The Four Hundred

Most of us have a love/hate relationship with highly intelligent people. They're not like us, and we know it. And so do they. Armed with a beautiful mind and an advanced degree in self-confidence, they make desirable candidates for talent-obsessed corporations. Competition for the best and the brightest is fierce, and top performers are rewarded with money, status, responsibility, and freedom of action. The need for talent is so self-evident that no one questioned the corporate fixation with hiring superstars.

If your experience with the ultra-bright has occasionally been disappointing, your suspicions have been confirmed. In a provocative article titled The Talent Myth, published in the July 22 issue of The New Yorker, Gladwell convincingly challenges researchers' claims that "having better talent at all levels is how you outperform your competitors." That's what everyone assumes. But if results can be allowed to intrude on the nostrum of hiring the most able, perhaps, Gladwell muses, they're overrated.

According to Gladwell, the talent craze was stoked by the nation's top management-consulting firm, McKinsey & Company. If you've never heard of them, it's because they deal with the type of companies that hire Harvard MBAs by the pound. (IBM Chairman Louis Gerstner is a prominent alum of McKinsey, and it was his experience there that got him into position to lead American Express, RJR Nabisco, and Big Blue.) Several years ago, McKinsey executives surveyed their elite clients to determine "how the top-performing companies in America differed from other firms." And guess what they discovered? To their surprise and astonishment (wink, wink), they found that the leaders of successful companies "were obsessed with the talent issue." By happy coincidence, these companies "recruited ceaselessly, finding and hiring as many top performers as possible." And, of course, McKinsey & Company was delighted to be their talent supplier. For a lavish fee.

The McKinsey executives compiled their less-than-startling findings in a book called The War for Talent and set about convincing nonbelievers that a system can only be "as strong as its stars." And stars--because they are, well, stars--require special treatment, extravagant compensation, and the creative freedom to march to whatever beat may be pounding in their ingenious heads at the moment. Acquire top talent, spoil it, and turn it loose, the management consultants preached, and fabulous wealth and success are sure to follow.

McKinsey & Company, Gladwell recounts, had particular success in selling its philosophy to one notable company from which it not only received annual fees eclipsing ten million dollars, but where one of its directors "regularly attended board meetings." So absolute was this company's faith in talent that for a time it was hiring "two hundred and fifty newly minted MBAs a year." With so much talent and strict adherence to expert consulting wisdom, success, one would think, would be assured. But then Gladwell drops the revelation: That company was Enron.

Well, for one thing, it turns out that native intelligence has little correlation with job performance. The problem is one of context. Gladwell quotes Florida State University psychologist Richard Wagner: "In terms of how we evaluate schooling, everything is about working by yourself. If you work with someone else, it's called cheating. Once you get out in the real world, everything you do involves working with other people."

Not surprisingly, the highly intelligent have a scholastic history of striving in splendid isolation and of competing for their own advancement without regard for the success of others. As in athletics, superstars often have difficulty becoming team players, and if the team fails, the blame usually falls to those of lesser renown. People with great talent are insulated, excused, and given another chance. The reasoning is that it can't be their fault.

Another problem for people who achieve flashy academic credentials is that they are unaccustomed to dealing with or even admitting failure. Gladwell cites a study in which children praised for their intelligence soon began to associate their value with their intellect. "When times get tough and that self-image is threatened," writes Gladwell, "they have difficulty with the consequences." When they don't know the answer, or don't like the answer, they simply lie to protect the image. Certainly at Enron, the hundreds of elite rainmakers felt no need to admit they were wrong. Avoiding the truth was like a cultural trance in which everyone was content to operate with impunity. At least while the emperor still had clothes.

But perhaps the greatest failing was one of expectation. The demands on the ultra-talented were so great that top management created the very conditions that ultimately guaranteed their failure. Celebrated new hires were given compensation in excess of their value, status beyond their achievement, responsibility unwarranted by track record, and freedom of action delinked from accountability. The results should have been predictable, but they weren't, because what you pay attention to determines what you see, but it also determines what you miss. What was missed was a growing sense of invincibility, the belief that something must be done because it can be done, that it is right because the bright guy says it's right.

With all the trappings of power and privilege bestowed on a select few, it wasn't long before the belief that "We're smarter than you" morphed into "We're better than you." And, ultimately, that is the attitude that self-vindicates the excesses and fraudulent behaviors that characterize corporate affairs. The point at which hubris crossed over into criminality was probably no more distinct that an unmarked border. It was the logical result of a system that encouraged and rewarded narcissism.

What is perhaps most curious about the behavior of highly gifted innovators at companies such as Enron is its resemblance to psychopathy. Columnist Arianna Huffington recently supported this startling analogy by referencing the work of renowned criminologist Dr. Robert Hare. In his book Without Conscience, he identifies the key emotional traits of psychopaths, which include "the inability to feel remorse, a grossly inflated view of oneself, a pronounced indifference to the suffering of others, and a pattern of deceitful behavior."

Excessive focus and reliance on acquiring the best talent creates companies with substance but without structure, all musculature and no skeletal support. The value of structure is that it functions independently of the people working in it. Many companies, not glamorous enough to attract Harvard or Stanford MBAs, are highly successful in spite of the fact that they are populated by workers of average skill and intelligence. Gladwell cites two examples of corporations that eschew the star system but nonetheless excel: Southwest Airlines and Procter & Gamble. What they do have is a structure that supports people in accomplishing the work the company requires and functions regardless of who is at work on any given day. Such companies are more likely to be driven by their customer's needs, rather than by the whims of gifted employees. And one of the functions of structure is to provide built-in checks and balances that guard against fraud or the actions of rogue employees.

The star system, on the other hand, is based on individual heroics, on people who work 16-hour days and are willing to bend the rules to get the job done. In such environments, one of the reasons people work so hard is that they are expected to compensate for the inefficiencies of the system.

It is ironic that in a business environment perhaps the most valuable and least appreciated people are the invisible ones, who create the structures and systems that enable the rest of us to thrive.

For good or ill, the highly intelligent, like the poor, are always with us. Their influence has invariably been mixed. One moment, they are dragging humanity to new heights only they can envision, the next, they are creating the means of destroying all life. The reality is that the kind of people who can pioneer surgical procedures to reattach limbs, or the bombs that sever them, will inevitably leave a wake that may swamp lesser beings.

It was Arthur C. Clarke, a man of superlative intelligence and imagination, who observed that "There may be an optimum level of intelligence and perhaps we have already exceeded it. Our brains may be too big--dooming us as Triceratops was doomed by his armor."