Mindset: A book review by Bob Morris

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Carol S. Dweck
Ballantine Books (2008)

How to achieve sustainable growth of intellectual capabilities with the right mindset

I read this book when it was first published (2006) and recently re-read it before reading Daniel Siegel’s Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. Presumably he shares my high regard for Carol Dweck’s breakthrough insights, as countless other authors have duly acknowledged in books published in recent years. She focuses on two mindsets, one that is fixed and another that can be “grown” with appropriate development. Moreover, she also explains how and why it is possible to change one’s mindset. “You have a choice. Mindsets are just beliefs. They’re powerful beliefs, but they’re just something in your mind, and you can change your mind. As you read [this book], think about where you’d like to go and which mindset will take you there.” Long ago, Henry Ford observed, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re probably right.”

More recently, in Extraordinary Minds, Howard Gardner observes that exceptional individuals “have a special talent for identifying their own strengths and weaknesses.” Dweck suggets that those with this talent seem to have a growth mindset. Readers will appreciate her strategic provision of a “Grow Your Mindset” section at the conclusion of each chapter.  She poses direct questions, reviews key points, and suggests several different ways to think about how to expand and enrich mindsets to fulfill one’s potential at home, at work, in the community, and wherever else has special relationships.

These are among the subjects, topics, and passages that caught my eye:

o  ”Is Success About Learning — Or Proving You’re Smart?” (Pages 16-17)
o  ”Mindsets Change the Meaning of Failure” (32-39)
o  ”Mindsets Change the Meaning of Effort” (39-44)
o  ”Negative Labels and How They Work” (74-80)
o  ”Leadership and the Fixed Mindset” (112-114)
o  ”Groupthink versus We Think” (134-136)
o  ”Mindsets Falling in Love” (148-157)
o  ”Bullies and Victims: Revenge Revisited” (165-171)
o  ”Sending Messages [to Children] About Process and Growth” (177-179)
o  ”Teachers (and Parents): What Makes a Great Teacher (or Parent)?” (193-202)

I am among those who think that Mindset is among the most important books published during the last decade. While re-reading it again, I was reminded of three key points that help to explain much of human behavior: First, that almost all limits are self-imposed; next, that there is much we cannot control or even influence but we [begin italics] can [end italics] control how we respond to what happens to us; finally, that taking full advantage of a growth mindset requires a commitment no less demanding in terms of its nature and extent than a commitment to peak performance. For example, revelations about such a commitment after decades of research by Anders Ericsson and his associates at Florida State University. (For more about that research, read his HBR article, “The Making of an Expert,” and one or more of these books: Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and Geoff Golvin’s Talent Is Overrated.) Thank you, Carol Dweck, for helping so many of us to gain a better understanding of who we are, and, of greater importance, of who and what we can perhaps become with a growth mindset.

Olympic Champions, and Olympic Participants, and that 10,000 Hour Rule

So, as I have watched a few of the events from the Olympics, and I’ve been thinking about the 10,000 hour rule.  And I am ready to state the obvious:  putting in 10,000 hours guarantees nothing.

First, a refresher.  Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, described the 10,000 hour rule.  To summarize, it takes 10,000 hours to get really world-class good at anything.  (Gladwell got the idea/concept from Anders Ericsson).

And then, in the book Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, we learn that just any old 10,000 hours is not good enough.  You need to put in “deliberate practice” — lots and lots of deliberate practice – in order to get better and better.  In other words, you practice with the intent to get better.  This kind of practice is exhausting, and almost always needs a very knowledgeable coach, with terrific motivational skills.  (A coach who “can correct with creating resentment.”  John Wooden).

Now, back to the point of this post:  I am ready to state the obvious:  putting in 10,000 hours guarantees nothing.  Here’s what I mean.

As we watch the Olympics, we see pretty clearly that some athletes have developed a work ethic superior to others.  But there are plenty of athletes who put in pretty much the same kind of time, had the same high level work ethic, as the “winners” who beat them when the starter pistol went off.

So, putting in 10,000 hours guarantees nothing.  In sports, you need the 10,000 hours, plus the right coach, plus a little luck, plus maybe the right genetic makeup, plus…

Plus, plus, plus…

The more we learn, the more we learn how critical the next “plus” might be.

