
Are smart people overrated? - j_baker
http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm
======
mrr2
God, this is classic Gladwell. Skip critical details to come out as a "holier
than thou" contrarian.

 _Kitchin's qualification for running EnronOnline, it should be pointed out,
was not that she was good at it. It was that she wanted to do it, and Enron
was a place where stars did whatever they wanted._

EnronOnline was one of the most successful units of Enron. In fact, UBS picked
up the platform and now many of the techniques developed at EnronOnline was
picked up by the electronic energy trading platforms.

Kitchin is still considered one of the foremost authorities in the world of
energy trading and finance. I believe she is a MD at Deutsche Bank in the
field of energy structuring and got her development of the business turned
into a Harvard Business School case study.

Clearly not only was she good at organizing the business, she succeeded at it.
This is exactly what I really dislike about reading Gladwell's stuff. His job
is to find a previously successful story-line that has hit snags, in order to
act as an armchair quarterback. He is just like most other journalist and
historian - seemingly wise because of post-hoc analysis but incapable of
actual prediction.

~~~
j_baker
I don't see him as coming out as "holier than thou", although admittedly a bit
contrarian. Plus, the point about Kitchin wasn't that she was unsuccessful.
Quite the opposite in fact. The point was that these decisions affected the
whole company.

And for the record, I think that Enron goes well beyond having "hit snags".

~~~
mrr2
Definition of holier than thou: _Exhibiting an attitude of superior virtue;
self-righteously pious._

Gladwell tries to come off from a moral high ground where he preaches about
certain concepts (in this example the benefits of talent) by self-selecting
evidence.

I really find it funny how the entire employee grading process has become a
huge area of contention amongst arm chair quarterbacks. Recently, there was
another article where it talked about Wall Street's excessive competitiveness
as having caused the crisis. Gladwell and similar authors forget the one
company (and the one manager) credited with popularizing this entire concept:
General Electric and Jack Welch. I like the off-handed way Gladwell mentions a
specific quote from a G.E. exec without talking about the success G.E. had
with this approach I can use Welch and G.E. in order to argue against this
entire article. In fact, Welch's biographies do the job. Not only did he grade
employees into three tiers, he graded entire businesses into tiers. If a
business wasn't #1 or #2, its shuttered. I will bet I can actually construct a
better argument for supporting the quest for talent.

Enron blew up because upper management was a bunch of liars. What does talent
have to do with it? In fact, Enron failed at following the "promote talent"
concept. If they did take this philosophy to heart, they would have fired the
international heads that bled billions of dollars from Enron's bottom line. In
fact, Skilling and the top protected those sub-par managers and execs leading
to the shady accounting to hide the carnage. The talent they picked up in
their energy trading department was (and is) great. Go into any of the
nation's energy trading floors and Enron alumni enjoy great reputations.

As for the record, I think Gladwell goes well beyond being "a bit contrarian".
;)

------
kkowalczyk
I like Alan Kay's saying that "a point of view is worth 80 IQ points"
([http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2006/12/point-of-view-is-
worth...](http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/2006/12/point-of-view-is-worth-80-iq-
points.html)).

In the end I don't think that it's either mostly about intelligence or mostly
about the system but a balance, where good system will multiply the
effectiveness of intelligent people.

We can find examples of few intelligent people in the right place creating
astonishing breakthroughs (see Xerox Parc). I would think that if they were
not above-average smart, they wouldn't have done what they did, so we
shouldn't under-rate being smart.

On the other hand there are also examples of undoubtedly smart people creating
over-complex, broken designs (e.g. SOAP) so pure intelligence is not all there
is.

~~~
trop
Richard Benson (master printer, MacArthur genius grant winner, former dean of
Yale School of Art) has a saying (approx.), "Smart people are a dime a dozen.
Show me someone who can make something and I'll be impressed."

Wise people are also, of course, impressive.

------
fleitz
"Among the most damning facts about Enron, in the end, was something its
managers were proudest of. They had what, in McKinsey terminology, is called
an "open market" for hiring. In the open-market system"

Perhaps I missed this in the scandal, but I thought the most damming facts
about Enron were wholesale accounting & auditing fraud with participation from
Anderson. How does 'hiring smart people' explain the fact that their auditors
conspired to commit fraud? If Anderson also heavily engaged in this HR
practice Gladwell may have a point. But it's still heavily anecdotal. Like
most business analysis it's backward looking instead of making predictions
based on the theory and reporting the results.

Also, the article seems to conflate having an MBA with being smart. I wonder
if Gladwell has ever thought that the reason Southwest has a vastly more
efficient organization than its competitors is because it has a bunch of smart
people who figure out how to do things more efficiently. People so smart in
fact that they realize people on the ground can make much more informed
decisions than people in a boardroom. An MBA is not a proxy for being smart,
an MBA is a proxy for doing well in school. Unfortunately, school has almost
nothing to do with the real world.

When I think about 'smart' people, I don't think about IQ or degrees. I think
about people I've seen do the 'impossible'. A 'smart' person for customer
service might be someone who is very friendly and personable. A 'smart' person
for engineering may not be very personable at all but can come up with a
working design in days instead of months.

