As many of you who know me realize, I am a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Malcolm Gladwell. Not an enthusiast, not a respectful advocate or even brash supporter - I am a tattoo-wearing zealot.
He is a master story teller, a mirror to human insight, a sensai for modern times, an entertaining intellectual ride and a gatherer of odd pieces of information to form quite powerful and new conclusions on what hidden rules drive the world we live in.
The Tipping Point effectively created the pillars for my business and has stood the test of time and scrutiny - although riddled with really clever sparks of insight, the key argument - small things do make big differences.
Blink was his follow up and asserted effectively that although we may try to refute it, most of our cognition and decisions come down to the instinctual, sub-conscious-driven turn of our guts.
In a speech (video above and linked) drawing from his new book "Outliers" on the shelves in November, 2008, Gladwell looks at the lives of successful people and proves that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from. In the New Yorker sponsored keynote above, Gladwell uses an National Hockey league draft combine, an affirmative action-affected lawyer cross-section, a teacher-affected student population and a sample of pilots and their safety records to prove that the expert tests that we prove to evaluate talent and potential for success as wholly uncorrelated to in-role success.
It's a powerful theses and given Malcolm's touch, a best selling argument. This mismatch of evaluation and performance is not just restricted to job functions either.
In business' quest for certainty, we look at established marketing mediums as having greater and more exact norms for success when anybody who has spent any time in marketing should realize - the awareness, recall or reach levels (some of our key industry metrics) of our communication mediums have very little to do with their success in building businesses. Our marketing metrics are mismatched. We measure, and therefore, spend behind mediums that have very little to do with a company's success.
Given an ecosystem that gets created to support and defend these mediums (ad agencies, media firms, brand management, production businesses), similar to the professional sports combine of tests, what to some might seem obvious gets blurred to the point of inertia resulting in seasoned experts and highly paid practitioners operating unquestioningly behind marketing's mismatched metrics.
Back to Gladwell's list of mismatched tests - he brings up the Wonderlic Intellectual test - most known for its assessment of football players in advance of the NFL draft. An average person can score 24, football players -20, chemists -31, journalists -26 and for those football insiders - the smartest position - offensive tackles - 26, quarterbacks -24, wide receivers -17 and the dumbest - halfbacks -16).
Now taking some of the top rated NFL quarterbacks, apparently smartest ever:
- Drew Henson
- Alex Smith
- Eli Manning
- Tony Romo
- Drew Bledsoe
- Matt Leinhart
- Kellen Clements
And the lowest ranked, apparently dumbest:
- Tivarius Jackson
- Derek Anderson
- Vince Young
- Dave Gerrard
- Dan Marino
- Terry Bradshaw
- Donovan McNabb
Which QB would you consider running your team? On balance, most football intellects, would choose the dumbest and their 3 Hall of Fame-worthy QBs plus 3 of the game's brightest stars- Gladwell at his best again.
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