Smarts Is Not Enough

The market attaches a huge “premium” on being smart.

Certain companies pride themselves on hiring smart people.

Some companies even make this a key feature of their business brand.

In fact, it seems there’s a deeply entrenched market bias in favor of smart people.

We think the preference for “smart” people is short-sighted.

But moreover, it’s not smart.

Why?

The reason is because, on its own, smarts is not enough.

Consider McKinsey, a consulting firm that built its brand on hiring smart consultants.

Yet, the role McKinsey had played in intensifying the opioids epidemic in the US, which took the lives so many people and is now becoming publicly known, provides a terrible case-in-point.

Specifically, McKinsey advised several opioid manufacturers to aggressively market the painkiller. Not only that, but a July 2019 email disclosed in the litigation showed a McKinsey partner discussing talking to its firm’s risk committee about “eliminating all our documents and emails”.

This is not the first time, however, that McKinsey gets in trouble. The Enron scandal is another such example.

Key Questions

In addition to the horrible disregard of human lives in the pursuit of corporate profits, the McKinsey Opioids case is a loud wake up call for all business and human capital leaders who must closely examine—

• How we hire and whom do we seek to hire?

• How we select managers and leaders, and why we select them?

• How we construct and view “performance” and what performance do we reward?

Smarts is not enough (and it will get you in deep trouble) if it doesn’t also come with a degree of moral standards, dependability, and (yes!) empathy: the ability to understand someone else’s perspective and anticipate others’ reactions and feelings so you can calibrate your own actions and doings.

It’s true for hiring, it’s true for leadership, and it’s true for how companies manage their human capital and build their future workforces.