Talent Is Overrated (23 page)

One of the main reasons why the people in organizations don't produce more innovation is that the culture isn't friendly to it. New ideas aren't really welcomed. Risk taking isn't embraced. Corporate surveys show this, but we don't need the surveys; we all know it from experience. A revealing finding from McKinsey research explains why the problem doesn't get fixed very often: Top management doesn't think it's a problem. In a survey of six hundred executives, those at the top thought the main reason why their company wasn't more innovative was that it didn't have enough of the right people. Lower-level managers held a markedly different view—that the company had the right people, but the culture kept them from innovating as they should. Anyone who has spent time in organizations knows which of those two groups is more likely to be right. Changing an organizational culture to be friendlier to innovation, or in any other way, is a massive, long-term project that we can't explore in detail here, aside from making one observation: Culture change starts at the top. As long as those C-level executives think the culture is fine, it will never change. That's why McKinsey's survey explains a great deal about why so many companies aren't as innovative as they want to be.

Organizations can take two other steps that are especially effective in light of how innovation really happens: telling people what's needed, and giving them freedom to innovate.

Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, speaks often to business groups and typically takes them through a little exercise. He finds someone in the group whose birthday is that day, or the day before or after, and brings that person forward. Then he says to the group, “It's Mary's birthday! Sing her her song!” Without another word of instruction, the group immediately sings “Happy Birthday” to Mary. Then Zander says, “Well, that was very good. But you know what? I think you can do better. Now please sing it again, but this time—better. Go!” Complete silence. No one makes a sound. After several awkward seconds, Zander points out what has just happened: When everyone understood what to do, they did it easily, together, and without being led. But when they didn't understand—when told simply to sing it better—they became paralyzed.

It's often the same with innovation in organizations. Leaders exhort the troops to be innovative, but no one understands clearly what that means. Unsure where to go, they go nowhere. Organizations that want more innovation would benefit from telling everyone what kind of innovation would be most valuable. Because waiting for lightning bolts won't work—people would have to devote enormous time and effort to mastery of the field in which they hope to innovate—resources can be massively wasted if those people are pointed in the wrong direction. The right direction should be stated clearly: We need new ways to extend a product line, or new ways to expand in Latin America, or new ways to identify the needs of our customers, or new ways to lower our capital costs. What's important is that people understand the organization's priorities and thus know where innovation will do the most good.

The other step, giving people freedom to innovate, is a matter of motivation. The topic of why people put themselves through the rigors required for great performance is discussed in the last chapter, but it's worth noting here that on creative tasks in particular, some research suggests that people perform more innovatively when they are offered no extrinsic rewards; offering them a reward can actually reduce their creativity. Not all the research agrees, but the point is intuitively plausible: People who are internally driven to create do seem more creative than those who are just doing it for the money. As we've seen, money is never at the top of the list of motivators anyway, and when we're asking people to become masters of their field, we want to rely on the strongest possible inducements. That helps explain why some of the most notably innovative companies, such as 3M and Google, let employees spend a certain amount of their time, typically 10 to 20 percent, on any project that they find personally compelling. Such projects will not always help the company; that's a risk. But the benefit is that follow-your-heart policies embody a culture of trust, which is, as noted, an important contributor to creativity and almost impossibly difficult for many companies to adopt. That's why companies that adopt it hold a competitive advantage.

 
Understanding where innovation comes from is particularly important because we tend to believe deeply that this type of performance, even more than others, is a mysterious gift. It's easier for most of us to believe that a great tennis player achieved his success through the principles of deliberate practice than to believe that a great inventor got there that way. But the evidence shows that the most important factor in their high achievement is the same for both. Professor Raymond S. Nickerson of Tufts University has written that “the importance of domain-specific knowledge as a determinant of creativity is generally underestimated, even though investigators have given it considerable emphasis.” What makes the biggest difference is the willingness to go through the demanding process of acquiring that knowledge over time. David N. Perkins of Harvard, surveying the many factors that have been proposed as important elements of creativity, wrote, “The clearest evidence of all demonstrates the connection between creative thinking and values broadly construed—a person's commitments and aspirations. . . . Much more than we usually suppose, creating is an intentional endeavor.” Wanting to achieve mastery of a field, committing to the long, hard work of achieving it, and then intending to innovate—that's how it happens.

The heavy burden of the evidence is that creativity is much more available to us than we tend to think. The most significant constraint, as with all kinds of exceptional performance, is mostly likely to be our willingness to do the difficult work required. On that point, the study of innovation in particular has raised questions that are actually significant for all types of top performance: How early in life should the work of deliberate practice begin, and how late in life is it effective? In creative fields such as music, people may begin training when they're very young and keep working until they're very old. What is the larger meaning of this? Does achieving exceptional performance take longer than it used to? If so, what is the role of the supporting environment?

It turns out that the power of deliberate practice extends very broadly through life. We turn next to why that is so and what it implies.

Chapter Ten

Great Performance in Youth and Age

 
 
Why are Nobel Prize winners receiving their awards at increasingly advanced ages? They are, and at a fairly dramatic rate.