Now, let me back up.  If we were not so fixated on winning the gold, we might come closer to admitting that the 10,000 hour rule does in fact guarantee success.  Even making an Olympic Team; or, even being good enough to compete in an Olympics Trials Qualifying Event to try to make the team, takes massive skill.  So, why is that not “success?”  It certainly should be.

And we do know that in many cases, coming in second is every bit a “win.”  Did you see the depth of emotion on the faces of Kelci Bryant and Abby Johnston after they won the Silver Medal in Synchronized Diving?  They may not have won the Gold, but, it was the first diving medal at all for the USA since 2000, and the first ever medal for the USA in this particular event.  Yes, the Chinese duo were better.  Noticeably better.  But these two young women were the second best in the world, and their 10,000 hours paid off.

Kelci Bryant, left, and Abby Johnston of the USA show off their silver medals from after finishing second in 3-meter synchronized diving. (By Kyle Terada, USA TODAY Sports)

Maybe we could say this:  maybe 10,000 guarantees nothing.  But a failure to put in 10,000 hours does guarantee something – you won’t make it to the top without putting in those 10,000 hours.

Now – the other challenge.  One reality about this kind of world-class accomplishment is that these athletes show up, every day, with a coach watching and “coaching” every moment.  Wouldn’t all of us get better at our jobs if we had that kind of individual coaching, motivating, “pushing us to the limit” daily encounter?  I think so.

Work ethic, plus coaching, plus deliberate practice, plus constant feedback, plus measurable goals, plus…  The road to true success really is a challenging road.

Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters

Illustration Credit: David Plunkert

Here is an article written by David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz that was featured in the The New York Times (November 19, 2011). I urge you to click on the links to che vk oyt the sources to which the arricle refers. Also, I highky recommend a recently published book, The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else Does, written by George Anders and published by Portfolio/Penguin (2011). This is a “must read” book for anyone involved in — or at least interested in — talent recruitment and/or talent management. I also think Anders’ book could serve as the foundation of talent evaluation and performance review initiatives.

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HOW do people acquire high levels of skill in science, business, music, the arts and sports? This has long been a topic of intense debate in psychology.
Enlarge This Image

Research in recent decades has shown that a big part of the answer is simply practice — and a lot of it. In a pioneering study, the Florida State University psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues asked violin students at a music academy to estimate the amount of time they had devoted to practice since they started playing. By age 20, the students whom the faculty nominated as the “best” players had accumulated an average of over 10,000 hours, compared with just under 8,000 hours for the “good” players and not even 5,000 hours for the least skilled.

Those findings have been enthusiastically championed, perhaps because of their meritocratic appeal: what seems to separate the great from the merely good is hard work, not intellectual ability. Summing up Mr. Ericsson’s research in his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell observes that practice isn’t “the thing you do once you’re good” but “the thing you do that makes you good.” He adds that intellectual ability — the trait that an I.Q. score reflects — turns out not to be that important. “Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,” he writes, “having additional I.Q. points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.”

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, restates this idea in his book “The Social Animal,” while Geoff Colvin, in his book Talent Is Overrated, adds that “I.Q. is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, I.Q. predicts little or nothing about performance.”

But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point.

Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.

In our own recent research, we have discovered that “working memory capacity,” a core component of intellectual ability, predicts success in a wide variety of complex activities. In one study, we assessed the practice habits of pianists and then gauged their working memory capacity, which is measured by having a person try to remember information (like a list of random digits) while performing another task. We then had the pianists sight read pieces of music without preparation.

Not surprisingly, there was a strong positive correlation between practice habits and sight-reading performance. In fact, the total amount of practice the pianists had accumulated in their piano careers accounted for nearly half of the performance differences across participants. But working memory capacity made a statistically significant contribution as well (about 7 percent, a medium-size effect). In other words, if you took two pianists with the same amount of practice, but different levels of working memory capacity, it’s likely that the one higher in working memory capacity would have performed considerably better on the sight-reading task.

It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point. In fact, it would be nice if they weren’t important at all, because research shows that those factors are highly stable across an individual’s life span. But wishing doesn’t make it so.

