Talent: Thoughts,Ideas & Questions

Talent by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross will change how you think about people

Thank you Tyler and Daniel for sharing how you think about Talent.

Sections in this post:

1. Ideas

2. Testing some of Tyler & Daniel’s questions on myself

3. Hypothesis

4. Questions for Tyler & Daniel

5. Thoughts

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Ideas

Some hiring questions I’ve thought of:

• What are some qualities you admire in people you worked with? Can you give examples of specific situations when you encountered these qualities? - the ability to appreciate others is underrated and uncommon.

• What is the one unfulfilled ambition you have? What do you think can enable you to fulfill it?

• What (action/object/person/anything else) can impart joy for you even in the toughest situation?

• If you’d just woken up and had to speak for half an hour about anyone or anything, what would you talk about?

• If you were paid to learn anything for the next 6 months, what would you pick? Why?

Post-hiring (mostly a note to self):

• Have periodic (ideally every 6 months/1 yr) conversations with your team about their future ambitions. A desire to be improve oneself has to manifest continuously or people will not be able to meet the needs of a fast-growing organization. Also, unambitious people bring down the ambition density of a team and this is a slow spiral to complacency.

• Emphasize and conduct regular training. Older team members should continuously add to the knowledge of newer ones, not just when problems arise. Document thoughts, ideas, small successes and failures in problem solving to have a large body of materials that new recruits can learn from. Do NOT derive perverse joy from seeing new recruits struggle through what older team members struggled to learn. That’s a waste of time, energy and resources. There are going to be newer challenges for them.

• Watch for signs of agency. Does the person fulfill their assigned role and try to do more than was expected of them? These are people you don’t want to let go.

• If you find someone who can mediate conflict well, do everything you can to keep them.

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Testing some of Tyler & Daniel’s questions on myself:

Tabs open in my browser right now:

• LinkedIn searches for Energy & Biotech companies I want to reach out to for Telborg

• Github for cal and livebook

• Number of articles about the Semiconductor industry for a piece I’m currently writing (Stratechery posts are excellent!)

• Prisma Docs

• Future of Nuclear Power

• The corporation and innovation by Patrick Haggerty, co-founder of Texas Instruments

• Short interview of Hannah Schmitz, Principal Strategy Engineer at Oracle Red Bull Racing

• Lowercarbon’s Carbon Removal Startup Wishlist

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Hypothesis

1. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman observes:

   Earlier I traced people’s confidence in a belief to two related
   impressions: cognitive ease and coherence. We are confident when the
   story we tell ourselves comes easily to mind, with no contradiction and no
   competing scenario.

   …If subjective confidence is not to be trusted, how can we evaluate the
   probable validity of an intuitive judgment? When do judgments reflect true
   expertise? When do they display an illusion of validity? The answer comes
   from the two basic conditions for acquiring a skill:
   - an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable
   - an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice

   Both of those conditions will be satisfied, with respect to hiring, for a small percentage of people among all involved in hiring.

   Also from Thinking Fast and Slow:

   Another reason for the inferiority of expert judgment is that humans are
   incorrigibly inconsistent in making summary judgments of complex
   information. When asked to evaluate the same information twice, they
   frequently give different answers.

   Given this, would basic screening depending on the job + random selection have a greater or equal chance of success at finding good talent than human judgement alone? (Dr. Kahneman refers to dart-throwing monkeys making better predictions about the future than ‘experts’).

2. No great company has been built by entrepreneurs alone, but entrepreneurs are celebrated way more than exceptional managers. In a digital-native culture where influencers (essentially having public credibility) matter more than ever, can celebrating manager success help retain excellent talent?

3. Eliminating for undesirable traits (meanness, inability to accept counter perspectives, lack of ethics, poor tolerance for constructive feedback) is more important than selecting for what you believe to be necessary traits.

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Questions for Tyler & Daniel

1. "Talented people make each other better, often in dynamic, nonlinear fashion, and this holds for intelligence as a measure of talent as well.”

   - Will the benefits of working with other smart people accrue in remote teams as well as in in-person ones?

2. Assuming the Flynn Effect continues, will intelligence matter more or less in future hiring decisions?

3. Talent from underserved geographies and communities is more likely to have encountered difficult situations in early life. Do you believe in the correlation of scarcity/discomfort and drive? Will this correlation break down with newer generations born in greater prosperity, but with higher intelligence and tolerance for risk?

