[Tamerlin]

While I agree your sentiment that degrees and IQ have next to nothing to do with whether or not someone is actually smart, have a look at current culture and at corporate america.

At amazon, everyone was obsessed with how "smart" amazon employees were, and yet the place was a showcase of terrible engineering -- rife with accidental complexity and tight coupling that spanned not just systems within a group, but across entire divisions -- and some what I read in this article I saw there first-hand. The management complained constantly about how bad our tools were, yet the people that they promoted and took care of were the ones that designed and implemented those same tools.

A great many managers haven't the faintest idea as to how to determine what constitutes a "smart" employee, so they zero in on things like degrees and number of hours worked because they don't have any rational standard for identifying the good ones from the bad, so the guy with the degree who's working 80 hours a week is obviously the best guy on the team! Look how hard he's working! He must be REALLY smart!

"Also, the article seems to conflate having an MBA with being smart. I wonder if Gladwell has ever thought that the reason Southwest has a vastly more efficient organization than its competitors is because it has a bunch of smart people who figure out how to do things more efficiently. People so smart in fact that they realize people on the ground can make much more informed decisions than people in a boardroom."

I think that was precisely his point. Enron used MBAs as a proxy for "smartness" and turned out to be a spectacular disaster. Southwest doesn't, and is one of the few US-based airlines that isn't relying on the US government to keep it alive.

[mrr2]

Could it be that once you reach a certain level of size in any organization bureaucracy and complexity turns up? The reason why Amazon might have "terrible engineering" while the sleekest app startup doesn't is because Amazon is really, really big.

Look I understand degrees and IQ really don't mean much by themselves. Most of my friends attend "elite" colleges (as society deems it). Some are brilliant. Some aren't. However, the numbers show that "smartness" and particularly an "obsession" with smartness matters. Amazon is really successful. Google is really successful. D.E. Shaw is notoriously successful. Facebook is successful. Teach for America is super successful. The defining theme to all of these organizations is a focus on hiring the best talent possible. And often times the best talent happens to be at those top schools.

Think of the timeline of hiring. These companies often target people in the 22-27 age bracket. That is just 4 to 9 years away from their high school when college decisions were made. Work ethic, ambition, and a determination to get things done is pretty damn autocorrelating in its nature. Someone mentioned how PG noted in an essay that he was underwhelmed by MIT, Harvard, Stanford kids. But look at the YC startups. The number of startups funded by YC by alumni from MIT, CMU, Stanford is far more than what it would be if there was no correlation-causation.

I think drawing broad conclusion from a criminal enterprise like Enron is a poor way of doing things. Just because Enron touted their smartness and failed doesn't mean that is the norm. On a large enough sample set, I will still bet you that the McKinsey conclusion is right in that "talent" and the drive to get the top talent is still a big part of the most successful organizations.

[Tamerlin]

"Could it be that once you reach a certain level of size in any organization bureaucracy and complexity turns up?"

I would tend to agree with that, although I've seen startups run by bad managers install a pointlessly complex hierarchy for no reason other than that companies have hierarchies.

"The reason why Amazon might have "terrible engineering" while the sleekest app startup doesn't is because Amazon is really, really big."

No. Their abysmal engineering is by far the worst I've ever seen... well, not by far, what I ran into at Disney gave Amazon a run for its idiocy. The reason for the terrible engineering is that amazon is a Gen-Y shop. The company is notorious for abusing employees, and very clearly shows preferential treatment to interns rather than seniors. They have a lot of trouble hiring experienced engineers, and since everything they do is an emergency, they put however they can on the job... in other words, most of Amazon's mission critical software was designed and implemented by people who either just graduated from college, or hadn't yet (interns).

And then they hire seniors to "fix" it... the culture is such that they think "smart" is the ticket, and don't value the wisdom and knowledge that come with experience.

Now count the number of successful companies to the number that aren't. And take into account the number of unsuccessful projects compared to the number of successful ones, even at successful companies. What I suspect that you'll find is that in most companies, even successful ones, the primary reason that projects "succeed" is that the management changes its definition of "success" in order to avoid taking blame for mis-managing a project to its demise.