None of this is to deny the power of practice. Nor is it to say that it’s impossible for a person with an average I.Q. to, say, earn a Ph.D. in physics. It’s just unlikely, relatively speaking. Sometimes the story that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear.

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David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz are associate professors of psychology at Michigan State University and Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, respectively.

Malcolm Gladwell’s latest contribution

Malcolm Gladwell

I highly recommend an issue of The New Yorker (May 16, 2011) that includes Malcolm Gladwell’s article, “Creation Myth,” his latest contribution to the “Annals of Business” series. Gladwell is a brilliant journalist but hardly an original business thinker. His books consist of articles, most of which originally appeared in The New Yorker and all of which cover ground plowed by others.

In Blink, for example, he introduces his concept of the “tipping point” without acknowledging that Andrew Grove discussed the same concept (he called it an “inflection point”) and Grove acknowledges his debt to Michael Kami’s concept of a “trigger point” years before. Outliers offers another example of (a) Gladwell’s erudition and (b) his usual position atop others’ shoulders, sharing the view with his readers. This book is mostly based on others’ insights (notably Geoff Colvin’s in his book, Talent Is Overrated) that – in turn – are mostly based on research conducted since the early-1990s by Anders Ericsson and his associates at Florida State University.

If you do not subscribe to The New Yorker, purchase a copy of the aforementioned issue and read Gladwell’s essay. He is again at his best when explaining what he characterizes as “the truth about innovation.” What he reveals is by no means a secret. The separate but interconnected stories are well-known. They feature Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), what Steve Jobs learned from it, the subsequent development of what became the personal computer, and the pivotal role that Gary Starkweather played throughout those years.

What Gladwell learned from his research (which included conversations with several key people such as Starkweather and Nathan Myhrvold) is best revealed in context, within his narrative. However, I am comfortable disclosing that not one but several myths are scrutinized and a few are discredited. He surveys quite a range of colorful history and draws attention to events and consequences that he considers most significant.

Gadwell will continue to make valuable contributions because he is a gifted and energetic journalist who has devised innovative ways to share others’ original ideas. He makes excellent use of his highly-developed skills as a raconteur as well as a cultural anthropologist when reconstructing “story lines” in which colorful “characters” compete for our attention while driven by their curiosity and passion to generate what Jobs characterizes as “insanely great ideas” and then make them even better.

And if you share my high regard for Gladwell’s latest contribution, here are two “must read” books: John Linkner’s Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity and David Kord Murray’s  Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others.

Are We Truly A “Flabby Lot?” – In A 10,000 Hour Rule World, Why Are We So Flabby?

Discipline is hard – harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures.  We can’t even keep from snacking between meals.  We are not built for discipline.  We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail.  Discipline is something we have to work at.
Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto

The list of posts on this blog referring to the 10,000 hour rule, the need for deliberate practice, the books Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, is long.  We have chronicled the ascendancy of, the centrality of  — call it what you will – “work ethic,” “it take s10,000 hours to master anything…” thinking.

But…

The quote that indicts me personally, in a way that I cannot escape, is the one from Gawande:  “We can’t even keep from snacking between meals.”

This morning, Pulitzer winner Kathleen Parker has a column about Wikileaks.  In the midst of this column is this section:

With the exception of our military, we are a flabby lot, and I’m not just talking about girth. We are merely disgusting in that department. I’m talking about our self-discipline, our individual will, our self-respect, our voluntary order.
Note the operative words: self, individual and voluntary.
We don’t need bureaucrats and politicians to dictate how to behave; how to spend (or save); what and how to eat. We need to be the people we were meant to be: strong, resilient, disciplined, entrepreneurial, focused, wise, playful, humorous, humble, thoughtful and, please, self-deprecating. We have all the tools and opportunities a planet can confer.

We are a flabby lot.  And it shows – not in a good way.  We’ve read all about 10,000 hours, but how many of us actually put in the work?

As always, we are back to the “knowing-doing gap.”  We know, we just don’t do…

Take inventory.  Be honest with yourself.  Are you flabby, undisciplined, unfocused?  If so, you’ve got your work cut out for you (as do I).  Let’s get to it.

