I’ve worked at a few startups and a few large companies. Most of the places I was surrounded by high performance teams. Companies that went the distance and the ones that did not had a simple differentiation - ambition.
I think ambition breaks down into - that exercise of care to complete and when you are done you ask the question - what’s next? If the next is determined, articulated and communicated well, that team is ready to better itself.
Such high performance teams relish what they’ve accomplished, knowing fully well that it’s just the start.
The best engineers come back the morning of a production outage energized to find out what caused the outage, where else could this occur and how to make sure never to have it at any other place. The best marketers obsess about the number of pixels that an image has and whether it’s sharp enough.