Malcolm Gladwell, “The Myth of Talent,” New Yorker, July 22, 2002, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth.

The Friction Project

Introduction

“Sometimes, it seems as if Peter Drucker was right when he said, “Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.

We are smitten with Leidy Klotz’s Subtract, his book on “the science of less.

We also learned what to make harder and slower from works including The Necessity of Friction by Nordal Åkerman, a collection of essays on the virtues of blocking, delaying, and stopping action that draws on fields including economics, organizational theory, physics, and artificial intelligence.

Thus we encounter the paradox that the thesis put forward by Jensen and Meckling from the Midwest of America in the 1970s is broadly consistent with the Marxist view of the capitalist firm proposed in Western Europe by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848. It is also consistent with the account of Ayn Rand, whose libertarian rants inspired yacht-owning Eddie Lampert, whom we shall meet again at the destruction of Sears, Roebuck and Co. Left and right often agree when both are wrong.