Expertise - or Talent?
In a way, Buckingham faked me out (Mixner) in his book First, Break All the Rules. His premise - don't try to change people; work with what you've got - morphed into "Don't hire based on experience; hire on talent." I bought the idea and wrote it up. Well, it ends up that there is, like most things, another point of view on hiring and managing.
Gladwell and Goleman both refer to Hogan's work (Hogan) to argue the opposite point of view. In their mind, talented people with outside the box thinking only take you so far. Gladwell derides Michaels' book The War for Talent (Gladwell, Department, 28), saying that, basically, Enron, in accepting McKinsey's thesis that talent was better than experience, hired the best graduates of the best business schools year after year because they were the best at "outside-the box-thinking." By continually thinking outside the box, however, those same super-qualified employees made all the mistakes we all know about so infamously. "It never occured to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing (Gladwell, Department, 33)."
It is always fun to pick on the winners. Any time a business text labels a company best-in-class or some such title, folks start to look for weaknesses. No company, basically, stands the test of time. Those that survive (and since Enron famously did not) will go through cyclic periods of success. Failure, however, is just over the horizon. When the numbers are starting to click is the time to re-evaluate strategy.
References
Buckingham, Marcus and Curt Coffman. First, Break All the Rules. What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently. Simon & Schuster. 1999.
Goleman, Daniel. Managing; The Dark Side of Charisma. New York Times. 1 April 1990. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/01/business/managing-the-dark-side-of-charisma.html
Gladwell, Malcolm. Department of Human Resources. The Talent Myth. Are smart people overrated? The New Yorker. 22 July 2002. 28.
Gladwell, Malcolm. What the Dog Saw and other adventures. Little, Brown and Company. 2009.
Hogan, Robert, Robert Raskin and Dan Fazzini. The Dark Side of Charisma. Audio. http://www.wsradio.com/wsradio-player.cfm/type/windows/show/The-Doug-Noll-Show/segment/21070
Michaels, Ed, Helen Handfield-Jones and Beth Axelrod. The War for Talent. Harvard Business School Press. 2001.
Mixner, Jack. First Break All the Rules. Which Rules? http://mixnerstrategy.com/blog/2007/10/change_or_not_to_change.html