Why every star needs a solar system
Deborah Turness and Michael Gove rightly argued that people follow people. But how do you build a business your stars don't want to leave?
This week, both a former boss of mine, Deborah Turness https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/may/12/broadcasters-must-react-threat-creator-journalism-says-ex-head-bbc-news, and former cabinet minister and Spectator editor Michael Gove https://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/news/michael-gove-broadcasters-must-make-more-effort-to-engage-news-viewers/5216732.article
argued that broadcasters and new organisations need to let their talent build personal followings on external platforms to deepen audience engagement. Trusted individuals can carry the brand. And that’s same in other sectors too.
None of this is particularly new. At Sky News and ITV News, we had presenters and reporters with significant followings on social media platforms. We’re quicker to trust individuals over brands, and as the old saying goes, people buy from people, even more so in an age of AI, hyper-tech and the great leveller and elevator of technology. Legacy organisations are competing with one-person media businesses. That’s all great for consumers and customers.
But the conversation Turness and Gove are having stops short of the harder question, which is how to ensure your stars thrive better in your solar system rather than on their own, or in someone else’s.
Every great business has stars: the presenter audiences follow wherever they go, the salesperson who outsells the rest of the team combined, the fund manager whose name alone attracts capital.
But stars have gravity. That's precisely what makes them valuable, and also what makes them a risk.
Clients and colleagues orbit around these stars rather than around the business. The individual builds an audience, a client base, a talent community which is attached to them personally.
When they go, the following goes with them, and that can apply internally (colleagues) and externally (customers).
There are subtler costs too, that might go unexamined while the star is shining. Difficult behaviour gets excused because the numbers are too good to jeopardise. Other talent, sometimes better aligned, sometimes with more long-term potential, gets overlooked. The star's gravity bends everything around it.
There are two things businesses that handle this well tend to do:
They make the company genuinely difficult to leave. By ensuring the star is as good as they are at least partly because of the company around them - retention packages or golden handcuffs are a tempting shortcut, but they don’t solve the challenge completely. Stars will stay in your orbit for a brand that opens doors they couldn't open alone, the team that sharpens their thinking, and the institutional purpose that gives the work meaning beyond the individual transaction.
Neil Woodford is instructive. Within Invesco he was extraordinary, supported by a research team, a risk framework, an institutional reputation he could draw on. Outside it, the same person produced very different results. His investors reached a verdict, the hard way.
When a star is genuinely better because of the company they're in, two things happen. They are less likely to leave. And if they do, the business, as well as the individual, becomes the thing clients and colleagues stay for.
They build a bench. Great teams aren't built around one player - they develop depth, so no single departure is fatal. In practice this means identifying and investing in the next generation of talent before you need them: giving understudies real mandates, real visibility and real development. Don’t look at it as a contingency plan, but as an operating principle.
When a star is performing, it might be easy to enjoy the status quo. Why develop the bench when the first team is winning? Because the first team won't always be there. And because the talent that might have become exceptional, properly supported, tends to leave when they see no path, taking their potential somewhere it's more valued.
Turness is right that the audience follows people. She's right that institutions need to get comfortable with that. But the institutions that come out of this well are the ones that both set their talent free, and make themselves worth staying for.
Stars are an asset. The challenge for the business is to be the solar system in which they shine brightest.