Product Description

Expanding on a landmark cover story in Fortune, a top journalist debunks the myths of exceptional performance.

One of the most popular Fortune articles in many years was a cover story called “What It Takes to Be Great.” Geoff Colvin offered new evidence that top performers in any field--from Tiger Woods and Winston Churchill to Warren Buffett and Jack Welch--are not determined by their inborn talents. Greatness doesn’t come from DNA but from practice and perseverance honed over decades.

And not just plain old hard work, like your grandmother might have advocated, but a very specific kind of work. The key is how you practice, how you analyze the results of your progress and learn from your mistakes, that enables you to achieve greatness.

Now Colvin has expanded his article with much more scientific background and real-world examples. He shows that the skills of business—negotiating deals, evaluating financial statements, and all the rest—obey the principles that lead to greatness, so that anyone can get better at them with the right kind of effort. Even the hardest decisions and interactions can be systematically improved.

This new mind-set, combined with Colvin’s practical advice, will change the way you think about your job and career—and will inspire you to achieve more in all you do.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #139 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

About the Author
Geoff Colvin, Fortune’s senior editor at large, is one of America’s most respected business journalists. He lectures widely and is the regular lead moderator for the Fortune Global Business Forum. A frequent guest on CNBC’s Squawk Box and other TV programs, Colvin appears daily on the CBS Radio Network, reaching seven million listeners each week. He also co-anchored Wall Street Week with Fortune on PBS for three years.

Customer Reviews

Recommendation from Amazon
Excellent book!!! It was a recommendation of your site while i was buying another one on the same subject, but from a different author!!! Your advise was very well done!!!

I Guess It Depends on How One Defines "Talent"
In "Talent is Overrated" Mr. Colvin makes a case for success by reviewing what it is that makes high achievers do what they do. His argument is that innate ability is not really innate, but rather that a rare combination of factors may create the "winning" formula. Most of these factors have to do with circumstance. For instance, Tiger Woods had a father who started him on the golf course at a very young age and was able to coach him in a way that helped him achieve. The other components in Mr. Wood's case included deliberate practice, internal drive, intense work effort and, equally important, the financial stability to be able to pursue golf as a career. If Mr. Woods had been born in equatorial Africa or Southeast Asia, for example, it is unlikely that he would have been quite the phenomonon he is today.

Perhaps "talent" is another word for drive. Talented people in any profession can only go so far on talent alone. That has been a given understanding for at least 300 years. Mr. Colvin does not unleash any great revelations here, but his well-referenced tome does help a reader get an idea of what she or he may have to do to achieve worldly success.

Practicing deliberate simplification
This book tackles a fascinating question that challenges top academic psychologists. Interestingly, it was written by a business magazine editor. This explains why we are treated to recurrent musings on how to produce "greatness" in business managers. Personally, I find it unhelpful and offensive to compare the skills of corporate CEOs to Picasso or Tiger Woods. The author himself admits running a business is not necessarily rocket science, and anyone who doubts the role of cronyism as opposed to skill in reaching high levels in organizational hierarchy has only to recall the 43 rd president of the United States.

When he does stick to realms of truly inspiring achievement, Colvin leads us on an engaging and tantalizing exploration of how greatness is achieved. He does do a convincing job of demolishing the conventional wisdom that great achievement is solely the result of some innate talent. This in itself is empowering and inspiring news to motivate the rest of us. However, the rest of the book is framed on the concept of "deliberate practice", an idea based rather heavily and directly on the work of Anders Ericsson. This becomes the grand, unifying hypothesis to explain what separates the great achievers from the masses. Unfortunately, this attempt at an explanation simply raises more fundamental questions. Some could have been dealt with more extensively - such as how and by whom such practice is best designed, or the nature and development of the "metacognition" that supposedly sets elite performers apart. Others may be unanswerable, as the author admits in the final chapter on motivation. Why do some people push themselves through the disciplined efforts to become so much better? Because they develop an intrinsic drive that is self-reinforcing, is the startling conclusion. Try practicing that.

Sometimes these simplistic conclusions even contradict each other. One of the fundamental attributes of deliberate practice as defined early on is "not being enjoyable". Yet later in the book we are told that in some cases the motivation to practice becomes self-reinforcing because it provides pleasure! A more basic flaw that underlies almost all the conclusions is the inherent unreliability of retrospective analysis. Looking back on the lives of overachievers, even comparing them to the backgrounds of lower achievers, will never provide the answers that can come only by following a diverse group of people as they evolve from a similar starting point. Such studies are difficult if not impossible to perform. Until they are, this book's conclusions are encouraging, but probably premature.