At the height of the dot-com boom of the 1990s, several executives at McKinsey & Company, the world’s most prestigious management consulting firm, launched what they called the War for Talent. After extensive research, they concluded that the best companies had leaders who were obsessed with “the talent issue”. They recruited ceaselessly, finding and hiring as many top performers as possible. They singled out and segregated their stars, rewarding them disproportionately, and pushing them into ever more senior positions. The “talent mind-set” became the new orthodoxy of American management — the intellectual justification for why a high premium was placed on degrees from first-tier business schools, and why the compensation packages for top executives had become so lavish.
None spread the word as ardently as McKinsey, and, of all its clients, one firm took the talent mind-set closest to heart. It was a company where McKinsey conducted 20 separate projects, where McKinsey’s billings topped $10 million a year, where a McKinsey director regularly attended board meetings, and where the CEO himself was a former McKinsey partner. The client was Enron, which has become an example of how not to run a company.
Writing in the July 2002 issue of The New Yorker magazine, about a year after the Enron scandal broke out, Malcolm Gladwell cites the McKinsey-Enron story to raise the troubling question: What if Enron failed not in spite of its talent mind-set but because of it? And then an even more troubling one: “What if smart people are overrated?”
The broader failing of McKinsey and its acolytes at Enron, says Gladwell, was that they believed in stars, not systems. Among the many glowing books on Enron written before its fall was the bestseller Leading the Revolution, by management consultant Gary Hamel, which tells the story of Lou Pai, who launched Enron’s power-trading business. Pai’s group began with a disaster: It lost tens of millions of dollars trying to sell electricity to residential consumers in newly deregulated markets. The problem, Hamel explains, was that the markets were not truly deregulated. As Gladwell points out, it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that Pai ought to have looked into those rules more carefully before risking millions of dollars. Pai was given new opportunities, and when he failed at those new opportunities, he was given still more opportunities… because he had “talent”.
Are you thinking… reconsidering your view on talent? If you are, this reviewer has succeeded in transferring — to only a minuscule extent — what Gladwell succeeds at through this book: To make the reader think. That, he says in a delightful preface, is the hallmark of good writing. “Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade… It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head — even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’d really like to be.”
That may also be construed as an attempt to head off familiar criticism by re-stating what his writing is and — more importantly — what it isn’t. Gladwell’s most recent book, Outliers, was panned for stating the obvious: That successful people put in a lot of hours, but crucially are often in the right place at the right time and seize the opportunities life throws their way. Before that, Blink drew flak for urging readers to go with their gut feelings, except when their gut feelings were wrong.
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Both those books stretched Gladwell’s theories across a broad canvas, so broad that the cracks were hard to ignore. What the Dog Saw, a collection of Gladwell’s favourite articles from The New Yorker since he joined as a staff writer in 1996, achieves its purpose more effectively.
It uses a tool similar to that employed with great success by the Freakonomics fellows. So questions are raised about subjects that seem beyond questioning, or too mundane to question. The topics get meshed together and suddenly there is a poignant inference.
Have you ever wondered why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup? Or what Cézanne did before painting his first significant works in his 50s? Or wanted to know where Led Zeppelin got the riff in Whole Lotta Love?
Gladwell does. He also dwells on several other subjects, all of them equally quirky — the history of women’s hair-dye advertisements, the secret of Heinz’s unbeatable ketchup, even the effects of women’s changing career patterns on the number of menstrual periods they experience in their lifetimes — and uses each as a gateway to some larger meaning.
The true success of the book is an irony. It is clear from the start that there is nothing new in this book. In fact, all the pieces are available free of charge from Gladwell’s own website. If Gladwell the writer takes the place of Gladwell the reader, he may ask why one should buy the book if the content is free? And what does that say about the one who still goes ahead and buys it? Actually, good things.
WHAT THE DOG SAW
Malcolm Gladwell
Allen Lane (Penguin)
410 pages; £14.99
