Talent Is Overrated (7 page)

The evidence is actually far more substantial than our own random experiences. A wide range of research shows that the correlations between IQ and achievement aren't nearly as strong as the data on broad averages would suggest, and in many cases there's no correlation at all.

Consider, for example, a study of salespeople. This was a so-called meta-analysis, the largest of its type ever conducted, gathering data from several dozen previous studies looking at almost forty-six thousand individuals. Studying businesspeople in the real world is tough because you generally can't control the conditions, and the results are often unclear; whether a decision was good or bad may not be known for years. Salespeople make attractive subjects for researchers because at least they produce something clear to measure: sales. There may still be endless sources of noise in the results, as salespeople explain eloquently to their bosses, but over time and over large numbers of subjects, most of that should wash out.

In this analysis of analyses, the researchers found that if you ask salespeople's bosses to rate them, the ratings track intelligence moderately well; bosses tend to think that smarter salespeople are better. But when the researchers compared intelligence with actual sales results, they found nothing. Intelligence was virtually useless in predicting how well a salesperson would perform. Whatever it is that makes a sales ace, it seems to be something other than brainpower.

These results are surprising also because they suggest that sales supervisors are deluding themselves. You'd think they would have every incentive to know the objective performance of their subordinates and rate them on that basis, but apparently they do not. That finding has been supported in at least one other large meta-analysis. It seems our view that intelligence necessarily produces better performance is so deep that it may occasionally even blind us to reality.

A more detailed investigation of real-world performance focused on an activity that has a lot in common with business: betting on horses. You study the facts, you estimate odds, and you decide where to put your money; it isn't so different from management. The researchers went to a track and recruited a group of subjects. Based on their ability to forecast post-time odds, these subjects were deemed experts or nonexperts. The experts were by definition a lot better at that task, but except for that difference, the two subsets on average turned out to show no significant differences in several ways that you might expect to matter: years of experience at the track, years of formal education, occupational prestige scores, and IQ. The IQ averages and variabilities of both groups, in addition to being the same, were almost exactly the same as for the overall population. The expert forecasters were no smarter than the nonexperts or than people in general.

Looking at the data more closely, the researchers found that knowing a particular subject's IQ was of no use in predicting whether he was a handicapping expert. For example, one of the experts was a construction worker with an IQ of 85 (what one of the early IQ test developers classified as “dull normal”) who had been going to the track regularly for sixteen years; he picked the top horse in ten out of ten races the researchers presented and picked the top three horses in correct order five times out of ten. By contrast, one of the nonexperts was a lawyer with an IQ of 118 (“bright normal,” almost “superior”) who had been going to the track regularly for fifteen years; he picked the top horse in only three of ten races and the top three in only one of ten.

What makes these results especially interesting is that accurately forecasting odds is highly complex. More than a dozen factors have to be considered, and they relate to one another in complicated ways. In fact, the researchers found that the expert handicappers used models that were far more complex than what the nonexperts used, so-called multiplicative models in which the values of some factors (such as track condition) altered the importance of others (such as last-race speed). In other words, what the experts were accomplishing was extremely demanding. And to repeat, IQ just didn't seem to matter. “Low-IQ experts always used more complex models than high-IQ nonexperts,” the researchers found. Not only did handicapping expertise fail to correlate with IQ, it didn't even correlate with performance on the arithmetic subtest of the IQ test.

The researchers' conclusion: Their results suggest “that whatever it is that an IQ test measures, it is not the ability to engage in cognitively complex forms of multivariate reasoning.” That last phrase is not one that most of us use very often, but it's actually a very good description of what most of us do every day in our working lives, and what the best performers do extremely well. You just don't have to be especially “smart,” as traditionally defined, to do it.

 
Similar results turn up in a wide range of fields. For example, in chess—another realm that businesspeople feel is a lot like their own—IQ does not reliably predict performance. This seems hard to believe, since we generally think of chess as an exercise in pure brainpower. Yet researchers have found that some chess grand masters have IQs that are below normal. It's a similar story with Go, the Japanese game that is at least as complex as chess. Also surprising, some top Scrabble players score below average on tests of verbal ability.

Even when performance does match up with IQ in a way we would expect, the effect tends to be short-lived. That is, even if high-IQ people do better than low-IQ people when first trying a task that's new to them, the relationship tends to get weaker and may eventually disappear completely as they work at the task and get better at it. For example, a study of children who took up chess found that the strength of IQ as a predictor dropped drastically as the children worked and got better, and IQ was of no value in predicting how quickly they would improve. Many studies of adults in the workplace have shown the same pattern. IQ is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, IQ predicts little or nothing about performance.

None of this suggests there's anything the least bit wrong with being smart if you want to succeed in business or anything else. Many of the most successful people do seem to be highly intelligent. But what the research suggests very strongly is that the link between intelligence and high achievement isn't nearly as powerful as we commonly suppose. Most important, the research tells us that intelligence as we usually think of it—a high IQ—is not a prerequisite to extraordinary achievement.

The evidence is similar when it comes to that other general ability we often associate with hypersuccessful people, an amazing memory. Francis Galton was certain that this was one of those “natural gifts” that characterize “illustrious men” and that you either inherit it or you don't. For example: “[Richard] Porson, the Greek scholar, was remarkable for this gift, and, I may add, the ‘Porson memory' was hereditary in that family.” Yet a large mass of more recent evidence shows that memory ability is acquired, and it can be acquired by pretty much anyone.

