I’ve been reading What the Dog Saw. It’s a compendium of articles in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point.
Gladwell’s earlier book, which I loved, shows how ideas and trends arrive at a critical point at which they become epidemic. In his latest book, he examines a wide range of social and business phenomena, such as criminal profiling, the risks of technology, hiring practices, plagiarism and dealing with the homeless.
For me, the most telling piece in What the Dog Saw is one he wrote in 2002 in the aftermath of the Enron collapse, called “The Talent Myth”. I wish I’d read it at the time. In it, he effectively demolishes the concept of The War for Talent – the doctrine evangelised by McKinsey in the 90s, which has became orthodox thinking across large swathes of the corporate world since then.
Gladwell tells how Enron shipped in boatloads of MBAs from Harvard, Wharton and Stanford, and created a culture of suicidal pandering to the needs of the new “stars”. Enron’s open market for hiring, based on McKinsey principles, would allow executives starting new lines of business to plunder staff from other divisions regardless of the consequences for the businesses thus depleted. Executives were moved from one job to another with such frequency that it was impossible to judge their performance. “Stars” were able to lose millions of dollars on successive project without anyone questioning whether talent – evidenced by a high class MBA – was sufficient to run a business. The stars had become more important than the shareholders and the ordinary employees who kept the show on the road.
The War for Talent myth continues today. It was the mantra of a US company with which I briefly worked a couple of years ago and which has strong links with the a number of business schools. It’s the insurance sell that propels a healthy stream of MBAs from Harvard, INSEAD and the London Business School into high profile jobs (you will fail if you don’t hire the brightest and best). It places potential above achievement. It’s the philosophy that led to the obscene bonus structures among financial institutions (if we don’t pay them, someone else will). It’s contributed to the narcissistic, short term culture within the same institutions that contributed so heavily to the financial crisis of 2008/2009.
Before I read Gladwell’s short and succinct destruction of the War for Talent, I wrote a far less coherent piece on the same subject, called “The Department of Getting Things Done”. It’s at http://www.careeradvantage-uk.com/uncategorized/the-department-of-getting-things-done. In that piece, like Gladwell, I suggested that the world needs a few more tortoises – people who quietly and effectively get things done – and a few less hares.
In another piece, “Most Likely to Succeed” Gladwell touched on a related subject close to my heart – the disconnect between hiring criteria and the likelihood of success in a job. He focuses on the teaching profession in the US, where rigid requirements for academic qualifications are the gate through which prospective teachers must pass. A masters’ degree to teach primary school kids to read? An exaggeration perhaps, but that was the case in the private school system in the UK when I was growing up. Particularly from the age of nine to eighteen, I was taught by a battery of MAs from Oxford and Cambridge whose abilities were totally unrelated to their qualifications. Some were good, and one or two were truly awful. My parents were horrified one term when the maths teacher said in a term report that I “gave a passable imitation of a fool”. He wasn’t far wrong, but that’s another story.
Gladwell’s view is that “teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree – and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before”. I agree with him, and the same goes for a number of occupations barred to those who do not meet rigid criteria that in no way predict the success of the entrant.
A true philosophy of lifelong learning would produce an education system that encourages incremental learning – learn more when that learning will take you to the next level, rather than accumulate a vast blob of knowledge at the age of eighteen for which you have no context born of experience.
When you graduate at twenty-one, the chances are that eighty percent of the knowledge you have acquired will serve no purpose in your working life. What’s more you will have largely forgotten it within ten years of graduation. That’s a big statement, and open to dispute in many cases, especially with occupational degrees. But I believe it to be to be true as a general rule. Even where people qualifiy for occupations, they end up specialising, and use only a fraction of the knowledge acquired.
To those who would say that the philosophy I’ve described exists today in many companies, institutions and societies, I would answer: for the few, not the many. And that’s why we waste so much of the real talent that would blossom given the opportunity.
Following on from my previous post….
So McChrystal went. Not surprising really. For a President who prizes teamwork, or at least the appearance of teamwork, the alternative would have been accusations of lack of support from many of his leading advisors, resignations (either he goes or I go), and a media greedy for evidence of further fractures in the chain of command.
Obama was in a no-win situation. Accused of weakness if he kept McChrystal, thereby showing that he was prepared to tolerate the general’s maverick tendencies. Accused of weakness if he fired him, thereby allowing politics to get in the way of the pursuit of the war by an extremely talented commander.
When he took office, Obama replaced a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office and replaced it with his favourite president, Abraham Lincoln. It doesn’t surprise me that some in the US media are comparing Obama’s relationship with McChrystal with Lincoln’s handling of the Union commander in chief General George McClellan.
