8: Nature or Nurture?

The author refers to the differences between children in the same family who develop very different personalities and characteristics. The point is that a person's nature, their genetics, provide them with certain innate abilities, but it is nurture that causes a person to develop those abilities to differing degrees.

(EN: it's an interesting example that also suggest "nature or nurture" is a false dichotomy. The children each come from the same genetic subset, and are raised by the same parents, and still turn out quite differently. So ultimately, it's about very subtle differences. While the children are close in their generics and upbringing, they were not perfectly identical - very subtle differences produce significantly different outcomes.)

Personality Matching

The author returns to the notion of matching a person to a position based on their personality type - whether you are hiring a brand new person or looking to promote someone into a different job.

He refers to an experiment done, using 1,000 restaurant managers, and divide them into three groups according to the profitability of the restaurants they managed. They profiled them, and found statistically significant differences between those who performed poorly and those who performed well, and used this to screen candidates. The results they saw was a marked decrease in attrition during the training program (EN: he does not carry forward to monitor performance after training.)

They applied the same tactic to a retail chain, in terms of using profiles to indentify store managers who would make good area managers. It's noted that they sought to overcome the notion that a good store manager makes for a good area manager by profiling area managers, not store managers, to determine the profile that would be successful. What they found was that some of the mediocre store managers made the best area managers.

(EN: notes on this chapter seem brief, bit it was a short chapter ... though I wonder if the online version of the book might have been missing a number of pages here.)