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Why firms don't want you to be brilliant at your job

74 点作者 dreamweapon超过 10 年前

13 条评论

mamurphy超过 10 年前
TL;DR: -Top employees use top large corporations as springboards to their careers rather than as 30-year destinations, a marked change from the past.<p>-Top large corporations reward interpersonal skills and getting along more than brilliance, causing top employees to seek employment elsewhere.<p>-The advent of the internet has heightened the communication gap between the generations, making it hard for &quot;partners&quot; and &quot;new associates&quot; to communicate.<p>The author didn&#x27;t provide evidence for much of what she claimed, and did not build towards a conclusion. More, the above themes did not seem like new news to me. Also, the first two themes did not clearly related to the third. The article felt like meandering observations -- which is fine insofar as it goes, but, while I enjoyed the read, I wanted more to conclude it. Maybe I&#x27;ll find that here in the comments?
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CapitalistCartr超过 10 年前
I think she&#x27;s missed the obvious. Employers want the McDonald&#x27;s system, where the brilliance is in the system, not the employees. If it&#x27;s in the worker, it&#x27;s perishable; in the system, it&#x27;s not. When I hire a machine operator, brilliance isn&#x27;t a useful asset, so I&#x27;m not paying for it. Some brains, yes, sure, but not above a 120 IQ. That&#x27;s all the job requires, and I keep it structured that way.
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7Figures2Commas超过 10 年前
&gt; Years of drudgery and late nights in the office have a way of taking the shine off any brilliance, and, in any case, there is no incentive to hang on to it as the corporate world doesn&#x27;t rate it.<p>&gt; Rather than reward brilliance, it prefers skills that graduates can&#x27;t see - good judgment, a nice way with clients, and an instinct for when to bite your lip.<p>This is a curiously cynical perspective. &quot;Brilliance&quot; alone doesn&#x27;t necessarily create value or pay the bills. The combination of high IQ and low EQ can be harmful to customer relationships and co-workers. The corporate world values soft skills just as much if not more than raw intelligence because soft skills can often make or break a business.<p>Notwithstanding the fact that a lot of young employees overestimate just how clever they are and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that smart ideas won&#x27;t always be viable in the real world, instead of pretending that &quot;brilliance&quot; is some sort of panacea that companies should cling to regardless of the cost, the author should consider that pragmatic, well-rounded employees who can perform consistently might be better contributors than the brilliant, intense employees who become disillusioned whenever they don&#x27;t get their way.
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xivzgrev超过 10 年前
Sounds exactly like something a fresh college grad would say. All brilliant people jump from company to company, all people who stay at one company are dull.<p>I say, if you&#x27;re enjoying yourself at one company, learning a lot, and moving up, why not keep it up?<p>Not to mention once you have a family &#x2F; kids, me thinks you are much less likely to jump.<p>&quot;The main thing that had struck him so far was that people seemed to get dimmer the higher they went in the organisation. I asked if he had any explanation for this and he said it was self-selection.<p>Really smart people don&#x27;t stay at the institutions they have fought so hard to get into. The best leave within two or three years - the slightly less good stay a bit longer, and only the also-rans and the terminally unimaginative are in for the long haul.&quot;<p>Also, I used to work in consulting firm, so by this definition, all of the partners are also-rans and terminally unimaginative - I&#x27;d say some partners fit this definition, but many others were bright-eyed, bushy tailed, and full of interesting ideas &#x2F; perspectives.
cgio超过 10 年前
