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Jun 2nd 2012 | from the print edition
IN 1956 William Whyte argued in his bestseller, The Organisation Man , that
companies were so in love with well-rounded executives that they fought a
fight against genius . Today many suffer from the opposite prejudice. Software
firms gobble up anti-social geeks. Hedge funds hoover up equally oddball
quants. Hollywood bends over backwards to accommodate the whims of creatives.
And policymakers look to rule-breaking entrepreneurs to create jobs. Unlike the
school playground, the marketplace is kind to misfits.
Recruiters have noticed that the mental qualities that make a good computer
programmer resemble those that might get you diagnosed with Asperger s
syndrome: an obsessive interest in narrow subjects; a passion for numbers,
patterns and machines; an addiction to repetitive tasks; and a lack of
sensitivity to social cues. Some joke that the internet was invented by and for
people who are on the spectrum , as they put it in the Valley. Online, you can
communicate without the ordeal of meeting people.
Wired magazine once called it the Geek Syndrome . Speaking of internet firms
founded in the past decade, Peter Thiel, an early Facebook investor, told the
New Yorker that: The people who run them are sort of autistic. Yishan Wong,
an ex-Facebooker, wrote that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, has a touch of
Asperger s , in that he does not provide much active feedback or confirmation
that he is listening to you. Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, says he
finds the symptoms of Asperger s uncomfortably familiar when he hears them
listed.
Similar traits are common in the upper reaches of finance. The quants have
taken over from the preppies. The hero of Michael Lewis s book The Big Short ,
Michael Burry, a hedge-fund manager, is a loner who wrote a stockmarket blog as
a hobby while he was studying to be a doctor. He attracted so much attention
from money managers that he quit medicine to start his own hedge fund, Scion
Capital. After noticing that there was something awry with the mortgage market,
he made a killing betting that it would crash. The one guy that I could trust
in the middle of this crisis, Mr Lewis told National Public Radio, was this
fellow with Asperger s and a glass eye.
Entrepreneurs also display a striking number of mental oddities. Julie Login of
Cass Business School surveyed a group of entrepreneurs and found that 35% of
them said that they suffered from dyslexia, compared with 10% of the population
as a whole and 1% of professional managers. Prominent dyslexics include the
founders of Ford, General Electric, IBM and IKEA, not to mention more recent
successes such as Charles Schwab (the founder of a stockbroker), Richard
Branson (the Virgin Group), John Chambers (Cisco) and Steve Jobs (Apple). There
are many possible explanations for this. Dyslexics learn how to delegate tasks
early (getting other people to do their homework, for example). They gravitate
to activities that require few formal qualifications and demand little reading
or writing.
Attention-deficit disorder (ADD) is another entrepreneur-friendly affliction:
people who cannot focus on one thing for long can be disastrous employees but
founts of new ideas. Some studies suggest that people with ADD are six times
more likely than average to end up running their own businesses. David
Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue, a budget airline, says: My ADD brain
naturally searches for better ways of doing things. With the disorganisation,
procrastination, inability to focus and all the other bad things that come with
ADD, there also come creativity and the ability to take risks. Paul Orfalea,
the founder of Kinko s and a hotch-potch of businesses since, has both ADD and
dyslexia. I get bored easily; that is a great motivator, he once said. I
think everybody should have dyslexia and ADD.
Where does that leave the old-fashioned organisation man? He will do just fine.
The more companies hire brilliant mavericks, the more they need sensible
managers to keep the company grounded. Someone has to ensure that dull but
necessary tasks are done. Someone has to charm customers (and perhaps
lawmakers). This task is best done by those who don t give the impression that
they think normal people are stupid. (Sheryl Sandberg, Mr Zuckerberg s deputy,
does this rather well for Facebook.) Many start-ups are saved from disaster
only by replacing the founders with professional managers. Those managers, of
course, must learn to work with geeks.
Geekery in the genes
The clustering of people with unusual minds is causing new problems. People who
work for brainy companies tend to marry other brainy people. Simon Baron-Cohen
of Cambridge University argues that when two hyper-systematisers meet and mate,
they are more likely to have children who suffer from Asperger s or its more
severe cousin, autism. He has shown that children in Eindhoven, a technology
hub in the Netherlands, are two to four times more likely to be diagnosed with
autism than children in two other Dutch towns of similar size. He has also
shown that Cambridge students who study mathematics, physics and engineering
are more likely to have autistic relatives than students studying English
literature. Most employers are leery of hiring severely autistic people, but
not all. Specialist People, a Danish firm, matches autistic workers with jobs
that require a good memory or a high tolerance for repetition.
More broadly, the replacement of organisation man with disorganisation man is
changing the balance of power. Those square pegs may not have an easy time in
school. They may be mocked by jocks and ignored at parties. But these days no
serious organisation can prosper without them. As Kiran Malhotra, a Silicon
Valley networker, puts it: It s actually cool to be a geek.
http://www.Economist.com/blogs/schumpeter
from the print edition | Business