do exactly the same job in exactly the same way—you still find significant range in the performance metrics.