The Talent Crash
Let me ask a question: what is the universal sign of an untalented person?
It’s not being bad at something, because even talented people are bad at many things. No one would pay to watch me play basketball.
Here’s the answer: an untalented person lives on his reputation. That’s it. That’s how it works. Talented people can succeed on their merits; untalented people succeed if they create and exploit feedback loops (wealth and prestige begetting same) in human societies.
Talent is hard enough to measure as it is, but talented people are usually doing things other than evaluating talent. This means that our society must trust talentless people to evaluate talent when filling coveted jobs.
Talent doesn’t matter in the workaday world because it’s been successfully managed out of the equation. An adept manager doesn’t bet his company on the intermittent availability of top talent. He tries to find a way to make sure the trains will still run with mediocre people driving them. This is a disturbing realization for me, but my existence on a job site means that, from a cost-cutting MBA’s perspective, someone fucked up. A more capable executive would find a way to replace the expensive, ornery high-talent person with a plug-and-play mediocrity.
The world benefits from top talent. Do individual hiring managers trying to protect their positions, within workaday corporations that would rather standardize mediocre processes than take a risk on excellence, get what they want from people like me? No.
In light of the collapsing demand for top talent, reputation and social manipulation become more important than ever. Which means that the 85th, 95th, and possibly 99th percentiles are forced to live on their reputations, like talentless hacks. People who could once work with their talents are now forced to fall back on their reputations. Why? Because corporate management, on its own terms, works. The system runs well enough on mediocre inputs. To be talented enough to be above the reputation trap got harder. There might soon be no level of talent that escapes it.