Ahead of the Curve (11 page)

The first question is “When you go somewhere for the day, would you rather A) plan what you will do and when, or B) just go?” The penultimate question is “Which mistake would be more natural for you, A) to drift from one thing to another all your life, or B) to stay in a rut that didn’t suit you?” The final question is “Would you have liked to argue the meaning of A) a lot of these questions, or B) only a few?” The truth, of course, is that to most of the questions, the right answer would be “well, it depends.” Regarding new fashions and trends, the test asks, are you usually “one of the first to try it or not much interested?” It depends what the trend involves. Is it worse to be unsympathetic or unreasonable? Am I dealing with my four-year-old son or Idi Amin? Is it more important to be able to “see the possibilities in a situation or to adjust to the facts as they are?” How about both? It is only by forcing the test-taker to make these false choices that Myers-Briggs can reduce human character to its sixteen brackets. If you let people tell you what they honestly feel about choosing between a kind boss and a fair boss, that tidy matrix would end up looking like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Before we showed up at the HBS campus, we were given a long to-do list, from taking an online accounting course to buying a laptop computer. Myers-Briggs was on there, and I zealously followed the directions not to linger over my answers. I was diagnosed as an ENTJ. The characteristics of an ENTJ were: “Frank, decisive, assume leadership readily. Quickly see illogical and inefficient procedures and policies, develop and implement comprehensive systems to solve organizational problems. Enjoy long-term planning and goal-setting. Usually well informed, well read, enjoy expanding their knowledge and passing it on to others. Forceful in presenting their ideas.”

It sounded pretty good, validating even, as though I had actually performed well on the thing. Until I read the characteristics of other types. ENTP—“quick, ingenious, stimulating, alert and outspoken.” ISFJ— “quiet, friendly, responsible and conscientious.” It was like reading horoscopes beside my own. I could just as easily have been Sagittarius or Cancer as Leo.

Critics of the test say it is an example of the Forer principle. In 1948, the psychologist Bertram Forer created a personality test for a group of students and then gave them an analysis based on its results. He asked the students to rate the accuracy of the analysis on a scale of zero to five, with five being a first-rate description of their personality. The average rating was 4.26. But Forer had played a trick on the students. He had given each one exactly the same analysis, one he had cobbled together from various horoscopes. It read:

His test demonstrated the truth that people are more likely to accept positive things said about them than negative things. Is someone likely to pay more attention when you say “I love the way you work” or “Hey, ass-hole, stop that”?

My own pitfalls, Myers-Briggs advised me, would be overlooking other people’s needs, ignoring practical considerations and constraints, and suppressing my feelings. I wished they had just said, “Dear Philip Delves Broughton: when you’re not busy taking an action-oriented, energetic approach, taking charge and forcing your ideas on others, you can be a selfish, thoughtless, uptight fantasist. Just try to be nicer sometimes, would you? Please?”

The other test, CareerLeader, promised a “unique profile of interests, abilities and motivations.” I would learn about my “core interests and what they mean for your career and happiness,” the organizational structure I would most enjoy, the rewards that motivated me, my strengths and weaknesses, and the characteristics likely to limit my success. Consequently, I would be able to “find the careers that are most likely to bring you success and satisfaction, along with suggested actions to take to work toward your career goals.” The test asks a series of very similar questions that iteratively home in on these actions, goals, and interests. Do you value financial rewards more highly than interesting work? Do you value financial rewards more highly than having more time to yourself ? Do you value having time to yourself more highly than interesting work? On and on until the test can conclude how exactly your motivations are prioritized. The questions are so repetitive and niggling that the temptation is to blitz through them without much thought. To let your instincts take control.

My interests, it turned out, were “creative production, theory development and conceptual thinking.” I would probably enjoy activities such as “designing new products, developing marketing concepts, creating visual and verbal advertising ideas, planning events, creating innovative approaches to business-service delivery and managing public relations.” I would also be happiest in a “work culture marked by a spirit of cooperation, interpersonal sensitivity, a tendency to assume the best of people, and perhaps a degree of altruism in the organization’s mission.” I could certainly imagine being unhappy in the opposite kind of environment, one marked by a spirit of dictatorial behavior, thoughtlessness, suspicion, and selfishness.

My assessment indicated that I tended to be “agreeable, trusting, generous, sincere, open to other people and sympathetic,” and hence I should avoid work environments that called for “less sympathy and more toughness, shrewdness and assertiveness.” I should “steer clear of organizations in which a high level of toughness and political savvy are essential for success.” And in interviews, I should beware of my “modesty and genuineness” getting in the way of my selling myself. “To get comfortable with being a little bit immodest, go over your key ‘selling points’ before every interview.”

My initial reaction to these tests was suspicion. I felt that their animating spirit was conformist. Unless there were some broad standard for selling yourself in interviews, why should I worry about being too modest? I could not help wondering what failure of imagination and human understanding must have occurred for these tests even to exist. What insecurity and mistrust lurked at the heart of the companies that implemented them? Of course, I didn’t have responsibility for making sure billions of credit card transactions were properly executed or toilet paper rolled off the production line. I was not in a position where I had to persuade feuding employees to work together or prevent a star manager from jumping ship. I thought that these tests took the rich tapestry of human character and reduced it to a sterile batch of letters. More fundamentally, I did not trust what I thought was an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. But given what I was about to go through, I should have given the tests more credit. They were closer to the mark than my ego was allowing me to believe.

A few weeks into the semester, this process of self-examination continued with a personal development exercise called “My Reflected Best-Self.” The instructions read,

Aside from being written in the densest management-speak, the exercise required us to contact ten to twenty friends and former colleagues and ask them to share moments when we were our best selves. The grumbling within the section was immediate and intense. “There’s no way I’m sending this to my old friends at work,” said Graham, a phlegmatic Minnesotan. “They already think Harvard MBAs are arrogant without being asked to tell me how great I am.”

The exercise also demanded we paint our own best-self portrait, offering the following example:

Reading this, I badly wanted to know what this person had read growing up. And at what point did he decide to abandon the limpid expressions of childhood for this strange new tongue? When did the phrase “model the message of integrity” first make sense to him?

We were expected to craft our own best-self portraits by answering the following questions: How does your best-self profile correspond with the sorts of things you spend the bulk of your time doing? What situations or contexts encourage your best-self to emerge? What keeps you from operating at your best more of the time? How can you prioritize your life so that you maximize the potential for your best-self every day? What can you do differently? What might you consider not doing anymore? Are there certain contexts you can put yourself in to maximize your potential?

I could see the point of all this. It was not enough for me to think about what I was best at or in what situations I thought I thrived. It was also useful to know what others thought were my strengths. So late one evening after a drink or two, I sat down with a pencil and joined battle:

Nine out of the ten people I asked for feedback replied, “This is ridiculous. Is it essential to your course?” I told them not to waste their time with it. But one friend just could not resist.

“Have had a wonderfully windy email inviting me to assist with a field exercise on behalf of you,” wrote Quentin, a British journalist, my first boss on Fleet Street and an aficionado of the absurd. “Is this genuine, or the creation of Monty Python?” Genuine, I replied. A few minutes later he zinged back: “Have just sent the following. Thought I’d give it a spot of top spin, just to brighten their day!