The explosion of the types of jobs that exist is a great thing overall but quite terrible if you happen to be someone that has an interest in doing more than one or two things in your work life. In Talent, Cowen and Gross take a firm stand against the broken world of the default path talent assessment:
Most of all, we oppose and seek to revise the bureaucratic approach to talent search, which is poorly serving the American economy—and many American and global citizens. The bureaucratic approach, as we define it, seeks to minimize error and loss, and it prizes consensus above all else. It demands that everyone play by a set of overly rigid rules, that individualism be hidden or maybe even stamped out, and that there is never any hurry, so another set of procedures can be applied, virtually without end.
In earlier times, and still today, we are not always putting the most productive people into the jobs they would best be suited for; in other words, we were and are underusing, indeed wasting, human talent. This is bad for our economy, but it is also a human tragedy for those who cannot rise, and it harms our national spirit and morale.
Tons of highlights. One of the best books I’ve read on talent assessment (and I used to work in talent assessment and have read many of them).
Highlights
Talent search is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor, based on the premise that there is always more value to be found in our world.
We focus on a very specific kind of talent in this book—namely, talent with a creative spark—and that is where the bureaucratic approach is most deadly.
For instance, for a large swath of jobs, intelligence and IQ are far less important than many smart people believe.
We see stamina as one of the great underrated concepts for talent search, especially when you are looking for top performers and leaders and major achievers.
We both find during interviews that “downtime-revealed preferences” are more interesting than “stories about your prior jobs.”
“What did you like to do as a child?” This gets at what they really like to do, because it harks back to a time before the world started bossing them around.
Daniel continuously asks himself: Whom is this person responding to or used to performing for? Whom do they view as important to impress? Their parents? A particular peer? High school friends? A former boss?
Raising the aspirations of other people is one of the most beneficial things you can do with your time. At critical moments, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something more important and ambitious than what they might have in mind.