Talent Is Overrated (16 page)

But in the great majority of careers, and in the advanced stages of all of them, there is no published curriculum, no syllabus of materials that must be studied and mastered. In deciding which skills and abilities to work on, and how to do it, you're on your own. Most of us are completely unqualified to figure these things out by ourselves; we need help.

From this perspective we can see mentors in a new way—not just as wise people to whom we turn for guidance, but as experienced masters in our field who can advise us on the skills and abilities we need to acquire next, and can give us feedback on how we're doing. At least that's the ideal mentor, ideally used. Finding such a person isn't easy, but it's always possible to pursue the general principle: In all practice activities it's highly valuable to get others' views about what you should be working on and how you're doing.

The skills and abilities one can choose to develop are infinite, but the opportunities to practice them fall into two general categories: opportunities to practice directly, apart from the actual use of the skill or ability, the way a musician practices a piece before performing it; and opportunities to practice as part of the work itself.

In most jobs the notion of practicing directly is not well established, aside from maybe rehearsing a speech. But in fact the possibilities are surprisingly wide and deep. We can think of them in three general categories, based on models used in fields in which practice is accepted as critically important.

 
The music model.

 
In the classical tradition, a musician knows what he or she is going to play; the music is written down. What separates the greats from the rest is how well they perform that music. In business we find many analogous situations, far more than you might at first think. The most obvious involve presentations and speeches, and these form the one element of corporate life that is commonly practiced. But how well? These events can be extraordinarily important—a presentation to Wall Street analysts, to the board of directors, to your boss, to a congressional committee, or just to immediate colleagues can hold large consequences for you or your organization. Yet for most people, practice consists of perhaps a few run-throughs.

Think of all the ways it could be done much better. One could analyze the text of the talk and in each section determine the most important idea to be conveyed—passion, logical inevitability, common bonds with the audience, humor—and then work on each section repeatedly, constantly striving to express that key idea more effectively, with feedback after each repetition, either from a coach or by watching video. In the age of YouTube, it may be easy to find video of others giving similar types of presentations that one can then analyze and learn from, noting specifically how other speakers tried—well or badly—to convey the same key ideas that you want to put across.

Is this way more work than anyone you know has ever put into a presentation? Most likely. But it is exactly the type of preparation that great performers put into whatever they do.

Many other important elements of business life can be practiced similarly. One of the most dreaded tasks for many managers is giving job evaluations to their direct reports. This is a music-model task; you know what you want to convey, and the challenge is to convey it effectively. The message can be broken down into pieces and each piece analyzed for intent, then practiced repeatedly with immediate feedback from a coach or by video. Even being interviewed—by a prospective employer or by the news media—can be practiced in this way. After all, in those situations you probably know the key messages that you intend to convey, regardless of the questions you're asked.

We have bypassed the question of how these presentations or speeches get written. It's often said that anything you write is a performance, which suggests that writing may be considered a music-model activity. For straightforward written work, the multipart Ben Franklin technique would be appropriate; instead of emulating the
Spectator,
you would choose a superior letter to the shareholders, advertisement, blog entry, or other appropriate model. For spoken presentations, a particularly effective approach would be a juiced-up Ben Franklin technique: Watch a presentation that you consider especially well done and make notes of its various points; later, after you've forgotten most of it, use your notes to create a talk making the same points; deliver the talk and record it; then compare your video with the original.

 
Excellent chess players practice by studying positions from real games between top-level players, organized by various themes—openings, end-games, attacks, defenses, and many other categories that are far more refined. Thousands of books of such positions have been published. The practice routine is to study a particular position and choose the move you would make, then compare it with the move chosen by the master; if they're different, figure out why and which is better.

This is practice of a different type, but it still fulfills the requirements of well-structured deliberate practice: It is designed to meet the central demands of the field, in this case move selection, and can be further focused on the types of moves that need to be improved; and it involves high repetition and immediate feedback. Many elements of job performance can be improved through a similar approach.

In fact, the chess model has been used widely in business education for eighty years, but under a different name: the case method. Pioneered at the Harvard Business School, it is strongly analogous to chess practice: You're presented with a problem, and your job is to figure out a solution. Real life being the way it is, you often won't know whether the solution chosen by the case's protagonist was the best one possible, or whether yours was any better. But the process of focusing on the problem and evaluating proposed solutions is powerfully instructive, which helps explain why the case method is used by hundreds of universities around the world.

One of the great strengths of this approach is that it can be focused sharply on specific skills that need improvement, in keeping with deliberate practice principles. You might work in marketing for years and get only a couple of chances to market U.S. products in China, for example, so that's a skill you probably wouldn't be very good at. But in a short time you could study a dozen cases about marketing U.S. products in China. That's one step removed from actually marketing the products, but it puts you many steps ahead of anyone who has not studied that specific skill intensely and repeatedly.

One way to apply the chess model is to take business classes that use the case method. That option isn't always available, but it holds many advantages. Since the correct response to the case problem isn't always clear, it's helpful to hear the perspectives of other students and especially of the teacher, who may be the writer of the case. Classes also typically expose students to a lot of cases; students at the Harvard Business School study more than five hundred of them during the two-year program.

