Let's see:

(1) See a market opportunity in yachts 55 feet long. Need to hire a yacht designer to get the engines, hull shape, hull construction, safety, other engineering details right and supervise the construction including selecting the people for the interior design and finishing the interior. Want (A) someone who has done such work with high success for two dozen yachts from length 30 feet to 150 feet or (B) someone with the potential?

(2) Have a small but rapidly growing Web site and need to hire someone to get the server farm going for scaling the site. They need to design the hardware and software architecture, select the means of system real time instrumentation, monitoring, and management, work with the software team to make needed changes in the software, design the means of reliability, performance, and security, get the backup and recovery going, design the server farm bridge and the internal network operations center (NOC), write the job descriptions for the staff, select and train the staff, etc. Now, want someone who has recently "been there, done that, gotten the T-shirt" or someone with the 'potential' of doing that?

(3) Need heart bypass surgery. Now, want someone who has done an average of eight heart bypass operations a week for the past two years with no patient deaths or repeat operations or someone with that 'potential'?

(4) Similarly for putting a new roof on a house, fixing a bad problem with the plumbing, installing a new furnace and hot water heater, installing a high end HVAC system, etc.?

War Story: My wife and I were in graduate school getting our Ph.D. degrees and ran out of money. I took a part time job in applied math and computing on some US DoD problems -- hush, hush stuff. We had two Fortran programmers using IBM's MVS TSO, and in the past 12 months they had spent $80 K. We wanted to save money and also do much more computing. We went shopping and bought a $120 K Prime (really, essentially a baby Multics).

Soon I inherited the system and ran it in addition to programming it, doing applied math, etc. When I got my Ph.D., soon I was a prof in a B-school. They had an MVS system with punched cards, a new MBA program, and wanted better computing for the MBA program. I wanted TeX or at least something to drive a daisy wheel printer. Bummer.

At a faculty meeting the college computing committee gave a sad report on options for better computing. I stood and said: "Why don't we get a machine such as can be had for about $5000 a month, put it in a room in the basement, and do it ourselves?". Soon the operational Dean wanted more info, and I lead a one person selection committee. I looked at DG as in "Soul of a New Machine', DEC VAX PDP 11/780, and a Prime.

The long sitting head of the central university computer center went to the Dean and said that my proposal would not work. I got a sudden call to come to the Dean's office and met the critic. I happened to bring a cubic foot or so of technical papers related to my computer shopping. I'd specified enough ordinary, inexpensive 'comfort' A/C to handle the heat, but the critic claimed that the hard disk drives needed tight temperature and humidity control or would fail. I said: "These disk drives are sold by Prime but they are actually manufactured by Control Data. I happen to have with me the official engineering specifications for these drives directly from Control Data.". So I read them the temperature and humidity specifications that we could easily meet. The critic still claimed the disks would fail. Then I explained that at my earlier site, we had no A/C at all. By summer the room got too warm for humans, so we put an electric van in the doorway. Later we had an A/C evaporator hung off the ceiling. Worked fine for three years. The Dean sided with me.

In the end we got a Prime. What we got was a near exact copy of what I had run in grad school, down to the terminals and the Belden general purpose 5 conductor signal cable used to connect the terminals at 9600 bps. The system became the world site for TeX on Prime, lasted 15 years, and was a great success. The system was running one year after that faculty meeting. I was made Chair of the college computer committee.

That faculty meeting had been only two weeks after I had arrived on campus. There was one big, huge reason my planning was accepted: I'd been there, done that, and gotten the T-shirt. That is, in contradiction to the article, what mattered was actual, prior accomplishment, not 'potential'.

Why the industrial psychological researchers came to their conclusions I don't know, but I don't believe their conclusions.