Aug 8, 2021
DEGREE DISABILITIES
There are many fish in the sea — some smart and fast, some big and dumb; and even more so, there are many turbulently overeducated people in the current world markets. They make a splash but can not hold water. They might appear persuasive, but they do not rule. This has more to do with cultural change, and historic forces, than the simple nasty recurrent “bias of whiteness.” In other words the numbers of ascending non-whites in positions of power and influence is mathematical, not simply a culture war!
In short, more and more practical employers are beginning to reject overqualified applications on what I call “degree bias”. If I think back on the last hundred finalists I’ve hired, I have the same “functional suspicions” of those that flaunt their elite education as reason for entry. In fact, I found the last dozen early hires I selected from Cornell, Yale, Harvard, Skidmore College, and Middlebury people, either men or women, diverse or white, self-limiting. They only wanted to do what they were trained for at their elite institutions.
This is self-limiting for reasons I discuss at length in my book Doing More with Teams: the New Way of Winning. But for now let me concentrate on “Degree Disability.” A psychological and social way to think of this same cultural complexity is “Degree Disability.” That’s right: there may be a new form of DEGREE DISABILITY in the world. You are not born with this disability, but instead your family upbringing and your first schools, if elite, burn that self-limiting element into your eyebrows and your brain. Everyone can see it.
That is, the smarter you become the dumber you might act, or appear to act, in the eyes of employers. Let’s break this down more. I am talking about great employers, like Nike, Unilever, Suncor Energy, bp, Merck. These are the most respected Human Resource and talent selection firms in the world. I am aware I am identifying a trend, not a certainty.
THE NEW SPEED IN ANTI-ELITISM
There is a profound global social movement afoot — from Australia to America, from New Zealand to Canada — evident in what is swimming around in the sea of applications, that disfavors elitism in behavior and pedigree. This is built on top of a deep anti-elitism in popular culture — from Music and Video to the Social Medium forums. Those attempting to hire talent must better understand these developments in order to capture the full glory of diversity and inclusion.
Look at any Unilever ad anywhere in the world. You’ll see why they employ from 190 different countries, and are considering the number one place to land your first job.
When all the world can apply in a click, it doesn’t really matter if you have a degree from Harvard or Yale. That is a far tertiary variable. It does not even qualify if all you have is a proven athletic track record. What matters is your ability to work in diverse teams, to excel with engineers, big data types, with designers, and with humanists and scientists, rather than with one type, your blood type. You know the type I am charactering.
In Doing More with Less, I called this Degree Disability the knucklehead effect. I documented how much waste there is that trips a person up with this oversocialization and overeducation for one dominant type. Forget that rap. If you are all reflection, all expertise, and little result, you will not be selected. Tell your parents that! I heard one employer say: “You know what word I hate, NUANCE!”
SELF-ESTEEM AND SELF-ACTUALIZATION WINS OVER DEGREES
In contrast, the person who applies with vivid self-esteem and examples of self-actualization rather than privileged access is winning more and more in the application race. At least this is true in my place of work. I see it as true at Nike, Trane Technologies and the many clients (like Merck and bp) we’ve served these last years. It would be interesting to hear back from small and mid-size firms to see if they are experiencing the same trends.
Where does this openness to the self-actualized come from? The change began in my head when I came across this Walt Whitman line:
“Having prayed thru the strata, analyzed to a hair, consulted with doctors, and calculated close: I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.”
This kind of self-confidence beats out the overtrained elite candidate who thinks it below them to toot their own horn. You know the type: they come to the interview expecting the job, not trying to earn it.
The elites might appear thin and trim and sharp — do they all work out at the same clubs, and tan on the same yachts? — -but they do know how to deal with the different body shapes of true teams? That is what 360 degree interviewing in groups is all about. I am deliberately dramatizing some anti- elite bias here to make a point. There is wider access to “different” applicants than ever in history.
Hey baby, the world is bigger than your upbringing.
Some fish are big and dump; some are small and fast. There are many kinds of stingrays, from the spotted eagle ray to the small rays in some oceans. And there are many kinds of sharks, from the nurse shark to the attack sharks. And there are many kinds of groupers, from the Nassau grouper with clever patterns of camouflage to the red grouper, the Goliath grouper, and the Tiger grouper. Whatever kind you are, you have a place if you produce!
In other words, if you only emphasize “the degree” you have a disability swimming in the seas of diversity. Wake up Yale, Harvard and Cornell; Wake up INSEAD, Manchester School of Business. Look around your class enrollments; they are already more diverse than your teaching faculty by a factor of two! Of course, you need to run these programs by the numbers, and make sure you have diversity in the final five candidates, to stamp down bias in the lower levels of the selection process.
