Insiders vs. Outsiders: Sweeping Generalizations Don't Make Sense

I read an interesting blog post this week on the HBR site.  The post consists of an interview with Harvard Professor Gautum Mukunda.   Here is an excerpt (video posted below as well):

The finding: The best leaders tend to be outsiders who don’t have a great deal of experience.
 
The research: Gautam Mukunda studied political, business, and military leaders, categorizing them into two groups: “filtered leaders,” insiders whose careers followed a normal progression; and “unfiltered leaders,” who either were outsiders with little experience or got their jobs through fluke circumstances. He then compared the groups’ effectiveness; for instance, with U.S. presidents, he looked at historians’ rankings from the past 60 years. He discovered that the unfiltered leaders were the most effective—and also the least effective—while highly filtered leaders landed in the middle of the pack. 
 
The challenge: Is searching for a leader with a long, impressive résumé a waste of time? Is experience a predictor of mediocre performance? Professor Mukunda, defend your research.
 
Mukunda: I was surprised by how unambiguous the data were, but they confirmed what I suspected: If you choose an insider who you know can do the job well, most of the time that person won’t perform any differently from any other top candidate with lots of experience. Such insiders—I call them “filtered leaders”—might be good, but they probably won’t be brilliant. It’s the unfiltered leaders, the outsiders without lots of experience, who perform the very best.

I'm highly skeptical of such a sweeping generalization.  I don't think we can argue that outsiders are ALWAYS preferable to insiders, that unfiltered folks are always preferable to experienced individuals.    The bottom line is: It depends!  Certain circumstances call for an outsider or a person with fresh perspective, while others lend themselves to an insider or someone with deep experience in an industry or company. Each company needs to assess its situation and make the right choice for that organization, given its strategy and culture, AT THAT POINT IN TIME.  The right solution for Company XYZ in 2012 may not make sense in 2018, as conditions change.   Moreover, the search for that superstar outsider can be a futile one, as I've written about in earlier blog posts.  We sometimes become enamored with the outside "star" hire... and then feel very underwhelmed a few years later.  

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The 10,000 Hours Misconception: Practice vs. Talent

Professors David Z. Hambrick and Elizabeth J. Meinz wrote a good article in the New York Times this weekend about the "10,000 hours" concept popularized by Malcolm Gladwell.   Actually, the idea of experts achieving world class status through 10,000 hours of practice comes from the excellent work of Florida State University Professor K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues.  They have studied how world class violinists, chess players, athletes, and the like engage in deliberate practice to enhance their skills.  Ericsson has found that top people in these fields tend to engage in at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice during their formative years.

Some people have interpreted this work to mean that talent doesn't matter much, that somehow one can become world class simply through hard work.   Here is how Hambrick and Meinz counter that conventional wisdom:

Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point.  Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage. 

Hambrick and Meinz go on to explain that the high achievers that they studied tend to have a very high level of working memory capacity.   That attribute tends to matter, above and beyond how much one practices.  For example, when they studied pianists who had practiced the same amount of hours, they found that those with higher working memory capacity tended to perform better.   The scholars don't dispute that deliberate practice matters.  They simply remind us that talent still matters... a great deal. 
 

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