Gladwell suggest that a focus that only considers 'smart' people is a singularly bad way to build an organization.

Ask any middle manager who's left about the last round of layoffs. Inevitably, a shy person with exotic knowledge of a critical function was terminated by a smart person who didn't understand how the organization really worked. In the interests of fairness (or was it conflict avoidance) departments were pared by across the board cuts of 10% or 20% rather than taking the time to really understand the mechanics of value creation.

For many tasks, reliability and integrity are far more important than 'talent'. Would you prefer a smart insurance agent or an honest one? Do you really want the gal who is running the nuclear power plant to be creative during normal operations? Is there a market for 'talented' crossing guards? 

Unfortunately, we live in a world in which buzzwords become policy, policy becomes legislation and legislation becomes reality. That's why grade inflation is so rampant in our educational system. Some of interbiznet's largest business difficulties have come from focusing on talent instead of, say, initiative or other harder to quantify variables.

Every organization needs a 'chief master sergeant', the person who knows how to bend the rules, is slightly corrupt but can be relied on to solve the problem when it arises...a fireman, so to speak. A search for talent will never turn up one of these, current job descriptions fail to produce them but, who else would run the coffee mess?

Some people are connectors (the hubs inside of the organization's walls, if you read last week's articles on network science). Not smart, connected. We know of no tool that can predict whether or not someone will become a connector once they've landed inside a culture. We do know that organizations that have them have better communications. It's not a skill most recruiters look for. 

Take a moment to read Gladwell's compelling essay. Then ask yourself whether you are hiring the right people or overpopulating your organization with talent.

This "talent mind-set" is the new orthodoxy of American management. It is the intellectual justification for why such a high premium is placed on degrees from first-tier business schools, and why the compensation packages for top executives have become so lavish. In the modern corporation, the system is considered only as strong as its stars, and, in the past few years, this message has been preached by consultants and management gurus all over the world. None, however, have spread the word quite so 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 twenty separate projects, where McKinsey's billings topped ten million dollars a year, where a McKinsey director regularly attended board meetings, and where the C.E.O. himself was a former McKinsey partner. The company, of course, was Enron.......

What the War for Talent amounts to is an argument for indulging A employees, for fawning over them. "You need to do everything you can to keep them engaged and satisfied—even delighted," Michaels, Handfield-Jones, and Axelrod write. "Find out what they would most like to be doing, and shape their career and responsibilities in that direction. Solve any issues that might be pushing them out the door, such as a boss that frustrates them or travel demands that burden them." No company was better at this than Enron. In one oft-told story, Louise Kitchin, a twenty-nine-year-old gas trader in Europe, became convinced that the company ought to develop an online-trading business. She told her boss, and she began working in her spare time on the project, until she had two hundred and fifty people throughout Enron helping her. After six months, Skilling was finally informed. "I was never asked for any capital," Skilling said later. "I was never asked for any people. They had already purchased the servers. They had already started ripping apart the building. They had started legal reviews in twenty-two countries by the time I heard about it." It was, Skilling went on approvingly, "exactly the kind of behavior that will continue to drive this company forward."

 -John Sumser

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