I had coffee the other day with the founder of an influential agency, who told me the key to his success was simple: At every stop in his career, he had surrounded himself with people who were way smarter than he was.

If you wanted to follow a similar strategy and were looking for a recruiting roster, you need look no further than the 50 people listed here in MM&M’s fifth annual Transformers and Catalysts of Healthcare issue.

These are some seriously smart and seriously impressive people. I used to work at a university and thought my time there had left me immune to being in awe of brainpower. I was wrong.

There are so many smart people working in all the different precincts of healthcare that when it came time to sit down and select the winners, our staff’s biggest problem was having to decide who to leave off the list.

What really struck me was the breadth of specialties currently at work in the healthcare arena. From hardware developers to data scientists, health and wellness writers to medical scientists, doctors and app developers to financiers, it’s hard to imagine a time when so many different disciplines were being brought to bear on improving medical care and optimizing outcomes.

An example: I flew to Seattle in early April to oversee our cover shoot of Amazon’s chief medical officer, Dr. Maulik Majmudar. Between takes, I asked him why he thought so many cardiologists were being tapped for leadership roles at tech companies moving into the health space.

Now, when you interview people for a living, you get pretty used to how most people actually speak — in fits and starts, with lots of ‘uhms’ and ‘ahhs’ and ‘ya knows.’ The affable Majmudar speaks in press-ready complete paragraphs, with his reasons numbered and ordered.

His answer, which you’ll find on page 34, was a good one. But as he considered his answer, he worried how his response would be received. His paraphrased thought: “Wow, people in other specialties are going to think that’s pretty brash.”

Of course they would. Smart people wouldn’t have it any other way.