Who's the S.O.B. in this work group?

"It was probably one if the greatest research teams ever pulled together on a problem," Walger Brattain would later say. When he first reviewed the list of who would be working with silicon and germanium in the new solid-state group with Shockley at Murray Hill . . . Brattain read it over twice. There isn't an S.O.B. in the group, he thought to himself, pleased with the prospect of joining in. Then after a minute he had a second thought: Maybe I'm the S.O.B. in the group.

Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 87