4. From Sam Altman's quote in the book "Also, it sounds obvious, but the successful founders I’ve funded believe they are eventually certain to be successful.”

   How far is believing one is talented a self-fulfilling prophecy?

5. Ray Dalio has talked about his highly documented approach to investment decision making. Could a similar approach be applied to hiring? These knowledge systems could also help train talent scouts. “Go with your gut” is hardly useful advice for an early-career talent scout.

6. The movie Erin Brockovich portrays the true story of a single mother of 3, who helped a large community of residents living near a PG&E’s Hinkley plant receive justice and compensation due to the widespread illness from release of carcinogens in water. She does this working with a lawyer, without any law degrees or prior legal or activism experience. Erin previously held an Associate degree in applied arts and won beauty pageants. Another interesting portrayal is in the Bollywood movie Raazi, a (claimed to be true) account of a young Kashmiri girl who helps foil a Pakistani submarine attack on an Indian naval target ahead of the India-Pakistan war of 1971. Neither of these characters displayed specific traits that would induce one to have recruited them for these roles. Can any science on Talent selection be trusted?

7. STEM-based testing has been used for decades to hunt for talent (India has a National Talent Search Examination). Can standardized non-verbal tests be developed to select for non-cognitive skills early in life?

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Thoughts

1. The challenge of talent is not just finding the right talent. It’s often a failure to bring out the talent in an individual. Many people’s work ethics, ideas of work culture, acceptable practices and even the ceiling of their ambition are determined by their previous work experience. Individual curiosity matters but often will get suppressed under work, family life, personal experiences. I wonder if there’s untapped alpha in working with mid-to-senior professionals (or even non-professionals) who did not display signs of early success.

2. Loved the surprises in the ‘Compensation and Adaptation’ section - Ed Catmull has aphantasia, National Association of Blind Lawyers 🤯

3. On attention deficits, have found that having a productive way to procrastinate (reading + writing for me) working on the main goal actually gets more stuff done in both areas.

4. Apple TV show Ted Lasso is a delightful portrayal of the power & influence of happy individuals.

5. On the gender gap in the workforce - most working women will encounter ennumerable instances of (mostly implicit) bias. The one way to change that is to simply have more women become professionals and/or entrepreneurs. I’m reminded of an excellent op-ed on women in politics. The author wrote “The question to ask is not what you can do, but what will be lost if you don’t do it.”

6. On bridging gender/racial/communal gaps - people can empathize most with those who had experiences similar to theirs, whether positive or negative. Initiatives that help promote talent of your own gender/race/community/religion can have more impact than general endeavors. Promoting a specific group can get more members of that group to come forward and take chances.

7. I love the emphasis on empathy “Toward these ends, one concrete step you can take is to put yourself in environments where other people do not perceive your talents very readily, not only to get a sense of what that is like, but also to make the idea emotionally more vivid to you.”

8. There is still a lot of scope in building the right social networks for discovering untapped talent.

9. Other examples of extraordinary energy and stamina -

• W. Edwards Deming - Founded the W. Edwards Deming Institute at the age of 82, continued to advise small and large businesses (including holding “week-long seminars for employees and suppliers”) on management, operations, innovation and published his final book at the age of 92.

• Morris Chang - returned to lead TSMC as its CEO at the age of 78 and lead the company for the next 9 years

• Henry Kissinger has published his latest book at the age of 99

• APJ Abdul Kalam - After completing his term as India’s 11th President at the age of 75, became a Visiting Professor at several renowned institutions and continued to work actively until he breathed his last at an event where he was to talk about Sustainability, at the age of 83.

• Ralph Steinman, 2011 Nobel laureate in Medicine lived with pancreatic cancer for the last 4 years of his life and was seen in his lab at Rockefeller University until a few days before he breathed his last

• Amitabh Bacchan - the most iconic Bollywood personality. Mr. Bacchan’s film career began in 1969 and continues. He’s also a writer, ex-politician, voice actor, and hosts the most popular reality show in the country.

Say Hi on Twitter @SoumyaG101 or email thehealthyanalyst@gmail.com

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Thanks to Dwarkesh Patel for the book recommendation. If you seek new ideas and enquiry into the minds of great thinkers, check out his excellent podcast and substack.