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August 22, 2005

A Beautiful Mind Revisited

One of my favorite scenes in the movie A Beautiful Mind is where the main actors are in a bar when four beautiful young ladies walk in and the gentlemen discuss their strategy. The eureka moment in Dr. Nash’s research arrives as he realizes that if all of them go after the blond they will all walk away alone. However, if none of them go after the blond they will remain friends and well you get the idea. Nash reasons, they'll devastate one another's chances while letting other, slightly less desirable, women get away. "Adam Smith needs revision!" he declares triumphantly. To his baffled classmates, he explains: Adam Smith said the best result comes from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself, right? Adam Smith was wrong! The message: Sometimes it is better to cooperate! (Yes, most folks know that Adam Smith understood the cooperative environment, but that does not make a good movie.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that the story is true and bring it to the High-Performance Work Place. Adam Smith would say that each individual should act in their own best interest and build a set of high performing skills. These skills would reflect professional, academic, corporate, and even entrepreneur dimensions of the individuals personal goals and objectives. Now, would Dr. Nash say that high performance individuals may not make a high performance work place and in fact may be counter productive in doing so? In other words, a high performing group may not be made up of a group of high performing individuals. More thoughts later…

Posted by Todd at August 22, 2005 1:32 PM

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Posted by: Pete Rivett at August 23, 2005 11:41 PM