the talent myth I've been thinking about the Gladwell article since Razib first linked to it. While it's been garnering praise around the blogosphere, something about it struck me as very wrong:

The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it's the other way around.

But this seems quite incorrect. In my experience (in both industry and academia), organizations make smart people dumb. The people who graduate from HBS and work at McKinsey are all very intelligent. But intelligence can be a bad thing when your brain is full of management nonsense and your job is full of perverse incentives:

How do you evaluate someone's performance in a system where no one is in a job long enough to allow such evaluation? The answer is that you end up doing performance evaluations that aren't based on performance.

Is it any wonder that intelligent people, faced with an evaluation not based on performance, will work towards good evaluations rather than good performance? Furthermore, Gladwell writes,

A company's business is supposed to be shaped in the direction that its managers find most profitable. But at Enron the needs of the customers and the shareholders were secondary to the needs of its stars.

If you take a bunch of super-intelligent people and tell them "do whatever you want," you'll likely end up with a less successful company than if you take competent people and tell them "make money meeting customers' needs." But rather than "intelligence is unimportant" or "success is an emergent property," the lesson I take is incentives matter. Charles Murtaugh thinks that Gladwell's thesis has implications for the "engineering intelligence" debate he and Godless and Paul Orwin are forever having (and which I try to stay out of). But my takeaway from the Gladwell article is the simple "If you reward stupidity, then even the intelligent will act dumb."