The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

by Todd Rose

Since Quetelet’s new science of the Average Man seemed to impose welcome order on the accelerating jumble of human statistics while simultaneously validating people’s natural urge to stereotype others, it’s little wonder his ideas spread like wildfire.

Today, scientific management remains the most dominant philosophy of business organization in every industrialized country.25 No company likes to admit it, of course, since in many circles Taylorism has acquired the same disreputable connotation as racism or sexism. But many of the largest and most successful corporations on Earth are still organized around the idea that the individuality of the employee does not matter. All of this leads to a profound question that transcends Taylorism: If you have a society predicated upon the separation of system-conforming workers from system-defining managers, how does society decide who gets to be a worker and who gets to be a manager?

Contemporary pundits, politicians, and activists continually suggest that our educational system is broken, when in reality the opposite is true. Over the past century, we have perfected our educational system so that it runs like a well-oiled Taylorist machine, squeezing out every possible drop of efficiency in the service of the goal its architecture was originally designed to fulfill: efficiently ranking students in order to assign them to their proper place in society.

The fact that there is not a single, normal pathway for any type of human development—biological, mental, moral, or professional—forms the basis of the third principle of individuality, the pathways principle. This principle makes two important affirmations. First, in all aspects of our lives and for any given goal, there are many, equally valid ways to reach the same outcome; and, second, the particular pathway that is optimal for you depends on your own individuality.