Range - David Epstein Page 0,56

they tended to realize that they had a lot of career options outside the military. Eventually, they decided to go try something else. In other words, they learned things about themselves in their twenties and responded by making match quality decisions.

The academy’s leaky officer pipeline began springing holes en masse in the 1980s, during the national transition to a knowledge economy. By the millennium, the leaks formed a torrent. The Army began offering retention bonuses—just cash payments to junior officers if they agreed to serve a few more years. It cost taxpayers $500 million, and was a massive waste. Officers who had planned to stay anyway took it, and those who already planned to leave did not. The Army learned a hard lesson: the problem was not a financial one; it was a matching one.

In the industrial era, or the “company man” era, as the monograph authors called it, “firms were highly specialized,” with employees generally tackling the same suite of challenges repeatedly. Both the culture of the time—pensions were pervasive and job switching might be viewed as disloyal—and specialization were barriers to worker mobility outside of the company. Plus, there was little incentive for companies to recruit from outside when employees regularly faced kind learning environments, the type where repetitive experience alone leads to improvement. By the 1980s, corporate culture was changing. The knowledge economy created “overwhelming demand for . . . employees with talents for conceptualization and knowledge creation.” Broad conceptual skills now helped in an array of jobs, and suddenly control over career trajectory shifted from the employer, who looked inward at a ladder of opportunity, to the employee, who peered out at a vast web of possibility. In the private sector, an efficient talent market rapidly emerged as workers shuffled around in pursuit of match quality. While the world changed, the Army stuck with the industrial-era ladder.

The West Point professors explained that the Army, like many bureaucratic organizations, missed out on match quality markets. “There is no talent matching market mechanism,” they wrote. When a junior officer changed direction and left the Army, it did not signal a loss of drive. It signaled that a strong drive for personal development had changed the officer’s goals entirely. “I’ve yet to meet a classmate who left the Army and regretted it,” said Ashley Nicolas, the former intelligence officer. She went on to become a math teacher and then a lawyer. She added that all were grateful for the experience, even though it didn’t become a lifelong career.

While the private sector adjusted to the burgeoning need for high match quality, the Army just threw money at people. It has, though, begun to subtly change. That most hierarchical of entities has found success embracing match flexibility. The Officer Career Satisfaction Program was designed so that scholarship-ROTC and West Point graduates can take more control of their own career progression. In return for three additional years of active service, the program increased the number of officers who can choose a branch (infantry, intelligence, engineering, dental, finance, veterinary, communication technology, and many more), or a geographic post. Where dangling money for junior officers failed miserably, facilitating match quality succeeded. In the first four years of the program, four thousand cadets agreed to extend their service commitments in exchange for choice.*

It is just a small step. When Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited West Point in 2016 for student meetings, he was flooded with concerns from very gritty cadets about rigid career paths that did not allow them to adjust to their own development. Carter had pledged to drastically reshape the Army’s “industrial era” personnel management from the strict “up-or-out” model to one that allows officers a shot to improve their own match quality as they grow.

When they were high school graduates, with few skills and little exposure to a world of career options, West Point cadets might easily have answered “Not like me at all” to the Grit Scale statement “I often set a goal but later choose to pursue a different one.” A few years later, with more knowledge of their skills and preferences, choosing to pursue a different goal was no longer the gritless route; it was the smart one.

* * *

• • •

Intuitively, grit research appeals to me. In the nonscientific, colloquial use of the word, I tend to think I have a lot of it. After running track and playing football, basketball, and baseball at a large public high school—and I’m only five foot six—I walked on to