Virginia Apgar, a doctor, sketched five simple markers on a napkin in a hospital cafeteria in 1949 — heart rate, breathing, muscle tone, reflexes, color. None of it was new medical knowledge. What was missing was organization: a way for a nurse to score a newborn in sixty seconds. That sketch became the Apgar Score, still used in delivery rooms worldwide.
Stacy L. Hambleton, a partner in King & Spalding's Mass Tort, Toxic Tort, and Product Liability practices, opens her Fortune commentary with that story to make a point about careers. She learned the underlying concept, she writes, from a volleyball coach who grew up in Hawaii and would yell "puka" — Hawaiian for gap or hole — whenever a spot on the court went uncovered.
Early in her career, Hambleton was the newest lawyer at her firm, sitting on the edges of a major trial with no formal role. A pile of disorganized medical records nobody wanted to manage was sitting untouched. She built color-coded binders for every medical issue, decoded the chart abbreviations, and wheeled the binders into the war room on a dolly.
"Six weeks later, I was a vital member of a trial team I was never originally slated to join," she writes. When the lead partner later left for a larger firm, he brought a small handpicked group with him — Hambleton included. He moved again, and brought her a second time. The chain of moves, she writes, started with a dolly and ended at one of the largest global law firms in the world.
Hambleton draws a distinction between gaps that are obvious — unowned problems, unglamorous work nobody wants — and gaps that are structural, which she calls the most valuable. She names two habits: "relentless curiosity," asking what a situation actually requires rather than what one has been assigned, and "decisive initiative," filling the gap because it needs filling rather than for credit.
She applies the same lens to artificial intelligence inside corporations today. While executive boards debate high-level strategy and conference panels discuss theoretical disruption, she writes, the tools themselves "sit largely underutilized on the ground." The gap, in her telling, is not information — it is shape, the same problem she solved years earlier with binders and a dolly, except that today's tools can do the organizing in far less than six weeks.
The piece is framed as career advice, but it doubles as a diagnosis of how large organizations actually move. Titles and committees did not create Hambleton's opening — an unmanaged box of paper did, and she acted on it without being asked.
That is the case for merit over credentialism that this outlet has long made: value gets created by people who solve the problem in front of them, not by the org chart that eventually catches up to them. The same logic applies to the AI gap Hambleton flags. Boards that spend quarters debating frameworks while the tools sit idle on employees' desktops are ceding ground to whoever inside the building — or outside it — simply picks up the dolly.
