The Happy Orca

Malcolm Gladwell

The demands of every profession in the workplace have changed dramatically over the past few years and they are going to continue to change at an accelerated rate. We want profoundly different things from workers today than we wanted in the past. We want them to be flexible, we want people who can work in teams, we want people who can think abstractly…

The world has profoundly changed but the way we hire people hasn’t changed along with it. We want to cling to these incredibly outdated and simplistic measures of ability.

The great irony in this of course is that we have this sense that progress, broadly speaking, has the effect of reducing uncertainty. But the opposite is true. As the world changes we have to accept the idea that people cannot be understood and summed up easily and cleanly.

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