Geoff Colvin's Talent is Over-Rated

I've been reading Talent is Over-Rated by Geoff Colvin, an editor at Fortune. It's a quick, clear read and a much more detailed discussion of the “10,000 hour” rule that Malcolm Gladwell travestied in his last book. Colvin is summarising a bunch of research which suggests that people who do anything – music, sports, mathematics, writing – at a very high level spend a lot of time doing deliberate practice: practice that is carefully designed to take you past your present limits and to remove any sticky spots in your present technique. Top-flight anyones do a lot of this. Indeed at the top level, you don't train to compete, you compete to train. Competition is there solely to identify the weaker points of your game.

Colvin is very good about the way that large corporations are set up exactly not to provide the environment and culture in which people can develop and perform excellently. “How often is feedback at most companies constructive, non-threatening, and work-focused? Evaluations at most companies are exactly the opposite: telling the hapless employee what he did wrong, not how to do better, and specifying personal traits (attitude, personality) that must be changed, all under the unspoken looming threat of getting fired.” Sounds familiar to me. What Colvin shys from saying why it's like this in most companies.

The research he's using suggests that the motivation of top-flight performers is intrinsic to the activity, it's about being excellent at what you do. It's not about winning, proving yourself to your peers, making lots of money, lavish praise, promotions and honours.

Well, unless you're a manager. Then your intrinsic motivations are exactly about proving yourself, winning, making money, status, praise, promotions and, who knows? Even honours, should you do the right thing by the incumbent Government. A manager's skills are the dark arts of seeking preferment, influence and advancement and avoiding responsibility, blame and ill-favor. Managers really are motivated by fear, praise, financial rewards and gee-gaws and they make the company in their image.

That's why most corporate appraisal schemes are fear-based and fault-finding; it's why the training is on the corporate intranet, non-accredited and shallow; why the courses they trumpet are about “leadership” and “effectiveness”; and why they can churn people and organisational structures every two or three years. That's why techies regard managers as untainted by the slightest skill or knowledge, and why the rest of the people who work there regard them as slightly sad or bad. Because they are motivated by the preferment of the powerful and the pursuit of power and influence, and there is something not quite right about that.

it's not to Colvin's detriment he didn't write that - because I'm sure he knows it - but it is a sign of how good the book is that it becomes obvious.