Daniel Gross: preference

Transcript context

…How much of the insights in the book have either of you managed to implement in your own organizations? When you write a book with a title of Talent, you certainly walk into every interview you do in your life realizing that guy’s thinking he’s chatting with a guy who wrote a book called Talent, so you pretty much want to be on point in the interview. Look, we obviously already experienced some heightened awareness around an act which most people are not sufficiently focused on, which is the interview itself. That only increases, I think, after something like the book comes out. We have always been trying different interview questions. The book is really just like a cut from a very long list that keeps on growing. I think we’ll continue to iterate on that, over time. I’d say that the biggest shift in my thinking on talent, as a by-product of working with Tyler, has been on the value of things like energy and sturdiness and industriousness over raw intellect and IQ, which I don’t think is properly . . . It certainly wasn’t in my mindset a couple of years ago, and I still don’t think it’s in the global mindset. We’re certainly not saying that horsepower and IQ don’t matter. They certainly do, but there is a clearing bar at which point, for most roles, I think people tend to overvalue it and don’t realize the logarithmic nature of the curve and assume it’s linear. But I actually think, earlier than many people realize, you want to switch to caring about just how vigorous and how energetic that person is. I think that might be because — I’d be curious if you’d agree that it’s because, for most tasks, doing gleans far more information than thinking. Exactly.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.