McClellan was a very different man from McChrystal – a cautious but highly competent manager and logistician rather than an inspirational leader. But he was much loved by his troops. Despite frequent clashes with Lincoln, who wanted him to take decisive action against Robert E Lee’s Army of Nothern Virginia, McClellan survived for a year until the bloody stalemate of Antietam.
What both generals have in common is a streak of vanity. As with McClellan, a cult of the personality seems to have been building around McChrystal, which perhaps contributed to the latter’s indiscretion.
One wonders how Obama would have reacted to the insults of McClellan, who once said of Lincoln that he was “nothing more than a well-meaning baboon”.
For those who want to explore this theme further, the US News carries an interesting interview with John Waugh, a journalist and author who, with superb timing, has just published a book about Lincoln and McClellan. The interview is here:
Meanwhile, the French national football team has returned home after its disastrous World Cup campaign. Just as McChrystal was summoned to the White House, veteran star Thierry Henry was whisked off to the Elysee Palace to explain to President Sarkozy in person the reasons behind what one journalist described as “a black day in the history of France”.
And captain Patrice Evra promises to tell all in the course of time. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
What do General Stanley McChrystal, Commander in Chief of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Patrice Evra, captain of the French World Cup team, have in common? Both were publicly critical of the chain of command.
Evra, with several of his colleagues, was dropped from the final match of France’s disastrous World Cup campaign. McChrystal will surely be gone within a couple of days of his return to Washington. Naturally you could argue that the demise of McChrystal, if it happens, will be far more significant in global terms.
Yet for many people in France, the World Cup disaster symbolises a wider malaise. That’s certainly the opinion of a colleague who stayed with me for the last week. He believes that France has lost its national pride, and is in a crisis of confidence. France’s structural problems, he maintains, are far deeper that those of the UK and other Euorpean countries that are currently tightening their belts. Inflexible employment practices, rigidly hierarchical management structures and declining national institutions such as the health service are all contributing to the national gloom.
If President Sarkozy attempts the kind of cuts that George Osborne has just introduced in the United Kingdom, it will be back to the barricades in time-honoured French fashion. My friend’s view of the President himself, as Sarkozy arrived in London to celebrate the 70th anniversary of De Gaulle’s call to arms after the defeat of France in World War II, is not complimentary, to say the least.
In Afghanistan, whatever you think of McChrystal’s indiscretions, it seems that the culture of what Americans would call “ass-covering” is alive and well, exemplified by the behaviour of Ambassador Eikenberry’s alleged positioning of himself to avoid any blame in the event that the current strategy turns bad. It takes more than a reforming president to cure the deeply ingrained tendancy shared by politicians the world over to run for cover when the whiff of blame starts drifting towards them.
Evra’s complaint was the perceived incompetence of team manager Raymond Domenech. McChrystal and his aides turned their guns on a raft of advisors in the White House.
The difference between Evra’s and McChrystal’s situation is that Evra and his team face almost universal contempt in a nation which believes that the episode epitomises the loss of “honneur”. Whereas McChrystal will enjoy much sympathy in America, particularly among the military, where he is highly respected, and among those who will take any opportunity to discredit the President and his team.
Ironically, among the anti-Obama faction are many patriotic Americans who in any other circumstances would regard the breaking of ranks at such a critical time with horror. But such is the polarised opinion about Obama, his opponents will seize this chance to further degrade his standing, and swallow their principles of respect for the chain of command.
That’s politics. Both will bear the scars of recent events. But Patrice Evra will return to Manchester United and eventually retire a very wealthy man. Stanley McChrystal will retire on a generous military pension, and no doubt make a fortune on the lecture circuit.
The price of breaking ranks will be wounded pride. For the people of France, and much more for the benighted Afghans, the agony will continue.
Welcome to my blog.
I live in the Middle East, was born in the UK, and have personal and business ties to the USA, Ireland, Malaysia, France and more than one of the GCC countries. In the blog I’ll be reflecting on politics, education, business, books I read, music I hear, movies I see. I look at most things through the prism of history. I feel privileged to live in a region where much of our spoken and written history began.
The Middle East is a land of where civilisations, empires and great religions have mingled, mutated and succeeded each other, sometimes with violence, sometimes in peace. Sumerians, Hittites, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Parthians, Byzantines, Umayads, Abbassids, Fatimids, Mongols, Franks, Ottomans, Saudis, French and British – all have contributed to the cultural and physical gene pool. The gods of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Carthage and Mecca have fought for the hearts of the faithful, to be supplanted by the great religions of the Book – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Today, the Middle East is still at the heart of things. The key to prosperity and deprivation, to peace and conflict way beyond its boundaries. It’s a land of kindness, hospitality, resentment, envy, plenty, destitution, wisdom, foolishness and hope.
You could say that of many parts of the world. But this is where western civilisation began. It’s beyond compare in many ways.
59steps 