Talent Is Overrated (3 page)

Microsoft and Google understand perfectly well that their success is built on human capital. Both companies are famous for the scorching intelligence of the people they hire and for the brutally rigorous tests they impose on job applicants. Bill Gates has said that if you took the twenty smartest people out of Microsoft it would be an insignificant company, and if you ask around the company what its core competency is, they don't say anything about software. They say it's hiring. They know what the scarce resource is.

What makes this phenomenon so significant is that it applies to all companies, not just infotech wonders. Consider the most extreme case of a company that would appear to rely almost entirely on financial capital, Exxon Mobil. It's the largest company in the world, and its business is arguably the world's most capital-intensive. In recent years it has been investing about $20 billion a year in its business, the largest capital investment program of any company in the world. But it has been giving even more—$33 billion in 2006—back to the shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks, the largest-ever example of “Here—maybe you can do something with this.” I asked the CEO, Rex Tillerson, why he followed that policy. After all, Exxon earns tremendous returns on the money it invests, far better than any of its major competitors. So why not build shareholder wealth by investing more than $20 billion a year? The constraint, he says, isn't money, it's people: “You don't just walk out on the street and hire an Exxon Mobil engineer or geoscientist or researcher.” He could fund more projects, but he doesn't have enough qualified people to manage them.

For virtually every company, the scarce resource today is human ability. That's why companies are under unprecedented pressure to make sure that every employee is as highly developed as possible—and as we shall see, no one knows what the limits of development are.

At the same time, a separate historic trend is putting individuals under unprecedented pressure to develop their own abilities more highly than was ever necessary before, quite apart from anything their employers may or may not do to develop them. That trend is the advent of the first large-scale global labor market. We've had global product markets for centuries and global capital markets for almost as long. But labor markets were different. For most of human history, most work has been place-based. Often it was tied to the location of customers; farriers had to be where the horses were, bakers where the buyers were, bankers where the depositors and borrowers were. Other work was tied to the location of the natural resources on which it relied. Miners had to be where the coal was, fishermen where the fish were. Detroit became the car capital because it was the best spot at which to bring together, via rail and Great Lakes shipping, the coal, steel, rubber, and other components of a car, and from which to distribute to the nation.

Offshoring happened for decades, but for most of that time it wasn't a national obsession because it didn't happen much; before the info age, coordinating production in a foreign country was slow and cumbersome. Thus the great majority of workers competed for jobs mostly with other workers in their area, and when they competed more broadly, it was mostly with workers in other parts of the country.

But today, many millions of workers in developed economies compete for jobs with other workers around the world. The reason is that a large and growing proportion of all work is information-based and doesn't involve moving or processing anything physical at all. We're all familiar with some of the results: workers in other countries answering our customer service calls, reading our X-rays, writing our software. Other developments may be more surprising. More than a million American tax returns are prepared in India each year. A major accounting firm audited a client company in London by flying in a team of accountants from India, putting them up in a hotel for three weeks, and flying them back; it was much cheaper than using British accountants.

It's all happening because the costs of computing power and telecommunications are in free fall. Processing information and moving it around costs practically nothing. For those same reasons, offshoring of manufacturing jobs is also exploding. Coordinating global supply chains has become so fast and precise that it's now worthwhile to take advantage of cheaper labor that happens to be halfway around the world.

The result is that a fast-growing number of workers everywhere have to be just as good—and just as good a value—as the very best workers in their field anywhere on earth. It's true that a few jobs can probably escape this brutal competition, but not as many as we're tempted to think. You might suppose, for example, that dentists will always have to be where their patients are. Not so. Many consumers in Britain, where dentistry is a much-criticized part of the National Health Service, are taking low-fare flights to Poland to get their dental work done by well-trained dentists who charge bargain prices.

If you think your job isn't exportable, you may be right—but think about it hard before you relax.

“World class” is a term that gets thrown around too easily. For most of history, few people had to worry about what world class was. But now that's changing. In a global, information-based, interconnected economy, businesses and individuals are increasingly going up against the world's best. The costs of being less than truly world class are growing, as are the rewards of being genuinely great.

Understanding where extraordinary performance comes from would be valuable at any time. Now it's crucial.

 
It must also be said that the value of better understanding great performance is more than just economic. Not that there's anything wrong with prosperity; most people want to be better off, and helping them keep their jobs, fund their retirements, and pay for their kids' educations—by helping them become better performers—can prevent a lot of human suffering. But there's more to life than work, and there's more to be good at than your job.

Being good at whatever we want to do—playing the violin, running a race, painting a picture, leading a group of people—is among the deepest sources of fulfillment we will ever know. Most of what we want to do is hard. That's life. Encountering problems, discouragement, and disappointment is inevitable. So any knowledge about what makes us better at the things we want to do—real knowledge, not myth or conjecture—can be used not just to make us richer but also to make us happier.

