Critical Thinking as a Way of Being

But the very same taker tendencies that served Wright well in Fallingwater also precipitated his nine-year slump. For two decades, until 1911, Wright made his name as an architect living in Chicago and Oak Park, Illinois, where he benefited from the assistance of craftspeople and sculptors. In 1911, he designed Taliesin, an estate in a remote Wisconsin valley. Believing he could excel alone, he moved out there. But as time passed, Wright spun his wheels during “long years of enforced

idleness,” Gill wrote. At Taliesin, Wright lacked access to talented apprentices. “The isolation he chose by creating Taliesin,” de St. Aubin observes, “left him without the elements that had become essential to his life: architectural commissions and skillful workers to help him complete his building designs.”

Frank Lloyd Wright’s drought lasted until he gave up on independence and began to work interdependently again with talented collaborators. It wasn’t his own idea: his wife Olgivanna convinced him to start a fellowship for apprentices to help him with his work. When apprentices joined him in 1932, his productivity soared, and he was soon working on the Fallingwater house, which would be seen by many as the greatest work of architecture in modern history. Wright ran his fellowship program for a quarter century, but even then, he struggled to appreciate how much he depended on apprentices. He refused to pay apprentices, requiring them to do cooking, cleaning, and fieldwork. Wright “was a great architect,” explained his former apprentice Edgar Tafel, who worked on Fallingwater, “but he needed people like myself to make his designs work—although you couldn’t tell him that.”

Wright’s story exposes the gap between our natural tendencies to attribute creative success to individuals and the collaborative reality that underpins much truly great work. This gap isn’t limited to strictly creative fields. Even in seemingly independent jobs that rely on raw brainpower, our success depends more on others than we realize. For the past decade, several Harvard professors have studied cardiac surgeons in hospitals and security analysts in investment banks. Both groups specialize in knowledge work: they need serious smarts to rewire patients’ hearts and organize

complex information for stock recommendations. According to management guru Peter Drucker, these

“knowledge workers, unlike manual workers in manufacturing, own the means of production: they carry that knowledge in their heads and can therefore take it with them.” But carrying knowledge isn’t actually so easy.

In one study, professors Robert Huckman and Gary Pisano wanted to know whether surgeons get better with practice. Since surgeons are in high demand, they perform procedures at multiple

hospitals. Over a two-year period, Huckman and Pisano tracked 38,577 procedures performed by 203 cardiac surgeons at forty-three different hospitals. They focused on coronary artery bypass grafts, where surgeons open a patient’s chest and attach a vein from a leg or a section of chest artery to

bypass a blockage in an artery to the heart. On average, 3 percent of patients died during these procedures.

When Huckman and Pisano examined the data, they discovered a remarkable pattern. Overall, the surgeons didn’t get better with practice. They only got better at the specific hospital where they practiced. For every procedure they handled at a given hospital, the risk of patient mortality dropped by 1 percent. But the risk of mortality stayed the same at other hospitals. The surgeons couldn’t take their performance with them. They weren’t getting better at performing coronary artery bypass grafts.

They were becoming more familiar with particular nurses and anesthesiologists, learning about their strengths and weaknesses, habits, and styles. This familiarity helped them avoid patient deaths, but it

didn’t carry over to other hospitals. To reduce the risk of patient mortality, the surgeons needed relationships with specific surgical team members.

While Huckman and Pisano were collecting their hospital data, down the hall at Harvard, a similar study was under way in the financial sector. In investment banks, security analysts conduct research to produce earnings forecasts and make recommendations to money management firms about whether to buy or sell a company’s stock. Star analysts carry superior knowledge and expertise that they should be able to use regardless of who their colleagues are. As investment research executive Fred Fraenkel explains: “Analysts are one of the most mobile Wall Street professions because their expertise is portable. I mean, you’ve got it when you’re here and you’ve got it when you’re there. The client base doesn’t change. You need your Rolodex and your files, and you’re in business.”

To test this assumption, Boris Groysberg studied more than a thousand equity and fixed-income security analysts over a nine-year period at seventy-eight different firms. The analysts were ranked in effectiveness by thousands of clients at investment management institutions based on the quality of their earnings estimates, industry knowledge, written reports, service, stock selection, and

accessibility and responsiveness. The top three analysts in each of eighty industry sectors were ranked as stars, earning between $2 million and $5 million. Groysberg and his colleagues tracked what happened when the analysts switched firms. Over the nine-year period, 366 analysts—9 percent

—moved, so it was possible to see whether the stars maintained their success in new firms.

Even though they were supposed to be individual stars, their performance wasn’t portable. When star analysts moved to a different firm, their performance dropped, and it stayed lower for at least five years. In the first year after the move, the star analysts were 5 percent less likely to be ranked first, 6 percent less likely to be ranked second, 1 percent less likely to be ranked third, and 6 percent more likely to be unranked. Even five years after the move, the stars were 5 percent less likely to be ranked first and 8 percent more likely to be unranked. On average, firms lost about $24 million by hiring star analysts. Contrary to the beliefs of Fraenkel and other industry insiders, Groysberg and his colleagues conclude that “hiring stars is advantageous neither to stars themselves, in terms of their performance, nor to hiring companies in terms of their market value.”

But some of the star analysts did maintain their success. If they moved with their teams, the stars showed no decline at all in performance. The star analysts who moved solo had a 5 percent

probability of being ranked first, while the star analysts who moved with teammates had a 10 percent probability of being ranked first—the same as those who didn’t move at all. In another study,

Groysberg and his colleagues found that analysts were more likely to maintain their star performance if they worked with high-quality colleagues in their teams and departments. The star analysts relied on knowledgeable colleagues for information and new ideas.

The star investment analysts and the cardiac surgeons depended heavily on collaborators who knew them well or had strong skills of their own. If Frank Lloyd Wright had been more of a giver than a taker, could he have avoided the nine years in which his income and reputation plummeted? George Meyer thinks so.