“The broader failing of McKinsey and its acolytes at Enron is their assumption that an organization’s intelligence is simply a function of the intelligence of its employees. They believe in stars, because they don’t believe in systems.” 76 While that didn’t quite square with my own experience of McKinsey, which had a robust set of internal systems for people development and counseled clients to have the same, I agree that blindly hiring for brains and giving them unbounded freedom to do what they will is a recipe for sudden and catastrophic failure. You obviously want to hire the best people,
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