idea into the new corporate religion, which was then used as intellectual justification for lavish compensation packages.
And it's not a coincidence that this approach led to one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in US history – Enron.
Enron took McKinsey's advice to heart. In his book What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell notes that prior to the meltdown McKinsey billed in excess of $10 million a year across 20 separate projects with Enron. A McKinsey director regularly attended board meetings and Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling had been one of the youngest partners in McKinsey history – so to say McKinsey had an influence on Enron would be a gross understatement.
Enron was famous for hiring smart, ‘talented' people who thought they deserved to be paid a great deal of money, and then paying them more than they thought they were worth! As a business it lived and eventually died by its obsession with talent. They scoured Ivy League universities and top-tier business schools to recruit the cream of the crop. They paid outrageous salaries and bonuses and allowed their talent free and unquestioned rein. And in the end it was the business's undoing.
It is so easy to look at exceptional performance and put it down to luck or talent. It's much more romantic to assume that some people are just born special. It's also much more convenient to subscribe to the ‘divine spark' theory, because it allows us to abdicate responsibility for performance. After all, if talent is the result of some unfathomable and uncontrollable genetic lottery we can't really be blamed for not being at the front of the queue when the gods were dishing out talent!
And to be fair, the argument seems logical! It just didn't quite stack up. McKinsey certainly made talent sexy, but talent-fuelled corporate collapse after talent-fuelled corporate collapse raised serious questions about the approach.
THE WAR AGAINST TALENT
In the inevitable backlash against talent we were told that talent was not only nowhere near as important as McKinsey and others were leading us to believe, but that it didn't even exist.
Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers popularised the 10 000 hours philosophy. The research he referred to in the book was conducted by K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer, who published a paper called ‘The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance', which stated that while they could not find evidence of natural gifts they did notice something else: no matter the activity, excellence took years of disciplined practice to achieve.
Adding weight and engaging narrative to the argument, Gladwell gave two business examples of the relevance of 10 000 hours – Bill Joy, computer scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems; and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft.
In the 1970s computers were the size of tennis courts, cost an absolute fortune and took forever to program. Plus they were not very powerful (the smartphone in your pocket is probably more powerful!). Needless to say, their size and cost didn't exactly make them accessible to the general public. Programming involved punching rows and rows of holes into cardboard, which then needed to be input by an operator. Complex codes often required hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hole-punched lines, and computers could only run one program at a time. Time-sharing changed all that and the programmer could input straight to the mainframe using a telephone line.
At the time Bill Joy was at the University of Michigan, one of the first places in the US to have time-sharing computers. Joy had initially planned to be a biologist or mathematician, but then he discovered the computer centre and became obsessed.
The same is true of Bill Gates. Most people know the Microsoft legend … the story of how Gates dropped out of Harvard to build the BASIC programming language with Paul Allen after informing Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS; the makers of the Altair 8080, billed as the world's first microcomputer) that they had developed a programming language that could be used on the Altair 8080. (All this despite having never even seen an Altair 8080 or programmed a line of code.) What's less well known is how Gates got to be so ‘talented' with computers and therefore confident enough to make the bluff and deliver.
Gates was not born a computer genius; he made himself one through thousands of hours of practice. He went to Lakeside, a private school in Seattle that, in his second year, started a computer club. The computers were time-sharing – not bad, considering that most colleges and universities didn't even have time-sharing computers at the time. Gates said, ‘It was my obsession … It would be a rare week that we wouldn't get twenty or thirty hours in'. Gates even tracked down a computer lab at the University of Washington that had a slack period between 3 am and 6 am. Such was his obsession that he would sneak out of his house in the middle of the night, walk or take the bus to the university, program for three hours and then sneak back in time for breakfast. Gates's mother later said that she'd wondered why it was so hard for him to get out of bed in the morning.
Both Bill Joy and Bill Gates admit that they must have spent thousands of hours mastering computers. In Outliers Gladwell presents a convincing argument that they would each have spent at least 10 000 hours, and that was what created their formidable ‘talent'. He goes on to quote neurologist Daniel Levitin: ‘… no-one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to achieve true mastery'.
Nobel Prize–winner Herbert Simon and William Chase proposed another version of the 10 000 hour rule with the ‘ten year rule'. Their research focused on chess masters and they concluded that it wasn't possible to reach the upper echelons of chess without a decade or so of intensive study.
In his book Talent Is Overrated Geoff Colvin states that despite serious scientific enquiry over the last 150 years, and a mountain of research gathered over the past 30 years, there isn't a single study that has successfully proven that talent even exists.
Colvin suggests that our rush to assume talent exists is based on faulty information and assumptions. To demonstrate his point he tells the stories of Mozart and Tiger Woods.
The legend tells us that Mozart was composing music at age five and giving public performances by age eight. What is less well known is that Mozart's father was a famous composer in his own right. He was a domineering man who started his son on intensive composition training by the time he was three. His father had a passion for music and how it was taught to children. In addition, many of Mozart's early compositions were not in his own hand; his father would ‘correct' them before anyone saw them. Mozart's first work universally considered a masterpiece is his Piano Concerto No. 9. But he composed that at age 21 – some 18 years after he first started learning and composing music.
Tiger Woods is the other example that people regularly point to as an expression of innate talent, but again there is much more to the story. His father Earl Woods had retired from the army, was golf crazy and loved to teach. Tiger Woods was universally recognised as brilliant at age 19 when he was a member of the US Walker Cup team. What is less well known is that Tiger was just seven months old when his father first placed a proper metal putter in his hand. By the age of two he and his father would go to the golf course to play and practise regularly and he appeared on the Mike Douglas Show demonstrating his already apparent skill. By the time he was considered a genius Tiger Woods had been practising golf with unprecedented intensity for 17 years. Neither Tiger Woods nor his father ever suggested that Tiger had a gift for golf; both put his success down to sheer hard work.
Mozart and Tiger Woods are both powerful examples of just how influential environment is in shaping personality and in determining what talents manifest in the first place.
Rory McIlroy has a similar story to Tiger Woods in that he also started playing golf at a very young age (18 months old). He was also coached by his father (Gerry, who played off scratch), and Rory also appeared on national TV demonstrating his skill –