Researchers have uncovered and refined a great deal of such knowledge over the past thirty years, and it holds tremendous promise for making us better at undertakings of every kind. This knowledge has not been widely dispersed or well understood, which makes the opportunity of applying it all the greater. Many of the findings are surprising; in fact, though they're ultimately full of promise and even inspiration, many people resist them at first.

The nineteenth-century humorist Josh Billings famously said, “It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so.” The first step in understanding the new findings on great performance is using them to help us identify what we know for sure that just ain't so.

Chapter Two

Talent Is Overrated

 
 
 
In 1992, a small group of researchers in England went looking for talent. They couldn't find it.

They were looking for musical talent, which made sense, because that's the kind people feel most certain about. They know it exists. They know there's a reason why they can't sing and other people can, or why Mozart could write symphonies when he was a teenager, or why some people can play the piano beautifully as mere children while others struggle to play a scale. Most people simply know that certain lucky individuals are born with a talent for music, and that's the main factor in how well they perform it or write it.

When researchers in a separate study polled a sample consisting mainly of education professionals, more than 75 percent believed that singing, composing, and playing concert instruments requires a special gift or talent; that 75 percent is a higher proportion than those who believe particular talent is necessary in any other field.

So the researchers looked at 257 young people, all of whom had been introduced to the study of music but who otherwise varied widely. They were classified into five ability groups, ranging from students at a music school who were admitted by competitive audition (the top group) to students who had tried an instrument for at least six months but had given it up. Researchers matched the groups by age, gender, instruments, and socioeconomic class.

Then the researchers interviewed the students and their parents at length. How much did the kids practice? At what age could they first sing a recognizable tune? And so on. Fortunately for the researchers, the British educational system gave them an independent means of assessing these students beyond the five ability groups used. A national system of grading young instrumentalists is rigorous and uniform; the great majority of kids studying instruments take graded exams that are formulated and conducted by a national panel of assessors, who then place each student into one of nine grades.

This setup let the researchers check their results two ways as they tried to figure out what accounted for the wide difference in musical ability and achievement among their 257 subjects.

The results were clear. The telltale signs of precocious musical ability in the top-performing groups—the evidence of talent that we all know exists—simply weren't there. On the contrary, judged by early signs of special talent, all the groups were highly similar. The top group, the students at music school, were superior on one measure of early ability—the ability to repeat a tune; they could do that at the age of eighteen months, on average, versus about twenty-four months for the others. But it's hard to regard even that as evidence of special talent, because the interviews revealed that the parents of these kids were far more active in singing to them than other parents were. On several other dimensions the various groups of students showed no significant differences; they all started studying their main instrument around age eight, for example.

Still, the students obviously differed dramatically in their musical accomplishments, and even if extensive interviewing turned up no evidence of particular talent, weren't the differing levels of achievement in themselves evidence of talent? What else could it be? As it happens, the study produced an answer to that question. One factor, and only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students were, and that was how much they practiced.

Specifically, the researchers studied the results of those nationally administered grade-level exams. You would expect, of course, that the students who went on to win places at the music school—and this was a school whose graduates regularly win national competitions and go on to professional music careers—would reach any given grade level more quickly and easily than the students who ended up being less accomplished. That's the very meaning of being musically talented. But it didn't happen. On the contrary: The researchers calculated the average hours of practice needed by the most elite group of students to reach each grade level, and they calculated the average hours needed by each of the other groups. There were no statistically significant differences. For students who ended up going to the elite music school as well as for students who just played casually for fun, it took an average of twelve hundred hours of practice to reach grade 5, for example. The music school students reached grade levels at earlier ages than the other students for the simple reason that they practiced more each day.

By age twelve, the researchers found, the students in the most elite group were practicing an average of two hours a day versus about fifteen minutes a day for the students in the lowest group, an 800 percent difference. So students could put in their hours a little bit each day or a lot each day, but nothing, it turned out, enabled any group to reach any given grade level without putting in those hours. As one of the researchers, Professor John A. Sloboda of the University of Keele, put it: “There is absolutely no evidence of a ‘fast track' for high achievers.”

To put the results in their starkest terms: Shown five groups of students, one of which won positions at a top-ranked music school and one of which gave up even trying to play an instrument, we would all say the first group is obviously immensely more talented than the latter. But the study showed that—at least as most of us understand “talent,” meaning an ability to achieve more easily—they were not.

If it turns out that we're all wrong about talent—and I will offer a lot more evidence that we are—that's a big problem. If we believe that people without a particular natural talent for some activity will never be very good at it, or at least will never be competitive with those who possess that talent, then we'll direct them away from that activity. We'll tell them they shouldn't even think about it. We'll steer our kids away from particular studies, whether they're art, tennis, economics, or Chinese, because we think we've seen signs that they have no talent in those realms. In business we constantly see managers redirect people's careers based on slender evidence of what they've “got.” Most insidiously, in our own lives, we will try something new and, finding that it isn't easy for us, conclude that we have no talent for it, and so we never pursue it.

Thus our views about talent, which are extremely deeply held, are extraordinarily important for the future of our lives, our children's lives, our companies, and the people in them. Understanding the reality of talent is worth a great deal.