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

by Todd Rose

In the 1980s, when Bloom conducted his research, he acknowledged that it would be prohibitively complex and expensive to convert our fixed-pace standardized education system into a flexible-paced one.31 But the ’80s have passed. We live in an era where new, affordable technology can make self-paced learning an accessible reality.

Think about it: Were you really not good at math or science? Or was the classroom just not aligned to your learning pace?

My case at IIT

40 He claimed to have identified 58 stages of behavior when playing with a pellet (twenty-eight-week-old toddlers place an open hand over a pellet, according to Gesell, while forty-four-week-old toddlers hold it tightly) and 53 stages of rattle-grasping behavior.41 He even coined the term “Terrible Twos” and the phrase “he’s just going through a stage.”

rearranged the sequence of my entire four-year schedule so that I took the most interesting courses in my first two years. One of those was an advanced course on plagues that required several prerequisites I didn’t have, but I took it anyway because it seemed like it would hold my attention. It did.

The rampant turnover made it difficult to develop trusting relationships with my fellow employees because I knew that everyone was temporary.

At Walmart the turnover rate is approximately 40 percent; at Costco, the turnover rate is 17 percent and drops to an astonishing 6 percent after an employee has been there for a year.

But there is nothing inherent to capitalism that says employers must build their practices, especially their human resource practices, around averages.

Since Vembu does not agree with evaluating people based on averages, there are no performance reviews at Zoho, no scorecards, and no employee rankings.

And Vembu is sure he knows why. “I have a strong math background and I know numbers. And I know that you are in big trouble if you start to think about individuals as numbers to be optimized on average,” Vembu told me. “Treat individuals with respect, as individuals, and you will get out more than what you put in.”

“People who have already worked a long time as managers at other companies can’t figure out what to do,” Paul Green told me. “They can’t handle the freedom and the fact that they can’t simply issue unilateral orders. But whenever people come here who don’t know what it’s like working anywhere else—or who didn’t fit in at other places—they very quickly and naturally find a place for themselves.”47

But as long as everyone else is playing the game of averages—and as long as universities and employers continue to play the game—there is a real cost for any student who chooses not to play.

But I think the most innovative aspect of MOOCs is not their low cost or the fact that they are online, but rather the fact that many leading MOOC providers, including Harvard and MIT, have begun to offer credentials (such as certificates) for students who complete these courses.