(This article originally appeared in Forbes.com on Sep 10, 2024.)
There’s an ancient Buddhist parable about a group of blind men and an elephant, which offers a timeless lesson on perception and understanding.
A group of blind men, curious about the elephant, decided to inspect it by touch. The first man, feeling the trunk, declared, “This being is like a thick snake!” The second, touching the elephant’s ear, said it felt like a fan. A third, after grabbing the leg, shouted that the animal was like a tree trunk. Another, touching its side, insisted, “This is a wall!” The last two described the elephant as a rope and a spear after feeling its tail and tusk, respectively.
This story is a powerful reminder of the dangers of making judgments based on partial context.
The Dangers Of Partial Information
I often hear suggestions such as, “I read this article that said company X does recruiting this way, so we should do it, too.” A slightly more nuanced version may be, “Open AI has no explicit titles to differentiate seniority for technical roles. This promotes the ‘best ideas win’ culture, which we’d want to emulate.” Conversely, some people critique with counterexamples: “Despite inventing transformers, Google hasn’t been able to bring any competitive GenAI products to life due to moving too slowly, so I want weekly status updates on all our projects to ensure we’re moving with speed!”
The commonality in the above examples (including the blind men and the elephant) is that people make quick judgments based on partial information. Unfortunately, just like machine learning models, bad input generally results in bad outputs.
Acquiring Full Context
Consider the following: Michael Phelps is known to eat between 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day during training season. If one were to mimic his diet without following his rigorous training regimen, they would likely fail to complete a 50-meter freestyle in less than 23 seconds. While we easily recognize the foolishness in an aspiring swimmer to start by copying Phelps’ diet, we often fall into the same trap when we try to apply other successful examples from one context to another without considering the nuances.
For instance, many top-tier tech companies, such as Google, Meta and OpenAI, have enforced a return-to-office (RTO) policy for their employees. I’ve heard startup founders discussing whether they should follow suit. What these founders don’t realize — or refuse to admit — is that those top companies possess enough talent density and prestige to make RTO feasible. Specifically, they can afford to lose some talent because there are enough other talented employees to cover for them while they hire new ones, which they can also do so more easily. The vast majority of startups have neither the talent density nor the prestige. Implementing a strict RTO policy may drive away their best talent while also struggling to replace these talents in the market where their office is, where top talent typically commands higher compensation.
Seeing The Whole Elephant
Just as each blind man only grasped a part of the elephant, many of us are prone to seeing only fragments of a larger picture when evaluating business strategies. Whether it’s adopting a new recruiting process or considering an RTO policy, it’s critical to understand the full context behind the companies that implement them. Just like expecting to swim 50 meters in 23 seconds by following Michael Phelps’ diet without his rigorous training — or one-in-a-billion genetics — blind (no pun intended) imitation generally fails.
Instead, approach each decision as a unique challenge. In the RTO case, evaluate your talent landscape and employee needs and consider the cost of talent in your local market. Gather as much information as possible, compare and contrast the various scenarios and then tailor the solution to fit your needs. Perhaps you have a special process for top talent who would prefer to be remote or start a pilot program with incentives in one of your offices. Or, you’ve determined that you have the same condition as Apple and would want to follow their lead. After all, if you just blindly used an elephant’s tail as a rope, you’d be in for a wild ride!
For more musings on tech culture, organization building, and management, follow me on Twitter @kenk616.