“One Job of the Coach is to Correct,” says Randy – “I Don’t Agree,” says Cheryl… Time for Some Dialogue

Coach:

a : a large usually closed four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage having doors in the sides and an elevated seat in front for the driver
a : a private tutor
b : one who instructs or trains <an acting coach>; especially : one who instructs players in the fundamentals of a competitive sport and directs team strategy <a football coach>

From Randy:
So, the other day at Take Your Brain to Lunch, I am in mid-presentation, and I say something like this:  “the purpose of a coach is to tell me what I am doing wrong.”  I referred to athletic coaches, people hired by the likes of Martina Navritilova and other “individual” stars.  I am convinced that such an athlete cannot watch himself/herself, and thus needs a coach to watch, find the flaws, and correct.  I used to play tennis (back in the days when rackets were made of wood, tennis balls were white, and the tiebreaker had not yet been adopted), and I know that’s what my coaches did for me.  They saw my flaws, pointed them out, and drilled correction into me.

And I got better. (I would have gotten much, much better if I had practiced they way my coach told me to.  But that’s another story).

Anyway, Cheryl Jensen, my blogging team member and the leader of Take Your Brain to Lunch, who is a personal coach, tells me I’m wrong.  She says that a coach should not look for areas to correct, but instead should… well, let her tell you.

By the way, I disagree with Cheryl.  Thus, this dialogue…

Cheryl, your turn.

From Cheryl:
As much as I try to avoid ever correcting people in public for fear of embarrassing them or damaging a relationship, I did indeed disagree publicly with Randy last week. When we traded time at the microphone, I offered a very different perspective. Randy is correct in that I am a professionally trained coach by The Coaches Training Institute (CTI) and the International Coach Federation (ICF), the governing body of professional coaching. Our official definition of coaching is “Coaching is a partnership with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

Another cornerstone idea from our CTI training is “People are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole.” This means coaching is not about fixing what’s broken. It is about helping the client look and find what’s already within and then directing that talent, energy, and focus towards their goals. There are 3 main reasons I coach: to facilitate learning, create movement towards client goals so they can improve their performance and enjoyment from life which of course includes work. So the whole idea of looking for what’s broken and then offering advice is totally counter culture from professional coaching to me. Rather than offer answers, we offer questions for the client to explore their areas of interest. Rather than offer advice, we ask questions to create options the client wants to implement. Rather than assign responsibility, we offer opportunities that will facilitate additional learning and new insights.

Tony Schwartz on “Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything”

Tony Schwartz

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Tony Schwartz for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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I’ve been playing tennis for nearly five decades. I love the game and I hit the ball well, but I’m far from the player I wish I were.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot the past couple of weeks, because I’ve taken the opportunity, for the first time in many years, to play tennis nearly every day. My game has gotten progressively stronger. I’ve had a number of rapturous moments during which I’ve played like the player I long to be.

And almost certainly could be, even though I’m 58 years old. Until recently, I never believed that was possible. For most of my adult life, I’ve accepted the incredibly durable myth that some people are born with special talents and gifts, and that the potential to truly excel in any given pursuit is largely determined by our genetic inheritance.

During the past year, I’ve read no fewer than five books — and a raft of scientific research — which powerfully challenge that assumption (see below for a list). I’ve also written one, The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working [click here], which lays out a guide, grounded in the science of high performance, to systematically building your capacity physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

We’ve found, in our work with executives at dozens of organizations, that it’s possible to build any given skill or capacity in the same systematic way we do a muscle: push past your comfort zone, and then rest. Aristotle had it exactly right 2000 years ago: “We are what we repeatedly do.” By relying on highly specific practices, we’ve seen our clients dramatically improve skills ranging from empathy, to focus, to creativity, to summoning positive emotions, to deeply relaxing.

Like everyone who studies performance, I’m indebted to the extraordinary Anders Ericsson, arguably the world’s leading researcher into high performance. For more than two decades, Ericsson has been making the case that it’s not inherited talent which determines how good we become at something, but rather how hard we’re willing to work — something he calls “deliberate practice.” Numerous researchers now agree that 10,000 hours of such practice as the minimum necessary to achieve expertise in any complex domain.

There is something wonderfully empowering about this. It suggests we have remarkable capacity to influence our own outcomes. But that’s also daunting. One of Ericsson’s central findings is that practice is not only the most important ingredient in achieving excellence, but also the most difficult and the least intrinsically enjoyable.

