In the mid-1980s, MetLife had a problem that money couldn’t solve. They were hiring 5,000 new insurance salespeople every year, spending over $30,000 to train each one, and watching half of them quit within 12 months. By year four, 80% were gone.
The company’s screening test was supposed to prevent this. It measured industry knowledge, aptitude, and financial acumen. I...
In 2007, a Harvard graduate student named Alia Crum walked into seven hotels in the Boston area with a clipboard and a strange question. The women who cleaned the rooms spent their shifts pushing carts, hauling vacuum cleaners up stairwells, scrubbing bathrooms, and changing linens on dozens of beds. By any reasonable measure, they were among the most physically active worker...
In the early 1990s, a Swedish psychologist named K. Anders Ericsson walked into the Berlin Academy of Music with a question that would reshape how we think about talent. He asked the academy’s professors to sort their violin students into three groups: the best — students with the potential to become international soloists; the good — talented but a tier below; and a third gr...
When Amy Edmondson started her PhD research at Harvard in the mid-1990s, she had a clean hypothesis. Better hospital teams, she assumed, would make fewer medication errors. Strong teamwork meant fewer mistakes. It made intuitive sense.
Then the data came back, and it said the opposite.
The highest-performing nursing teams in her study reported more erro...
The sentence was seven words long. “You must be smart at these problems.” Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck said it to roughly 200 fifth graders after they solved a set of easy puzzles, and then they sat back and watched what those seven words did to the children over the course of