Burying the Best and the Brightest

I’ve been thinking about the pernicious effects of our overachievement society again, this time by way of Philip Delves Broughton (via NYTimes Opinionator), in a post called The McNamara Syndrome.

The following is actually from the author’s book, Ahead of the Curve:

One of the most famous alumni of Harvard’s MBA program is Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, and member of the class of 1939. In his book InRetrospect reflecting on the war, he wrote that while at Harvard he had developed “an approach to organizing human activities.” There were three steps: “Define a clear objective…develop a plan to achieve that objective, and systematically monitor progress against the plan.” This was still the essence of the HBS method. Strategy, planning and measurement. Of course, McNamara’s methods came to seem macabre when he applied it to counting bodies in Vietnam.

[If you haven't seen The Fog of War yet, you should.]

Broughton goes on in his post to suggest “the McNamara Syndrome persists at Harvard Business School and more widely among business and economic leaders. It consists of three very dangerous elements”:

1)       Excessive faith in systems, long-established networks, language, thinking and a set of assumptions which change more quickly than you do…

2)       An over-justified confidence in one’s methods, instilled by schools and prior success…

3)       Brilliant people often end up working and thinking inside a bubble. Inhabitants of this bubble reinforce each other’s behavior, assuming it to be all equally brilliant…

Any of this seem familiar?

In today’s economy, the goal of increased home ownership, fine, became the mortgage meltdown and the creation of far too many credit derivatives.

What really caught my attention was

In McNamara’s case, he assumed that what worked at HBS, Stanford and Ford would work at the DoD. This is the subject of Halberstam’s brilliant and tragic book The Best and the Brightest, about McNamara and the other men around JFK. The financial collapse is The Best and the Brightest replayed in the economic sphere, though stripped of the public service ethic in Kennedy’s generation.

That highlighted part (my emphasis) represents one of my most persistent complaints.

“The best and the brightest” in our society owe their success to a rigorous sort of disposition that is reinforced from a very early age. In turn, they continue to refine our institutions and conventions towards those values.

Our whole system of education and career advancement is set up to promote people who thrive within established frameworks, where there are “right and wrong answers,” competing to win zero-sum games in closed, rule-directed systems, with clear “winners and losers.”

The lessons learned along the way — from classroom to sandlot, continuing on through graduate school, carrying over to the negotiating table, board room, golf course, etc — aren’t easily unlearned when people find themselves facing big, ambiguous, complex challenges that require the reticence to dwell in uncertainty, adaptiveness, humility to give up on goals and plans that turn out to be misdirected, and the creativeness to develop new frameworks.

Instead, the best and the brightest — so used to winning and being right (not to mention being recognized and rewarded for it) — have interpreted the open and dynamic systems they face at the highest levels in the real world as being like the simpler challenges, in closed systems, they had dominated all their lives.

The more I think and write about it, the more I believe that much of the past century was an experiment — an attempt by mankind to control everything with machines, mathematics, and rigid management regimes — which eventually failed.

According to current assumptions about success (i.e. our need for certainty and confirmation), that’s supposed to be bad news.

But if we start to bury those arrogant ideals and look at the world more openly, as we ought to — as an inherently uncertain process, beyond our ability to control completely — then the realization that the 20th century was an experiment, is, in fact invigorating…

Our response to the ongoing collapse of the old models should be, “Look at how much we’ve learned!”

And look at all of the opportunity…

No related posts.

Tags: best and the brightest, careers, creativity, education, leadership, learning, management, opportunity, overachievement, robert mcnamara, war, work