Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin Read Free Book Online

more than anyone: my father.” Asked to explain Tiger’s phenomenal success, father and son always gave the same reason: hard work.
    One of Tiger’s boyhood coaches later recalled that, on first seeing him, “I felt he was like Mozart.” As indeed he was.

In Search of Business Talent
    If the concept of specific talents turns out to be troublesome in music and sports, it’s even more so in business. We all tend to assume that business giants must possess some special gift for what they do, but evidence turns out to be extremely elusive. In fact, the overwhelming impression that comes from examining the early lives of business greats is just the opposite—that they didn’t seem to hold any identifiable gift or give any early indication of what they would become.
    To consider a few of the most prominent examples: Jack Welch, named by Fortune magazine as the twentieth century’s manager of the century, showed no particular inclination toward business, even into his midtwenties. He grew up as a high-achieving kid in Salem, Massachusetts, getting good grades, though “no one would have accused me of being brilliant,” he later wrote, and becoming captain of his high school’s hockey and golf teams. It was a good enough record to get him into an Ivy League college, but his family couldn’t afford it, and he ended up going to the University of Massachusetts. He majored not in business or economics but in chemical engineering. He then went to the University of Illinois and got a master’s and a Ph.D. in the same field. As he approached the real world at age twenty-five, he still wasn’t sure of his direction and interviewed for faculty jobs at Syracuse and West Virginia universities. He finally decided to accept an offer to work in a chemical development operation at General Electric.
    If anything in Welch’s history to that point suggests that he would become the most influential business manager of his time, it’s tough—in fact, impossible—to spot it.
    Bill Gates, the world’s richest human and symbol of a fundamental economic revolution, is a more promising prospect for those who want to explain success through talent. He became fascinated by computers as a kid and says he wrote his first piece of software at age thirteen; it was a program that played tic-tac-toe. Gates and his friend Paul Allen, with whom he later founded Microsoft, were constantly contriving ways to get more computer time on the big clunky machines of the day. They started a business, Traf-O-Data, to build computers that would analyze the data from traffic monitors on city streets; Gates says the device worked, but nobody bought it. After going off to Harvard, he remained immersed in the exciting and fast-changing world of computers.
    It’s clear that Gates’s early interests led directly to Microsoft. The problem is that nothing in his story suggests extraordinary abilities. As he is the first to note, legions of kids were interested in the possibilities of computers in those days. Harvard at that time was bursting with computer geeks who well understood that a technology revolution was happening. What suggested that Gates would become the king of them all? The answer is, nothing in particular. On close examination, it was probably not his software expertise that was most critical to his success. The more relevant abilities were the ability to launch a business and then the quite different abilities required to manage a large corporation. And Traf-O-Data notwithstanding, one looks in vain for signs of those abilities in world-class proportions, or at all, in the young Gates.
    In surveying the world’s business titans we find Welch-like stories more often than Gates-like stories, lacking even a hint of inclination toward the fields or traits that would one day lead to fame and riches. One of Gates’s predecessors as the world’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller,