I can't agree with this hard enough. I happen to be an extremely vocal person and have been lucky enough to sit in positions where I have regularly interacted with senior management at large...
the management class is still made of up pre-digital boomers and even rarely Silent Generation aged types refusing to retire
prevented from moving up to significant positions where their input is valuable
I can't agree with this hard enough. I happen to be an extremely vocal person and have been lucky enough to sit in positions where I have regularly interacted with senior management at large companies, but even then it feels like many suggestions end up falling on deaf ears and bad decisions are made which result in poor quality products which are either abandoned or eventually end up much closer to my (or my colleagues) original suggestions.
From my own experience I think the idea of tiers of management is simply poor business outside of menial or labor intensive jobs where it's easy to replace individuals. A much flatter style of management with tiering purely for strategy and final decision making allows information to flow much more freely from the bottom up and ensure that individuals much closer to the actual product can chime in with their extremely valuable experience.
I think this article is based on a fundamentally flawed assumption: I don't think that's accurate -- a meritocracy simply defines that the selection process for the future working elite is based...
I think this article is based on a fundamentally flawed assumption:
"The idea of meritocracy is that education both identifies and cultivates the future working elite — after the smart kids get good educations, they will go on to occupy the social roles where their talents are most needed, whether in business, academia or government."
I don't think that's accurate -- a meritocracy simply defines that the selection process for the future working elite is based on education and/or talent, and not class or family or skin color, etc.
If you wanted to craft an argument that the best and brightest aren't going into underpaid, unfulfilling jobs (whether they're needed there or not), then you should really be arguing against capitalism, not against meritocracy.
I don't think any argument encouraging people to act against their own best interests will get any traction. If you don't want them to become rentiers, that's fine; just change the financial or legal system to shift the incentives such that they will choose to do something else.
Edit: If you want to read the article and don't have a Bloomberg account, you can view the cached Google version here.
I think it's a heuristic that many people associate going to Harvard and Yale (or Standford) with smarts. Intelligence is not the same as dedication or family connections. I know from experience...
I think it's a heuristic that many people associate going to Harvard and Yale (or Standford) with smarts. Intelligence is not the same as dedication or family connections. I know from experience that the smartest students are not always the most driven, but the most driven are always among the disproportionately likely to apply for top tier schools.
And doesn't that cast the problem in a different light? If you assume what I said just now is true, isn't it a different problem that the most driven students generally (or at least disproportionately) see Finance as the best avenue for personal success? And doesn't it force you to have to wrestle for better metrics to determine what the "smartest" students are doing?
Adding onto what you're saying, because I don't disagree with it: I think the root issue is that finance is generally incredibly high-paying and it might siphon those super driven people from...
Adding onto what you're saying, because I don't disagree with it: I think the root issue is that finance is generally incredibly high-paying and it might siphon those super driven people from doing other things they're interested in that are probably more valuable in a non-monetary sense.
Ugh, paywall'd. If I were to take the article's title at face value, my opinion is that there is a common myth of "untapped potential". By what measure are we determining who are America's...
Ugh, paywall'd.
If I were to take the article's title at face value, my opinion is that there is a common myth of "untapped potential". By what measure are we determining who are America's smartest and where their talents lay. Is someone who graduated 4.0 with a pre-med degree more capable than a nurse who has worked in a hospital for the same period of time?
As someone who had to hire for a position and reviewed a number of applications, skills that one might consider "unique" doesn't look all that unique when you had to go through a pool of equally qualified candidates.
I can't agree with this hard enough. I happen to be an extremely vocal person and have been lucky enough to sit in positions where I have regularly interacted with senior management at large companies, but even then it feels like many suggestions end up falling on deaf ears and bad decisions are made which result in poor quality products which are either abandoned or eventually end up much closer to my (or my colleagues) original suggestions.
From my own experience I think the idea of tiers of management is simply poor business outside of menial or labor intensive jobs where it's easy to replace individuals. A much flatter style of management with tiering purely for strategy and final decision making allows information to flow much more freely from the bottom up and ensure that individuals much closer to the actual product can chime in with their extremely valuable experience.
I think this article is based on a fundamentally flawed assumption:
I don't think that's accurate -- a meritocracy simply defines that the selection process for the future working elite is based on education and/or talent, and not class or family or skin color, etc.
If you wanted to craft an argument that the best and brightest aren't going into underpaid, unfulfilling jobs (whether they're needed there or not), then you should really be arguing against capitalism, not against meritocracy.
I don't think any argument encouraging people to act against their own best interests will get any traction. If you don't want them to become rentiers, that's fine; just change the financial or legal system to shift the incentives such that they will choose to do something else.
Edit: If you want to read the article and don't have a Bloomberg account, you can view the cached Google version here.
I think it's a heuristic that many people associate going to Harvard and Yale (or Standford) with smarts. Intelligence is not the same as dedication or family connections. I know from experience that the smartest students are not always the most driven, but the most driven are always among the disproportionately likely to apply for top tier schools.
And doesn't that cast the problem in a different light? If you assume what I said just now is true, isn't it a different problem that the most driven students generally (or at least disproportionately) see Finance as the best avenue for personal success? And doesn't it force you to have to wrestle for better metrics to determine what the "smartest" students are doing?
Adding onto what you're saying, because I don't disagree with it: I think the root issue is that finance is generally incredibly high-paying and it might siphon those super driven people from doing other things they're interested in that are probably more valuable in a non-monetary sense.
Ugh, paywall'd.
If I were to take the article's title at face value, my opinion is that there is a common myth of "untapped potential". By what measure are we determining who are America's smartest and where their talents lay. Is someone who graduated 4.0 with a pre-med degree more capable than a nurse who has worked in a hospital for the same period of time?
As someone who had to hire for a position and reviewed a number of applications, skills that one might consider "unique" doesn't look all that unique when you had to go through a pool of equally qualified candidates.