How Do You Think This Interview Is Going?
A review of Tyler Cowen & Daniel Gross's "Talent"
A founder I once worked with said, “The best people have the best words.” He meant that the most talented people he knew mastered the linguistics of their craft. They're the kind of people who can cause you to go, “Oh, there’s a word for that?” – when they pick out a useful phenomenon whose existence is obvious once it’s given a name.
Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross’s Talent focuses on cutting through the noise and identifying world-class people. The book gives you more words for that project. Both authors are in the business of spotting elite talent – Daniel Gross as a venture capitalist and Tyler Cowen as a patron (neither has funded me yet).
A corollary aim of the book is to improve hiring and talent search generally – for those who are overlooked, underpriced, and underutilized even if they aren’t world-class. Identifying excellence is a different art and science from finding above-average competence.
So how do you discover talent? Start by being able to talk about what it is. Cowen and Gross adopt the multiplicative model: to be world-class, you need everything to go right. That includes intelligence, persistence, energy, domain-level expertise, and more. Other traits that Cowen and Gross discuss are learning rate, sturdiness, generativeness, insecure overachievement, happiness, precocity, and adhesiveness. To discover world-class productivity, you need to learn to look for “the whole package.”
Common themes for each trait, whether intelligence or conscientiousness, are:
It’s evidence for (or against) productivity
The strength of the evidence doesn’t dominate all other information
Whether the evidence is for or against productivity is context-sensitive
Intelligence is good, but top CEOs may not be as smart as you’d expect and it’s not that predictive of success. Likewise, conscientiousness tends to be good, but it’s contingent on the role and exactly how you operationalize the concept. Neuroticism usually indicates productivity, but many artists have been exceptionally neurotic, and “insecure overachievement” sounds a lot like neurosis.
Talent contains more shallow heuristics than Tyler Cowen’s past works. Books like the Complacent Class or Big Business tie disparate areas together into a coherent picture. The Complacent Class is about how Americans have become more complacent in culture, business, and politics. Big Business is an extended argument for the idea that we underrate big business as a force for good in nearly every sector. Talent has key themes like:
Talent search is an art and a science
You can be better at talent search
Identifying elite talent has different rules from identifying aptitude generally
You should raise your ambitions and the ambitions around you
But none of these form into a single picture like the idea that America has become more complacent. The content of Talent is too context-sensitive and practical for an easy narrative summary. Cowen once encouraged the philosopher Žižek to write a book on “the electric tram in Bergen — should it go through a tunnel or not?” Talent may be the closest thing for Cowen to this project. There are key themes running through the book, but much of it reads like a list of practical considerations with only a high-level, low-precision model made explicit. One reason for this is simply that the book has two authors. The other is due to the domain – talent search is an art and a science. Cowen and Gross are providing pieces that you can use in your hiring, investing, or friend selection efforts.
The discussion of disability is paradigmatic of this. Often a disability is evidence of low productivity – otherwise, we wouldn't consider it a disability. However, many people adapt to their initial disadvantage or redirect their focus, resulting in more expertise than their nondisabled peers. Cowen and Gross give the example of blind lawyers. They can adapt to their condition with text-to-speech software and likely remember the law better than those who can easily look up what they’ve forgotten. The dyslexic may be much less likely to get lost in the details and better at delegation. Circumstances may force those with attention deficit disorder to be less risk-averse due to their apparent inability to stay put. So disability can be prima facie evidence of lower productivity – but it doesn’t take much evidence to defeat that impression.
What goes for disability goes for disadvantages of any kind. Think of the contrast between Julius Caesar and Octavian. Julius Caesar was a brilliant bureaucrat, charismatic, and general. Octavian was a world-class bureaucrat but was significantly less charismatic and a dubious general. Yet, Octavian may have been better at talent search. He possessed a stronger circle of people around him, like Agrippa (the general who defeated Mark Antony and renovated Rome) and Maecenas (the skilled diplomat, advisor, and cultural patron). Octavian, not Caesar, became Augustus.
Perhaps Gross and Cowen underemphasize how much you should simply pay attention as an interviewer. Ask questions that allow the candidate to give substantive answers. Don’t let them get away with filling space and babbling. Aim to filter out style and take in the concrete answers. Compare them with your bank of past candidates. Rank each candidate against one another. With enough practice, you can learn to pattern match well. Cowen and Gross bring do up the idea of entrepreneurial alertness:
You need to have some potential categories at hand, even if you end up rejecting those categories as universal explainers. Talent alertness derives from having a broad variety of conceptual matrices, empirical results, and regularities at your disposal. The broader and better your toolbox, the more likely the “aha!” moment is to strike you when you are looking for talent.
Much of the book reads like a list of considerations and concepts – these are there to make sense of what you’re supposed to be alert to. Some are there to ensure you haven’t been misinterpreting your experience – see the chapters on disability, women, and minorities.
In addition to having the best words, many top performers have honed their attention and memory. Athletes remember games in eerie detail, professional poker players remember every bet from hands in casual games, and the best chess players play blind with ease (and also have excellent memory). Expert interviewers should aim to observe and retain to the same degree.
One way to read this book is as a defense of the generalist. The interview questions are well suited to curious people with many interests. Cowen encourages us to crack the “cultural codes” of other people. The number of “different conceptual frameworks an individual has at his or her disposal” is evidence of productivity.
The excellent talent picker must master their subject matter, but also interpersonal dynamics, aspects of psychology, attention, personal intuition, ethics, and forecasting. This isn’t a matter of interviewing candidates here and there, instead, it’s an approach to the world. Being interested in some kind of ability lends itself to interest in others. Game recognize game.
In sum, expertise in talent search requires intelligence, curiosity, alertness, conceptual competence, and, ethics. The possession of those traits is crucial for becoming world-class.