If you can't go to business school or take business classes, you can still apply the chess model ad hoc. For starters, many of the case studies used at famous business schools worldwide are for sale; you can buy them online and study them yourself. More generally, consciousness of the chess model changes the way you read the news or observe what happens in your own industry or the company where you work. The essence of the chess model is the question: What would you do? Each news event that you read about, each new development in your company or industry, is an opportunity for you to answer that question. Oil prices jump, consumer spending tanks, a rogue trader loses $7 billion, Apple introduces the iPhone—don't just read the news, imagine how it might affect the business you're in or want to be in, and answer the question: What would you do? Then comes a critically important step: Write your answer down and keep it. Remember, feedback is crucial to effective practice, and people have a tendency to misremember what they thought in the past; we almost always adjust our recollections flatteringly, in light of how events actually turned out. But there's no escaping a written record. Comparing your own what-would-I-do with the results of what the protagonist really did is the only way this exercise can yield genuine learning, and that learning can be considerable.

 
The practice of top athletes falls into two large categories. One is conditioning, building the strengths and capacities that are most useful in a given sport. NFL linemen build their leg muscles in a way that produces explosive power; tennis players work on stamina so they can still get to the ball three hours into a match. The other category of practice is working on specific critical skills—batting a baseball, throwing a football, hitting a golf ball out of the sand. A characteristic that many of these skills share is that they must be performed differently every time because the situations in which they're encountered are never the same. That's why this is different from the music model. For a pianist, the notes in Beethoven's
Moonlight Sonata
never change, but for a quarterback, no two passing situations are ever alike.

What are the analogs in business? For conditioning, we'll assume that your work makes no significant physical demands; if it does, the appropriate physical conditioning opportunities will be apparent. But if your work is information- and service-based, as most work in the developed world is, then conditioning means getting stronger with the underlying cognitive skills that you probably already have—basic math and accounting in financial jobs, basic science in engineering jobs, basic language skills in editorial jobs. In many cases this is stuff you learned in high school or college, and it's tempting to think you couldn't possibly benefit from revisiting it. But the truth is that these strengths, like physical strengths, decay if they aren't maintained.

Conditioning in this context can take various forms. It can mean getting out those old textbooks or handbooks and reviewing the fundamental skills that underlie your work, becoming faster, more facile, and more confident with them. For example, no matter how long you've worked in the world of investments, you will benefit from rereading Graham and Dodd's
Security Analysis,
a book you probably got when you started; and I guarantee you will learn something important that you'd forgotten. For people who write and edit, the same applies to Fowler's
Modern English Usage
and Strunk and White's
The Elements of Style.
Every field has classic guides that will always repay study, just as linebackers will always benefit from leg presses. The difference is that every linebacker from high school on up to the NFL does leg presses, while surprisingly few people in business practice the basic conditioning that supports all they do.

Conditioning can also be practiced with new material. Analyze the basic ratios in an unfamiliar financial statement with pen and paper, even though you have software that could do it all with one click. Do a value-based analysis of a stock. Pencil-edit a magazine article. You won't be learning new skills; you'll be building the strengths that make all your skills possible.

The second type of practice in the sports model, specific skill development, is based on focused simulation, and that concept can be applied widely in business, though doing it by oneself may be a challenge. Athletes spend much of their time working on particular skills that aren't like playing a piece of written music, which doesn't change, or like certain sports skills that are entirely under the athlete's control, such as pitching a baseball or serving a tennis ball. These other skills are difficult in part because they have one or both of two traits. First, they may require a fast response to an unpredictable action by the opponent—hitting a baseball or returning a tennis serve, for example. Second, they may be fluid and dynamic; a pass receiver may not be open when the quarterback throws the ball but may be by the time the ball arrives.

Unpredictable opponents, fast responses, dynamic situations—how very much like life in business. Practicing these situations can be difficult on your own because by their nature they involve other people. If you can get someone to help you practice a sales call or a negotiation, for example, by all means do so, being sure to remember the principles: trying to improve a specific aspect of your performance, high repetition, immediate feedback. But if you can't get anyone to help, you can do a great deal of this type of practice by yourself through the fast-growing world of business simulations. It's quite amazing what's available. Web-based or downloadable simulation games in marketing, stock trading, negotiating, corporate strategizing, and many other disciplines at several levels of sophistication are widely available, with more being created every day. They are a genuine advance in making this valuable type of practice easy and accessible.

Opportunities to practice business skills directly are far more available than we usually realize, but even these aren't the only opportunities. We all face a different way to practice business skills, and that is by finding practice in the work itself. It is, to repeat, a different kind of activity. If you're holding a talk with your boss about your bonus target, you probably can't say, “Hold on—let's discuss that point five more times.” But in that or any other situation you can do different things that will help make you much better. And they're all done in your head.

Researchers call these activities self-regulation. That term encompasses a broad range of behaviors, some of which are highly relevant here. Professor Barry J. Zimmerman, of City University of New York, and colleagues have studied these behaviors extensively, and he finds that the “properties of deliberate practice . . . have been studied as key components of self-regulation.” Effective self-regulation is something you do before, during, and after the work activity itself.