Who’s going to get there first? Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos? What could your organisation learn?
Great leaders don’t need every capability. Great teams do.
In February 2021, I wrote about two of the world’s most ambitious entrepreneurs.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos were competing for the title of world’s richest person.
But there was another competition that interested me much more.
Space.
Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin had both set their sights beyond Earth.
Their ambitions were enormous.
Their approaches were noticeably different.
Five years later, the comparison is even more interesting — because it illustrates something fundamental about leadership and teams.
A leader doesn’t need to be good at everything.
But somebody in the team does.
TWO EXTRAORDINARY VISIONS
Both Musk and Bezos have demonstrated an ability to think on a scale most of us rarely encounter.
SpaceX’s long-term ambition is to make humanity multiplanetary, with Mars at the centre of that vision.
Blue Origin expresses its ambition differently: millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth.
Different destinations perhaps, but both require leaders capable of looking far beyond the immediate horizon.
At Perfect Teams®, we might describe that as the Where and When.
Where are we going?
What does the future look like?
What’s possible that doesn’t exist today?
Every organisation needs somebody asking those questions.
But vision on its own isn’t enough.
MUSK: START WITH THE DESTINATION
Musk has rarely been reluctant to describe the future he wants to create.
Mars.
Reusable rockets.
Humanoid robots.
Autonomous vehicles.
Artificial intelligence.
Some of his deadlines have proved wildly optimistic.
But that’s almost beside the point for our purposes.
His ability to describe an extraordinary destination creates momentum.
Then comes the difficult part.
How do you turn an apparently impossible destination into reality?
SpaceX has done that through relentless engineering, experimentation and iteration.
Rockets fail.
Engineers learn.
Designs change.
They try again.
The vision provides the direction.
But thousands of people with very different capabilities turn that vision into hardware that actually flies.
BEZOS: BUILD THE SYSTEM
Bezos built Amazon with a reputation for something rather different.
Process.
Metrics.
Customer obsession.
Long-term investment.
Systems capable of operating at extraordinary scale.
Amazon spent years reinvesting rather than maximising short-term profit. The organisation that emerged wasn’t simply a great idea; it was an extraordinary operating system.
Blue Origin has historically expressed a similarly methodical philosophy through its motto:
Gradatim Ferociter — Step by Step, Ferociously.
The emphasis is revealing.
Where Musk’s public persona often begins with the destination, Bezos’s philosophy places enormous emphasis on the system required to get there.
Neither approach is inherently better.
They’re different.
And that’s the point.
YOUR STRENGTH CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BLIND SPOT
Strong leaders tend to have strong preferences.
Visionaries naturally look towards the horizon.
Analytical leaders naturally interrogate the detail.
Relationship-driven leaders naturally think about people, purpose and engagement.
Those strengths help make them successful.
But every strength casts a shadow.
The visionary may underestimate complexity.
The analyst may become trapped in detail.
The relationship builder may avoid a difficult decision.
So the objective isn’t to find the mythical leader who is brilliant at everything.
It’s to build the team around them.
THE TEAM SHOULD PROVIDE WHAT THE LEADER DOESN’T
This is one of the most important lessons we’ve learned through Perfect Teams®.
If a leader naturally provides enormous vision, who provides the detail?
If the leader lives in the numbers, who lifts everyone’s eyes towards the future?
If the leader drives relentlessly for results, who notices what’s happening to the people?
And if the leader generates endless ideas, who asks:
Which one are we actually going to do?
That’s interdependence.
Different characters don’t merely coexist.
They compensate for one another.
Which means the most useful question for a leader may not be:
What am I good at?
It may be:
What am I missing?
WHERE AND WHEN. WHY AND WHO. WHAT AND HOW.
At Perfect Teams®, our three perspectives can be expressed through six simple questions:
Where and when?
Vision and direction.
Why and who?
Purpose and people.
What and how?
Execution and detail.
Every leader will naturally gravitate towards some more than others.
That’s human.
The danger comes when the organisation starts to reflect the leader’s strengths and their blind spots.
Great teams provide balance.
They contain people willing and able to see the world differently from the person at the top.
And great leaders have enough confidence to let them.
SO, WHO GETS THERE FIRST?
Perhaps that’s the wrong question.
Musk and Bezos may ultimately pursue different destinations, at different speeds and through very different approaches.
The more useful question for the rest of us is what their organisations reveal about ours.
Do you have people who can see what’s possible?
People who understand why it matters?
People who can build the system?
People who challenge the leader?
People who provide what’s missing?
Because your organisation doesn’t need a perfect leader.
It needs a capable, interdependent team.
Nobody is perfect.
But your team can be.
You can’t download capability.™
What does your team provide that you don’t?
Perfect Teams® helps leaders understand their own character, see the strengths around them and identify the perspectives and capabilities missing from their team.
Originally published 1 February 2021. Updated August 2026.
Article by: