Via Zawodny's mostly dormant blog, I found this old Malcolm Gladwell article on "The Talent Myth". Gladwell writes about Google's Enron's over-confidence in the value of talent.

I think the potential for over-dependence on talent as a management structure has something to do with what Kedrosky was getting at in his response to my post on Marissa Mayer's talk:

Mayer has some perfectly pleasant ready-for-HBR ideas, but in practical terms her talk is loopy and full of self-congratulatory silliness and ex post rationalizations.

On Greg Sterling's blog he comments about the Google culture why it has more cachet than say Yahoo:

Yahoo is run by a bunch of real people, while behind the scenes at the Googleplex people believe there’s a mysterious and infallable cabal of search geeks. It’s strange.

Somehow it seems related to me. Not that Google's the next Enron, but the belief that they've somehow derived a new type of corporate culture based on smart people seems worrisome... (In the old but never-used SGI buildings, to boot)

¶ 5/18/2006