Working in such an organisation and being in the middle ranks (Manager), I may have a reconciling view to offer. These huge organisations (I see partners mentioned so I will assume big4) are not pioneering innovators (even if they try to appear so) but powerhouses of mediocrity. You can be brilliant and it will be appreciated to some degree, but most probably the passion that comes with your brilliance will be subdued by the layers of mediocrity between you and the mediocre leadership.<p>In partnerships, this is even more accentuated by the fact that there is division of power by design, so even if a visionary leader appreciates a vision you still have to convince the partnership which is mostly a matter of PR rather than quality of idea. I can relate to the graduate, but the fact is a brilliant graduate will be too anxious to demonstrate their skills which does not help them see the reality. It is not a matter of personal skills, there are brilliant people sprinkled in the organisation at different levels, but a matter of organisational culture that builds on commoditising ideas.<p>In a big organisation the skills are averaged out and it is the greatest common divisor that can be commoditised. There are more brilliant partners than graduates but the aggregated soup is tasteless. And by the time you are a partner you make enough money to not care about the spice you add to the soup but about the measured KPIs that make up your contribution (sales.)<p>It reads more like a rant, but I am glad to give more details on specifics. Just to address the title, it is not that firms don&#x27;t want you to be brilliant at your job, it is that they could not care less unless it is a client that focuses on your brilliance. And the situation with clients is very similar but I will not address it here.
highiquser超过 10 年前
BUT (and this is big one) in many instances, such as Google and Facebook, you do have to be brilliant to get in.
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Balgair超过 10 年前
The article raises a good point about the &#x27;diagonal&#x27; transfer technique. Horizontal would be moving about in your own pay grade to a different job, vertical would be up or down in pay in your own company. Diagonal is very much something that occurs with frequency. You company may not have a position for you to move up into but another fir does, so you jump up and over. Job hopping is not that bad and I really dont see a stigma anymore as people just plain are not retiring and companies are so fragile as is.
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chavesn超过 10 年前
This is an interesting point, but I think the source (the graduate now working at one of the &quot;most prestigious employers in the world&quot;) may be affected by a healthy dose of the Dunning-Kruger effect[1].<p>First of all, as a 22-year-old it&#x27;s easy to feel like 2-3 years is an eternity. It&#x27;s also easy to undervalue the attributes that the more senior employees possess, as one simply can&#x27;t see them.<p>&quot;Brilliant&quot; and &quot;Best&quot; are not necessary synonyms. The first seems to me to mean standing out from the crowd, thinking differently, challenging the status quo.<p>Those are valuable, possibly even essential traits. However, one can easily waste a lot of energy spinning wheels trying to do those things at the wrong times -- a mistake I am very personally familiar with.<p>My sense is this graduate will spend a few years disrupting things a bit with mixed success. In 5-8 years, if they are as bright as they think they are, they&#x27;ll have a lot of insight on new skills that they weren&#x27;t even aware of at play in their seniors&#x27; interactions. I hope also that the graduate retains most of their original brilliance, so that they can begin to make a serious difference with a matured, balanced perspective on what their peers and seniors have to offer.<p>[1]: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect</a>
james1071超过 10 年前
Americans don&#x27;t get irony, do they?<p>Lucy Kellaway writes a humorous column for the FT, the main subject of which is management nonsense.<p>The twist of this piece is that a new graduate considers her to be one of the dumb management that she has been mocking since the early 1990s (when I started reading her column), if not before.
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Systemic33超过 10 年前
I think while this point of view is indeed very true for the large majority, larger companies combat this job hopping, by encouraging internal job switching; ie. going from one area of business to another, which is closer to getting a new job, than getting a promotion. This ensures that the company doesn&#x27;t waste time in getting a ext. employee to get accustomed to the culture. But that&#x27;s really the essence Human Capital Management (HCM). I am however not so sure, how widespread this practice is, maybe you guys know?
Fando超过 10 年前
The title of the article exploits our narcissism ever so well.
nilkn超过 10 年前
I think this is too SV-centric (or even tech-centric). For instance, the major oil companies still offer pensions (and 401k&#x27;s) and many employees stick around for decades. They also higher senior management internally. Marissa Mayer figures are relatively rare in the industry.
craigsmitham超过 10 年前
I work for a company that promotes on average every 14 mos with average raise of over 14%. If you&#x27;re a software developer looking for an unparalleled career path, let me know.
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