If you want to be really good at something, it’s going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, along with frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures. That’s true as long as you want to continue to improve, or even maintain a high level of excellence. The reward is that being really good at something you’ve earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying.

Here, then, are [three of the] six keys to achieving excellence we’ve found are most effective for our clients:

• Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.

• Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.

• Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.

I have practiced tennis deliberately over the years, but never for the several hours a day required to achieve a truly high level of excellence. What’s changed is that I don’t berate myself any longer for falling short. I know exactly what it would take to get to that level.

I’ve got too many other higher priorities to give tennis that attention right now. But I find it incredibly exciting to know that I’m still capable of getting far better at tennis — or at anything else — and so are you.

Here are the recent books on this subject:

Talent is Overrated by Geoffrey Colvin. My personal favorite.

The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

The Genius in All of Us by David Schenk.

Bounce by Mathew Syed

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Tony Schwartz is president and CEO of The Energy Project. He is the author of the June, 2010 HBR article, “The Productivity Paradox: How Sony Pictures Gets More Out of People by Demanding Less” [click here] and co-author, with Catherine McCarthy, of the 2007 HBR article, “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time” [click here]. He  is also the author of the new book The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs that Energize Great Performance (Free Press, 2010).

Outliers, Talent Is Overrated, And Others – Creating Conversations About Success

I’m a little fuzzy on “the point” of this article in Slate.com.  But I know this, she is right about the popularity of Outliers, and the overall subject.

Here’s the article:  Give It a Rest, Genius — What the new success books don’t tell you about superachievement by Ann Hulbert.  Of the books discussed in the article, I have presented synopses of two:  Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

She describes the (relatively) new-found fixation on the 10,000 hour rule.  She is right to say that Colvin’s Talent is Overrated is more specific, more “demanding” than Outliers.  Here are a couple of paragraphs from her article:

In their calculus of success, these books endorse perspiration over inspiration as the key to extraordinary performance. The prevailing term is “deliberate practice,” introduced by K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist cited in every one of these books for research that has led to the “10,000-hour rule.” That’s how much intensely focused training it takes to reach the expert level, in any field. Coyle’s more New Age coinage is “deep practice.”

Higher expectations can indeed work wonders for anyone, but truly relentless drive is a rarity. Amid all the recycled material in Bounce, Syed offers a sobering firsthand reminder from the sports front: The necessary fanatical commitment to mastery is most commonly inspired by competition, which has a way of winnowing ruthlessly. But in an era when plenty of American workers feel we’re running in place and just barely keeping up, the mixed message of this genre is one we’re understandably more eager to hear: Maybe we don’t have to become magnitudes more frenetic than we already are—just a whole lot more focused—and we, too, stand a chance of zooming ahead.

I remember this thought from Lewis’ Moneyball.  By the time a baseball player is a young adult, it is simply too late to teach him not to swing at a ball.  Here’s the quote:

What most scouts thought of as a learned skill of secondary importance (the ability to take a lot of pitches) the A’s management had come, through hard experience, to view virtually as a genetic trait, and the one most likely to lead to baseball success.

The A’s acknowledged that it probably could be taught – if you could begin at about age 5…

So, what does all of this say to us as adults in the actual pursuit of current and future success.  I think two things:

1.  You may not ever be world class, but you can get better with deliberate practice. For example, do you speak, and is speaking a key part of your path to success?  Then watch yourself on video, hire a speech coach, scrutinize every part of your speaking, from content, to delivery, to gestures, to eye contact.  Extrapolate this principle into any work you actually do.  Watch yourself do it.  Hire a coach to catch your flaws (you’ll probably not be able to see them – and, I hate to tell you – you do have some!).  You have to work hard at developing the talent needed to excel.

2.  Every job requires this kind of attention to get better. You know that line “this call might be monitored.”  I wonder if anybody who monitors such calls is doing so to help the people on the calls get better, or are they just trying to catch them doing something wrong?

Help yourself, and others, get better – day in and day out — by focusing on getting better.  That may be the take-away message of these books!