Recall SF, who developed truly remarkable memory ability though he started with only average memory (and average IQ). He did it by working out his own mnemonic system based on his experience as a competitive runner. For example, recall his struggle to remember the final digits of his twenty-two-digit span. He kept saying, “Nine-forty-six-point . . . nine-forty-six-point. . . .” Why was he saying “point”? (And you may have noticed that he also said it earlier in the sequence, “Four-thirteen-point-one.”) It's because when he heard the digits 9 4 6 2, he thought of it as 9 minutes, 46.2 seconds, an excellent time for running two miles. Similarly, 4 1 3 1 became 4:13.1, a mile time. This is what researchers call a retrieval structure, which has particular significance that we'll hear more about later. Many other studies since SF have confirmed that apparently average people can achieve extraordinary memory ability by developing their own retrieval structures or being given them by researchers.

A different type of research reinforces the finding that memory is developed, not innate. World-class chess players, in addition to being considered awesomely smart, are generally assumed to have superhuman memories, and with good reason. Champions routinely put on exhibitions in which they play lesser opponents while blindfolded; they hold the entire chessboard in their heads. Some of these exhibitions strike the rest of us as simply beyond belief. The Czech master Richard Réti once played twenty-nine blindfolded games simultaneously. (Afterward he left his briefcase at the exhibition site and commented on what a poor memory he had.) Miguel Najdorf, a Polish-Argentinean grand master, played forty-five blindfolded games simultaneously in São Paulo in 1947; he won thirty-nine, drew four, and lost two.

It's hard to believe that any normal person could do such things. But consider a study in which highly skilled chess players as well as nonplayers were shown chessboards with twenty to twenty-five pieces set up as they were in actual games; the research subjects were shown the boards only briefly—five to ten seconds—and then asked to recall the positions of the pieces. The results were what you'd expect: The chess masters could typically recall the position of every piece, while the nonplayers could place only four or five pieces. Then the researchers repeated the procedure, this time with pieces positioned not as in actual games but randomly. The nonplayers again could place only four or five pieces. But the masters, who had been studying chessboards for most of their lives, did scarcely better, placing only six or seven pieces.

The chess masters did not have incredible memories. What they had was an incredible ability to remember real chess positions.

This research has been repeated with players of Go, Gomoku (a game played with the same board and pieces as Go, but with a different objective), and bridge, and the results are the same. Expert players have vastly superior abilities to remember real game positions, or in bridge, hands arranged in the usual order. But when the boards or hands are mixed up, the experts' memories are just ordinary. Similarly, SF's incredible memory did not extend beyond the specific task he had practiced. When he was read lists of random consonants instead of random digits, his memory was no better than yours or mine.

In short, the widespread view that highly accomplished people have tremendous memories is in one sense justified—they often astound us with what they can remember. But the view that their amazing ability is a rare natural gift is not justified. Remarkable memory ability is apparently available to anyone.

 
It may seem surprising that off-the-charts general abilities, especially intelligence and memory, are not necessary for extraordinary achievement, but it becomes less surprising when we consider the qualities that highly successful companies and business leaders look for in employees, or rather what they don't look for. It's certainly true that McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Google, and other top companies are looking explicitly for brainiacs above all. But it's striking to notice the companies that don't put extreme cognitive abilities at the top of the list, or sometimes even on the list.

Exhibit A would be the company that corporate headhunters consistently rank number 1 as their hunting ground for business leaders, General Electric. CEO Jeff Immelt has been clear about what the company is looking for: someone who is externally focused, is a clear thinker, has imagination, is an inclusive leader, and is a confident expert. Those are behaviors, not traits, and an IQ of 130 is not required in order to exhibit them. Immelt's predecessor, Welch, used a different set of criteria that also was not cognitively focused. He was looking for four
E
's: energy, ability to energize, edge (which means decisiveness, but he needed a word that started with
e
), and ability to execute. Again, those are behaviors, and they don't require special intelligence, memory, or more specific traits. It must be said that many GE leaders do seem awfully smart, but, then, those chess masters seem to have astonishing memories, when what they really have is a little different. So without testing, it's hard to know exactly what we're seeing. It's notable how many GE leaders—as distinct from those at McKinsey, Goldman, et al.—did not go to elite universities.

More generally, many top-performing companies have worked hard to develop hiring criteria and have come up with lists that clearly work but do not include standout general abilities. Southwest Airlines, the only airline in America to have made a profit every year for the past thirty-six years, is famous for seeking a blend of attitudes and personality traits—sense of humor, sense of mission, energy, confidence.

The message from these companies raises an important question: Even if superior intelligence and memory aren't the critical factors for success, are the traits these companies seek—team orientation, humor, confidence, and so on—reliably related to success across companies, and if so, are they innate traits that you either have or you don't? Research suggests that some personality dimensions do match up with success at certain types of work; yes, salespeople tend to be more extroverted, for example.

Logical next question: Are you stuck with the personality traits you have? Research going back decades suggests that personality dimensions don't vary much over the course of a person's life. But of course that doesn't necessarily limit a person's achievement; it may limit only the fields in which a person is most likely to excel. In addition, even within a given field, we know that some of the most successful people in business changed their personalities in significant ways. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who spent most of his career at Goldman Sachs and became the firm's cochief, reports that in his early years at Goldman he was, essentially, a jerk. He admits that he was “short with people,” “impersonal,” “abrupt and peremptory,” and frequently not nice to colleagues. None of this hindered his career as a successful arbitrageur; no one much cared how traders behaved as long as they delivered results. But then one day an older partner told Rubin he could possibly play a larger role in the firm if he changed his ways and actually started to care about the people he worked with. As Rubin recalls in his memoir, “I've often asked myself why this advice affected me so much.” He speculates on reasons, but the bottom line is that it affected him deeply. He started listening to people better, understanding their problems, and valuing their views. He changed an important element of his personality. If he hadn't, it's unlikely he would have become one of the most respected and admired figures at Goldman and on Wall Street.