Recently, I stumbled across a bunch of one-liners er, “slideshow”, on BusinessWeek’s site from last June in which Marissa Mayer of Google divulged her secrets for corporate innovation. Some of these were well-known nuggets about Google’s famously open culture (e.g., “Employees get one day off a week to work on their own projects”); some were obvious truisms of the sort that your typical BusinessWeek reader would find innovative (e.g., “launch early and often in small beta tests”). Most of them seemed like good ideas, in general. But there was one that stuck out because it’s a mantra I’ve heard a few too many times:
“Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approve hires. They favor intelligence over experience.”
I was immediately reminded of a fantastic work by Malcolm Gladwell entitled The Talent Myth. Writing in October 2004, in the wake of the Enron scandal and the accompanying widespread loss of faith in American businesses big and small, Gladwell wrote a compelling analysis of the role that Enron’s “talent first” culture played in its demise. In a nutshell, he argues that the company – spurred by McKinsey – repeatedly rewarded people who appeared brilliant by virtue of confidence, apparent intellectual prowess, test scores, and other superficial metrics. In the process, Gladwell says, Enron created a culture where potential (fuzzily measured) was valued far more than results (precisely measured, but usually far after the fact), and promoted people at a pace at which it became easy to outrun the consequences of their decisions.
Intelligence is obviously important. But intelligence doesn’t guarantee performance. So how do you find people that will really drive your company forward?
Marc Andreessen has an excellent post up that argues convincingly that “Intelligence, per se, is overrated,” citing the mythology around early-90s Microsoft and present-day Google for promoting the idea that hiring the “smartest people around” will lead to insane levels of success. Andreessen hires for drive, curiosity, and ethics.
Personally, I think “drive” is overrated as well – it’s really easy to hire assholes when you focus on that, especially when it’s motivated by the wrong things, and they can do a lot more harm than good. I don’t have the answers (although I’ll propose some in a later post)… so I’m curious to hear what others think the most important traits of a good recruit are.