The explanation reveals a number of trends and basic realities about exceptional performance. It shows why reaching the highest levels in many fields is harder than it used to be. That fact forces us to examine the effectiveness of deliberate practice throughout life, from the earliest ages to the oldest. It also leads us to consider the kinds of support structures that will be needed to help anyone reach exceptional achievements in the future—for one of the most consistent findings in the research is that nobody makes this journey alone.

The advancing ages of Nobel laureates and other innovators was discovered by Benjamin F. Jones of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He examined the winners of Nobel Prizes in the sciences and economics as well as others who had made the most notable advances in science and technology over a period that was roughly the twentieth century. When he determined the ages at which they had made their outstanding advances, he found a surprising fact: The average age had increased by about six years during just a one-hundred-year period. The finding survived every test of statistical significance. Something big was going on, but why?

The most obvious explanation would be that average life spans increased greatly over the twentieth century, so this finding makes perfect sense. Of course Nobel laureates were getting older; so was everybody else. The trouble is, this explanation doesn't hold up. Scientists and economists very rarely make important contributions in their later years, so it doesn't matter that they might be living to eighty rather than sixty-five. In addition, confirming this logic, Jones was able to use sophisticated statistical techniques to control for the aging population, and he found that its effect was zero.

The real explanation was at the other end of the spectrum. These eminent innovators were getting older not because the oldest ones were pulling the average up, but because the youngest ones were pushing the average up. Einstein won the Nobel Prize in physics for work he did at age twenty-six, and no one thought that was remarkable. Quite the contrary. Paul Dirac, who also won a Nobel Prize in physics for work he did at age twenty-six (in 1928), wrote a famous verse on exactly this point: “Age is, of course, a fever chill/ that every physicist must fear./ He's better dead than living still/ when once he's past his thirtieth year.”

Yet by the century's end, any physicist who died before the age of thirty would probably remain unheard of. Jones found that the innovators he studied began making active contributions to their fields at age twenty-three, on average, in 1900, but by 1999 the average age had risen to thirty-one, a very large increase of eight years, and of course the ages at which they made their greatest contributions were even later. The reason Nobel laureates and other innovators are getting older is not that they're living longer but that it's taking them significantly longer to make a contribution in the first place.

Other research shows that this trend applies not just to the most advanced thinkers. The age at which people receive their first patent, across a wide range of fields in business and government, has been increasing at a rate of six to seven years per century. Jones concluded, “Taking the facts together, we see similar trends among both the greatest minds and ordinary inventors. We appear to be seeing a general phenomenon.”

It's general because it's happening in all heavily knowledge-based fields, including those in which many people work. Knowledge is the foundation of great performance, and in fields where important advances are being made continually, mastering the accumulated knowledge takes longer all the time. That's easy to see in physics. When you think of all the twentieth-century giants in this field—Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Fermi, Feynman, and many others—it's clear why today's aspiring physicist needs many more years of preparatory study than even Einstein did.

But the same principle holds beyond physics and the other hard sciences, extending into all knowledge-rich realms, emphatically including business. Economics and corporate finance have been transformed in the past hundred years. Marketing, operations research, organizational behavior—all have developed into advanced disciplines that require far more study than in the past. Even the ever-swelling U.S. tax code—now four times longer than
War and Peace
—demands many years of devoted study by those whose work requires that they understand it. The Nobel Prize effect is happening in all these domains and many more.

Reinforcing that effect are generally rising standards, which are forcing more intensive preparation on anyone who hopes to excel. We saw in chapter 1 how several factors are pushing standards up in virtually every domain as competition increases and methods of advancement are constantly improved. And not just in the world of work: All parents with kids applying to college seem to be extremely glad that they applied back when they did, and not today.

As the demands of excellence increase in every field, so grows the importance of the supporting environment in which prospective achievers dwell, starting at the earliest age. No one becomes extraordinary on his or her own, and a striking feature in the lives of great performers is the valuable support they received at critical times in their development. Certainly some great performers have had to fight poverty and discouragement, but that's not the same as lack of support. In virtually every case, the supporting environment is critical.

It exists at several levels, some of which you can't do much about—though the findings on supporting environments at every level furnish insight that's valuable in shaping environments that you can control. Dean Keith Simonton has observed that “expertise of the highest order is most likely to appear in a particular sociocultural context.” For example, Kenneth Clarke, the famous English art critic and author of
Civilization,
believed that great art was usually created amid stability; you won't get many great statues or symphonies from residents of a city under siege. Simonton's research found that “exceptional creators are less likely to develop during times of anarchy but are more likely to develop during periods of political fragmentation, when a civilization is divided into numerous independent states,” which is a pretty good description of Renaissance Italy. Cultures encourage or discourage specific pursuits at different times. In Western cultures today you'll get plenty of support for medical research into a cure for cancer, but two hundred years ago phony cancer cures were so prevalent that you would have been regarded as a dangerous charlatan.

If the culture is at one end of the spectrum of supporting environments—the widest, most immutable part—then at the other end is the home, and wide research suggests that it is by far the most important part. The circumstances in which people begin developing in their eventual field of achievement can make a major difference, and even in business and other domains where development often begins later than childhood, findings about effective supporting environments in the home hold larger lessons that can be applied more generally.