

The Myth of the Bell Curve: Look for the Hyper-Performers - a3voices
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2014/02/19/the-myth-of-the-bell-curve-look-for-the-hyper-performers/

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camkego
It appears the Forbes author did not understand the underlying article, or the
concepts well. His graph axes of the Power Law distribution and comments
regarding it show a lack of understanding. The axes should be performance and
one of probability or frequency. He has the performance axis, but has
substituted 'total number of people' for frequency/probability. Thus making
this a CDF graph, not a PDF graph. But the cincher is the author's comments
"Roughly 10-15% of the population are above the average (often far above the
average), a large population are slightly below average, and a small group are
far below average" The original research shows the largest group is the lowest
performers, and a proper interpretation of the Power Law distribution applied
here also indicates the same. The author states the largest group is "slightly
below average". The graph comments reflect this misinterpretation also. His
Power Law interpretation better reflects an interpretation of the Normal
distribution, not a Power Law distribution.

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ScottBurson
Agreed. It wasn't at all what I was expecting him to say as I read the first
part of the article. What I thought he was going to say was this: the normal
distribution is only the prior -- what you would get if you hired people
randomly. Hiring is difficult, of course, and there is inevitably a certain
amount of randomness in the process, but once you have culled the low
performers once -- or succeeded in not letting them in in the first place --
you no longer have a normal distribution, and you shouldn't act as if you did.