In this hunt for talent rests the ability of great firms to compete on doing more with less. For in my experience, the elites waste time, and do not know how to run hard everyday. That is in most cases. Meanwhile, some of the best candidates began working for cash at ten; not thirty, with tons of degrees.
IT TAKES A FABLE TO EXPLORE THIS CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
I decided to write my Fable during Covid because I could not fly internationally or locally like I had done to earn my keep for thirty years.
With all that time to sit, I wrote and wrote.
In the Fable 2040, now out on Amazon and www.bookshop.com, I explore where the Covid-39 narrator stands relative to his famous journalist friend, and his college mate, a tax attorney. 2040 is described as fascinating and dramatic by those that have endorsed it for several reasons, I believe. Most of them have to do with the development of the faulted narrator, as he grows past elitism. He likes his friends, but has a chance to see how the world provided him a more diverse ascent than mere professionalism. He asks if this happened for a reason in the tale.
Across the finale, the narrator uncovers why his simpler, more emotional, less intellectual protest song proves more satisfying and impactful than the distinguished elite careers of his peers.
This is set up in subtle contrast, chapter by chapter, to his best friends. They remained elite journalists, and elite tax attorneys. He became a range of things, celebrated as company inventor, investor, board member, book writer. In short, the narrator learns how to strip the emotionless blinding Noh mask of higher elite education off his face. Now naked again before the reader, he celebrates a simpler, more lasting love of family, friends, and those in his firm.
He asks: Why is it that people are beginning to see that higher education can blind you?
What I am about to say may not prove popular.
Nonetheless, I find it true. The more you are educated the more you are likely to fit exactly into an old aging hiring system where you represent the values and virtues of a receding reactionary culture. Sure, it was once lily white, and a place of joy for whites, and of influence. But a more diverse and emerging dominant culture is at bay, waiting to land more and more shiploads of smart immigrants, new graduates, and experienced hard workers.
If all you know is that privileged culture, you are plugged in with a square sharp head, and you forget inventiveness and frugality. The large liberating circles of creativity have been turned off in these professionals. Some call them square heads, predictable hires. If you are beginning to read this as “if he is over the top’’, then go back to your E.B.White elements of style, and slip into a past that is no longer with a future in its bones. Here, of course, I am deliberately extending C.S.Lewis’ famous essay “The Two Cultures.”
I have pursued these themes in two of my books, Doing More with Less, and now this 2040 fable. Do not confuse it with the movie 2040 now on Amazon.
Let me dramatize the point from a Fable entry: From Chapter Eleven: “All We Need is Hope”
“Throughout most of human history ordinary people, in all their range and variety, have wondered if the elites might banish them….To maintain self-respect in such a world, I have found I depended on resilient friends, a doctor daughter, and a wife of gold. Without them I could get pushed down by cancellations, sales taxes, merchant banks, international fees, estate taxes, and bad digestion. The older you get, the older your obligations. Wealth itself becomes an alligator purse, pulling at your testicles.”
Or from an earlier passage in 2040:
“From: Why I Wore a Noh Mask”
“We wear masks for infection now. Yet being a businessman, when home or abroad, is like wearing a mask, too.”
“In Noh theatre, the true genuine face of the actor is kept hidden — as they are not people but universal types. The face of rage. The face of fear. The face of beauty. I was the face of competition — raw, unadulterated competition. It was all about winning the game of earning. Nothing personal. Nothing expressive. While my life was bizarre, I still kept the mask tight on my face. Until now.”…
“I know today that part of my mask was built while I was going to elite schools. They were designed to make me repressed, civilized, more Noh. They designed my memories, as they do for thousands each semester.”
“I was graded, at times, on my behavior and appearance more than my substance or my defiance. And defiance was always filed away, like fingernails growing too long.” ‘Be Cornell,’ a few of the professors said, mostly men back then. ‘And this means dignified.’ I loved my professors, but deep down, they years on the street made me realize they were fools, in a tower of elite, reconfirming but repressive echoes.``
“The elites did not rule the world, they pushed papers about the world.”
At the end phase of this lived set of experiences — I’d rather be the odd yellowtail damselfish, with a yellow tail, sticking out of the pack, than another in a suit. I now feel I might have made a bigger difference if I had this trait of protest song even earlier.
BIO: Admittedly, I am a seriously overeducated white man, with a confusing interracial family upbringing. I encourage you to look at 2040 in the Kindle Version of the Introduction by Thaddeus Rutkowski. There for free you can sense the fun and the fundamentals of the book.