~~~
Tamerlin
While I agree your sentiment that degrees and IQ have next to nothing to do
with whether or not someone is actually smart, have a look at current culture
and at corporate america.

At amazon, everyone was obsessed with how "smart" amazon employees were, and
yet the place was a showcase of terrible engineering -- rife with accidental
complexity and tight coupling that spanned not just systems within a group,
but across entire divisions -- and some what I read in this article I saw
there first-hand. The management complained constantly about how bad our tools
were, yet the people that they promoted and took care of were the ones that
designed and implemented those same tools.

A great many managers haven't the faintest idea as to how to determine what
constitutes a "smart" employee, so they zero in on things like degrees and
number of hours worked because they don't have any rational standard for
identifying the good ones from the bad, so the guy with the degree who's
working 80 hours a week is obviously the best guy on the team! Look how hard
he's working! He must be REALLY smart!

"Also, the article seems to conflate having an MBA with being smart. I wonder
if Gladwell has ever thought that the reason Southwest has a vastly more
efficient organization than its competitors is because it has a bunch of smart
people who figure out how to do things more efficiently. People so smart in
fact that they realize people on the ground can make much more informed
decisions than people in a boardroom."

I think that was precisely his point. Enron used MBAs as a proxy for
"smartness" and turned out to be a spectacular disaster. Southwest doesn't,
and is one of the few US-based airlines that isn't relying on the US
government to keep it alive.

~~~
mrr2
Could it be that once you reach a certain level of size in any organization
bureaucracy and complexity turns up? The reason why Amazon might have
"terrible engineering" while the sleekest app startup doesn't is because
Amazon is really, really big.

Look I understand degrees and IQ really don't mean much by themselves. Most of
my friends attend "elite" colleges (as society deems it). Some are brilliant.
Some aren't. However, the numbers show that "smartness" and particularly an
"obsession" with smartness matters. Amazon is really successful. Google is
really successful. D.E. Shaw is notoriously successful. Facebook is
successful. Teach for America is super successful. The defining theme to all
of these organizations is a focus on hiring the best talent possible. And
often times the best talent happens to be at those top schools.

Think of the timeline of hiring. These companies often target people in the
22-27 age bracket. That is just 4 to 9 years away from their high school when
college decisions were made. Work ethic, ambition, and a determination to get
things done is pretty damn autocorrelating in its nature. Someone mentioned
how PG noted in an essay that he was underwhelmed by MIT, Harvard, Stanford
kids. But look at the YC startups. The number of startups funded by YC by
alumni from MIT, CMU, Stanford is far more than what it would be if there was
no correlation-causation.

I think drawing broad conclusion from a criminal enterprise like Enron is a
poor way of doing things. Just because Enron touted their smartness and failed
doesn't mean that is the norm. On a large enough sample set, I will still bet
you that the McKinsey conclusion is right in that "talent" and the drive to
get the top talent is still a big part of the most successful organizations.

~~~
Tamerlin
"Could it be that once you reach a certain level of size in any organization
bureaucracy and complexity turns up?"

I would tend to agree with that, although I've seen startups run by bad
managers install a pointlessly complex hierarchy for no reason other than that
companies have hierarchies.

"The reason why Amazon might have "terrible engineering" while the sleekest
app startup doesn't is because Amazon is really, really big."

