Rory Sutherland
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This kind of thing is nuts. But perhaps the consultancies are no less silly in pursuing such an approach to begin with. Because it rests on the assumption that the optimal way to build an elite organisation is by assembling a homogeneous group of similarly elite, overeducated, hyper-competitive individuals. It isn’t. One MBA in a group might be valuable — whereas ten is often a formula for groupthink and collective idiocy.
Dr William Muir is an evolutionary biologist at Purdue University. In the 1990s, in a landmark experiment in poultry eugenics, he set out to create super-chickens, breeding from only the top-laying single hens in any group. Compared with the control group, the results were a catastrophe. Placed together, the uber-chickens produced very few eggs — and spent most of the time pecking each other to death. The best solution was not to breed from hens which were most productive individually, but to breed only from the most productive groups. If you are interested in knowing more, there is a Ted Talk by Margaret Heffernan on this topic.
I was reminded of this finding last week when watching the masterpiece that is Clarkson’s Farm. The farm is worked by five of the most incongruous individuals imaginable — it is almost Shakespearean in capturing the breadth of humankind, and the series is unfailingly entertaining as a result. But there are many deeper levels at which you can watch it. For instance, the breakout hero of the series, the tractor driver Kaleb Cooper, is the perfect embodiment of tacit knowledge — in Michael Polyani’s phrase, the fact ‘that we know much more than we can tell’. Kaleb has never heard of Oklahoma or Moses, but in reversing a trailer into a narrow gate — a perfect example of a skill you can acquire but not teach — you would bet on him against any engineering professor on Earth.
The amusement value of the series lies in the absurdly different characters it depicts. The deeper lesson which emerges is that this breadth is not a bug but a feature. In the short term, the farm would run better if Kaleb or the farm manager Charlie Ireland were exclusively in control. In the long term, it needs all of them.
Because you read about employment
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