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You can purchase my synopses of both Outliers and Talent is Overrated, with audio + handouts, at our companion site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com.

Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto – Its Primary Value

After this Friday, I will have presented synopses of well over 200 books over the last twelve years.  This includes books presented at the First Friday Book Synopsis, the Urban Engagement Book Club, and quite a few “special commission” presentations.  For a number of years, I said that The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharpe was the best book/my favorite book.  Then, I shifted that assessment to Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

My reasons for such a personal ranking are obviously quite subjective.  One reason is this – after reading those books, I kept thinking about them, a lot.  I remembered their stories, and I pondered their implications.  Both of them became part of my thinking, and I “built” on such thinking with other books – notably, Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin as the logical follow-up to Outliers (the 10,000 hours requires very serious practice discipline/”deliberate practice” to maximize those hours), and a number of books on innovation that seemed to make more sense when preceded by the thoughts in The Creative Habit.

Well, I may move The Checklist Manifesto to the top spot in my own little ranking system.

Why?

I think the more deeply I delved into The Checklist Manifesto, the more aware I became of just how big a challenge modern day complexity really presents.  The title of the book may be misleading:  “The Checklist Manifesto” makes it sound like a simple book – just create and use a checklist to get things done.  But it is born of a deeper issue – complexity.  For example, in the book Atul Gawande describes how for most of human history, a “Master Builder” would oversee all of the big building projects.  Today, with our 80 + story high-rises, there is no “Master Builder” who could possibly know enough to get such a building built as the Lone-Ranger type expert.

Here’s a revealing excerpt:

Every day there is more and more to manage and get right and learn.  And defeat under conditions of complexity occurs far more often despite great effort rather than from a lack of it.
It is not clear how we could produce substantially more expertise than we already have.  Yet our failures remain frequent.  They persist despite remarkable individual ability.
(our) know-how is often unmanageable.  Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields – from medicine to finance, business to government.  And the reason is increasingly evident:  the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.  Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.
That means we need a different strategy for overcoming failure…

In other words, it is not the solution of the checklist that has most intrigued me about this book, although I think I am a true convert to his solution.  His case is absolutely compelling.  But it is his diagnosis that makes it so valuable.  And, this is no surprise – Gawande is a surgeon, and proper diagnosis is sort of critical in the process of successful surgery.

Recently, I mentioned a book entitled How to Read Slowly.  Let me recommend that you put The Checklist Manifesto on your reading list – and carve out a time to read it slowly.  I think it is that valuable.

Finding Talent Remains an Important Issue

 

Even in a down-economy, discussions about assessing, developing, or obtaining talent will not go away.

Indeed, this week we learned about another business best-seller on this topic.

Top Talent by Sylvia Ann Hewlett (Harvard Business School Press, 2010).

Over the years, at the First Friday Book Synopsis, we have featured books such as these on talent:

• The War for Talent by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, Beth Axelrod (Harvard Business School Press, 2001)
• Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin (Portfolio, 2008)

I think the major reason that the quest for talent will not go away is that it is part of the consideration at the top of a company’s Performance Management system.  The first step is to “hire the right person.”  The second step is to get the person off to a good start with proper orienting or onboarding.    What’s funny is that if more companies would take the time to get the right person and get that person off to a great start, everything else under performance management would fall in place.  For example, companies would need to less counseling, progressive discipline, firing, and so forth.

However, this is not the case!  When managers have openings, they want to fill them as quickly as possible.  Companies are not taking the time and care to be sure that the new hire is a proper fit.  Talent is a huge consideration in this process, but not the only factor.  Yet, it is this rush to fill an open position, rather than ensuring that a person is right for the job, that creates so much trouble.

I understand this.  Many times managers with open positions do the work of the open position.  That means at least two jobs – if  not more.  But, I think of the old line, “do you want to pay me now or pay me later?”   A company does not have to take the time to get the right person, but when it does not, it will pay for it later in many ways.

Talent is important.  That’s why we continue to see authors write about it, and why we see customers purchase books about it, that ultimately make best-seller lists.

What do you think?   Let’s talk about it.

P.S. – By the way, did you know you can purchase synopses of the two talent books I refer to above at 15MinuteBusinessBooks.com?  You get the audio presentation along with an outline and sheet of key quotes.