No. Their abysmal engineering is by far the worst I've ever seen... well, not
by far, what I ran into at Disney gave Amazon a run for its idiocy. The reason
for the terrible engineering is that amazon is a Gen-Y shop. The company is
notorious for abusing employees, and very clearly shows preferential treatment
to interns rather than seniors. They have a _lot_ of trouble hiring
experienced engineers, and since everything they do is an emergency, they put
however they can on the job... in other words, most of Amazon's mission
critical software was designed and implemented by people who either just
graduated from college, or hadn't yet (interns).

And then they hire seniors to "fix" it... the culture is such that they think
"smart" is the ticket, and don't value the wisdom and knowledge that come with
experience.

Now count the number of successful companies to the number that aren't. And
take into account the number of unsuccessful projects compared to the number
of successful ones, even at successful companies. What I suspect that you'll
find is that in most companies, even successful ones, the primary reason that
projects "succeed" is that the management changes its definition of "success"
in order to avoid taking blame for mis-managing a project to its demise.

------
njharman
"Smart" has too many meanings to people. But successful (by western
consumerist societal standards) people are totally overrated.

Happy people and being happy in general are totally underrated.

~~~
patrickk
Yes, pg commented about "smart" people from top colleges applying to YC in
it's earlier days, and he was surprised at how underwhelming they were. Then
he goes onto say that just because they appeared impressive to admissions
officers when they were 17 doesn't predict future success.

Some quotes:

 _"Success is decided by the market: you only succeed if users like what
you've built. And users don't care where you went to college."_

 _"Y Combinator has been an unprecedented opportunity for learning how to pick
winners. One of the most surprising things we've learned is how little it
matters where people went to college."_

 _"There's nothing like going to grad school at Harvard to cure you of any
illusions you might have about the average Harvard undergrad. And yet Y
Combinator showed us we were still overestimating people who'd been to elite
colleges. We'd interview people from MIT or Harvard or Stanford and sometimes
find ourselves thinking: they must be smarter than they seem. It took us a few
iterations to learn to trust our senses."_

 _"We're talking about a decision made by admissions officers—basically, HR
people—based on a cursory examination of a huge pile of depressingly similar
applications submitted by seventeen year olds. And what do they have to go on?
An easily gamed standardized test; a short essay telling you what the kid
thinks you want to hear; an interview with a random alum; a high school record
that's largely an index of obedience. Who would rely on such a test?"_

\- from "News from the Front" <http://www.paulgraham.com/colleges.html>

EDIT: grammar

------
aridiculous
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the politics of intelligence is one
of the most potent and unspoken. It's far more of a touchy subject than
gender, class, or race. In fact, it precedes them: people seem to get the most
upset when groups of people are called intellectually inferior (they don't
really seem to care about what you have to say about cultural vs genetic
roots). It seems to rule everyday interactions and organizational decisions.

In America, I can't think of something more insulting to say to someone than
to call their heritage intellectually stupid.

------
zeemonkee
No, but Gladwell is.

------
bl4k
Gladwell talking about others being overrated

 _Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight_

------
rlmw
I do think that Gladwell is being hypocritical here. The people who wrote the
survey in the first place were doing a study to find things in common among
successful companies. He identifies things that have made individual
organisations successful in some places, and then generalizes to say that this
falsifies the argument that recruiting the best talent isn't important for all
organisations.

This is in fact he opposite of the methodology he advocates in 'outliers' -
where he suggests that you should look for things in common between successful
organisations.

------
naish
(2002)

------
xenophanes
Are stupid people overrated?

~~~
ludwigvan
Some are.

------
lwhi
If smart is pursued to the detriment of other positive characteristics - then
'smart' can be considered overrated.

~~~
Tamerlin
One must take under consideration the definition of "smart" first.

I had a co-worker who had memorized a raftload of facts without actually
understanding many of them. She frequently mis-diagnosed problems with
customer computers because although she had a huge list of facts in her head,
she couldn't think her way through them to make sense of what was really going
on.

Due to her ability to spew facts on demand however, the management thought she
was exceptionally smart, even though she couldn't actually figure anything out
for herself.

The company's hierarchy reinforced this sort of thing, because the
"engineering" team was a bunch of college dropouts who didn't have the
faintest idea as to how things like UNIX networking worked. They said that
total memory = physical + virtual, so my attempts to explain that UNIX doesn't
work like that went unheard, and customer machines continued to suffer because
they didn't have enough memory to serve their buyers' needs.

The last I heard the company had something like a 4% customer satisfaction
rate.

