This four-paragraph introduction to the longer
essay in The New Yorker serves as an excellent model for an
exploratory essay that serves to introduce a question.
Notice how the author begins with a story
to engage the reader. This is not a requirement, but it's an oft-used
technique in exploratory essays.
Notice how, even in the context of a business
story, the author manages to introduce an element of suspense: What
did the consultants discover?
There is a productive tension between this story
of the discovery of the importance of talent and the title of the essay,
"The Talent Myth," that calls this importance into question. Thus the
author is setting up his question even here.
The author puts the story--just a single incident,
after all--into a larger context so that we can see how important this issue
is.
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Five years ago, several executives at McKinsey
& Company, America’s largest and most prestigious management-consulting
firm, launched what they called the War for Talent. Thousands of
questionnaires were sent to managers across the country. Eighteen companies
were single out for special attention, and the consultants spent up to three
days at each firm, interviewing everyone from the C.E.O. down to the
human-resources staff. McKinsey wanted to document how the top-performing
companies in America differed from other firms in the way they handle
matters like hiring and promotion. But, as the consultants sifted through
the piles of reports and questionnaires and interview transcripts, they grew
convinced that the difference between winners and losers was more profound
than they had realized. "We looked at one another and suddenly the light
bulb blinked on," the three consultants who headed the project–Ed Michaels,
Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod–write in their new book, also called
the "The War for Talent." The very best companies, they conclude, had
leaders who were obsessed with the talent issue. They recruited ceaselessly,
finding and hiring as many top performers as possible. They singled out and
segregated their stars, rewarding them disproportionately, and pushing them
into ever more senior positions. "Bet on the natural athletes, the ones with
the strongest intrinsic skills," the authors approvingly quote one senior
General Electric executive as saying. "Don’t’ be afraid to promote stars
without specifically relevant experience, seemingly over their heads."
Success in the modern economy, according to Michaels, Handfield-Jones, and
Axelrod, requires "the talent mind-set": the "deep-seated belief that having
better talent at all levels is how you outperform your competitors."
This "talent mind-set" is the new orthodoxy of American
management. It is the intellectual justification for why such a high premium
is placed on degrees from first-tier business schools, and why the
compensation packages for top executives have be- come so lavish. In the
modern cor- poration, the system is considered only as strong as its stars,
and, in the past few years, this message has been preached by consultants
and manage- ment gurus all over the world. None, however, have spread the
word quite so ardently as McKinsey, and, of all its clients, one firm took
the talent mind-set |
closest to heart. It was a company where
McKinsey conducted twenty separate projects, where McKinsey’s billings
topped ten million dollars a year, where a McKinsey director regularly
attended board meetings, and where the C.E.O. himself was a former McKinsey
partner. The company, of course, was Enron.
The Enron scandal is now almost a year old. The
reputations of Jeffrey Skilling Kenneth Lay, the company’s two top
executives, have been destroyed. Arthur Andersen, Enron’s auditor, has been
all but driven out of business, and now investigators have turned their
attention to Enron’s investment bankers. The one Enron partner that has
escaped largely unscathed is McKinsey, which is odd, given that it
essentially created the blueprint for the Enron culture. Enron was the
ultimate "talent" company. When Skilling started the corporate division
known as Enron Capital and Trade, in 1990, he "decided to bring in a steady
stream of the very best college and M.B.A. graduates he could find to stock
the company with talent," Michaels, Handfield-Jones, and Axelrod tell us.
During the nineties, Enron was brining in two hundred and fifty newly minted
M.B.A.s a year. "We had these things called Super Saturday," one former
Enron manager recalls. "I’d interview some of these guys who were fresh out
of Harvard, and these kids could blow me out of the water. They knew things
I’d never heard of." Once at Enron, the top performers were rewarded
inordinately, and promoted without regard for seniority or experience. Enron
was a start system. "The only thing that differentiates Enron from our
competitors is our people, our talent," Lay, Enron’s former chairman and
C.E.O., told the McKinsey consultants when they came to the company’s
headquarters, in Houston. Or, as another senior Enron executive put it to
Richard Foster, a McKinsey partner who celebrated Enron in his 2001
book,"Creative Destruction," "We hire very smart people and we pay them more
than they think they are worth."
The management of Enron, in other words, did exactly
what the consultants at McKinsey said that companies ought to do in order to
succeed in the modern economy. It hired and rewarded the very best and the
very brightest–and it is now in bankruptcy. The reasons for its collapse are
complex, needless to say. But what if Enron failed not in spite of its
talent mind-set but because of it? What if smart people are overrated? |
Notice how the author keeps the company name a
mystery--and we soon find out why.
The line "The company, of course, was Enron,"
comes as a punchline and raises the question inside the reader's head well
before the author makes the question explicit in his last paragraph.
Notice how the author continues to tell the story
of Enron but specifically emphasizes the talent issue in order to persuade
the reader that Enron really believed in talent.
n his last paragraph, the author pulls all the
details together to ask his question. If he has succeeded, he has made
you wonder how the logic of rewarding talent could have gone so wrong and
why the logic might be unsound.
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