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In the following excerpt from his new book The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, Adrian Wooldridge traces “how universities became more important for controlling career entry”.

The American economy played a significant role in promoting the achievement-oriented spirit. Giant companies like the railroad needed specialized middle managers to keep trains running on time, and big universities like the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard set up business schools to make them. Nevertheless, the advance of the economic performance society was patchy before the Second World War. Much of the business community remained decidedly anti-intellectual. Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt (1922) is a merciless portrait of the American economy at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties. George F. Babbitt, the hero of the same name, is the role model of a solid citizen: a real estate agent by profession, “agile in calling to sell houses for more than people can afford,” and a conformist temperament, proudly leerdev of originality Ideas or intellectual curiosity. He surrounds himself with clever gadgets such as alarm clocks and electric toasters, which symbolize the power of technology. He wears the club button of a booster to show his loyalty to his hometown, Zenith, and his willingness to praise it on all occasions, even when the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. His friends, like Joseph K. Pumphrey, owner of Riteway Business College and a “teacher of public speaking, business English, scenario writing, and business law,” are all just like him, boosters and conformists. The book gave the English language a word, “Babbitt” – meaning a “person and especially a businessman or professional who mindlessly conforms to prevailing middle-class standards” and a George Gershwin song, “The Babbitt and the Bromide” .

Babbitt was typical of many American businessmen in his contempt for “book learning” and his admiration for “common sense.” In 1924 an anonymous businessman wrote an article in an American magazine entitled “Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men”. Brilliance is inevitably associated with excess and irresponsibility; it’s much safer to rely on “tough” and “muscular” guys. The great entrepreneurs were usually self-made men who succeeded without higher education or careful upbringing (by 1900 fewer than one in five entrepreneurs had a university degree). Henry Ford combined an automobile genius with silly and often contemptuous views of foreign affairs and politics. HL Mencken thought that the average American businessman was of the Boobus americanus species.

Business schools began as crossroads between business schools and Rotary clubs: students learned a little craft and a gathering of friends for life, but didn’t bother with the big ideas that were transforming the economy. Consultations focused on building lasting relationships with large companies rather than selling ideas. Marvin Bower, McKinsey’s guiding spirit, was so determined that McKinsey men should look like he insisted until 1963 that they wear a hat when they went out in public. Many corporate men prefer to acquire their knowledge on the job rather than at universities, with the most successful companies like IBM, General Electric, and Kodak offering lifelong employment and promising corporate men (and some women) sending them to their own in-house training schools.

The great American sociologists of the 1950s portrayed business people as anti-intellectual conformists. In Organization Man (1956), William Whyte described the typical businessman as an easygoing type who blends in above everything else – pleasant, sociable, but hardly a rocket scientist. He titled a chapter “The fight against genius”. In The Pyramid Climbers, Vance Packard described successful leaders as “polished, cool, handsome, adaptable, high-energy, quiet-speaking, over-integrated, non-idiosyncratic power players. Often times, during their ascent, they also demonstrated a remarkable ability to bow their heads and keep their noses clean. ”The command centers of the business world were more like rotating clubs and golf clubs than faculty lounges and laboratories.

The first sign that the relationship between business and the trained secret service was changing came with the arrival of the whiz kid after the Second World War. The Whiz-Kids were a group of highly skilled Air Force officers, including Robert McNamara and Tex Thornton, who persuaded Henry Ford II to give them all a job at the end of the war. Then they managed to save the ailing company from disaster, not by making better products – they didn’t really know much about cars – but by making better companies, mostly through tight financial and management controls. They then applied the same techniques to a number of other companies and institutions outside the automotive sector: Thornton founded Litton Industries, America’s first major conglomerate, and McNamara moved to the Pentagon, trying to win the Vietnam War by increasing the killing rates, and then the World Bank.

The two institutions that cemented the relationship between business and educated intelligence were business schools and consulting firms. In 1966, the Carnegie and Ford Foundations joined forces to publish a high-profile report arguing that business schools need to justify their place in universities with more original research. After that, schools adopted both the publish-or-spoil mentality and the star intellectual system that prevailed in the rest of the academic world. Business schools produced professors who distinguished themselves not only for their knowledge of specific companies, but also for their ability to develop intellectual models: strategists like Michael Porter and financial theorists like Michael Jensen who tried to incorporate the rigor of economics into the study of the Business administration. They also produced en masse MBAs that had little time for the post-war economy with its club culture and three-martini lunches and instead wanted to force the American economy to dwell and shape itself – by chasing shareholder value, if necessary, from Jensen’s or disciples by examining the operation of the “five forces” when they were porterites.

The same cult of the “Smarts” also gripped management consultancies. Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) believed the company’s only chance to challenge McKinsey was to rethink it, rather than network it. To this end, he created a number of nifty thought models such as the “Experience Curve”, which taught companies that when they increase their market share, thanks to the accumulation of know-how, they can lower their costs, and the “Growth Share Matrix”. , which encouraged companies not to see themselves as an undifferentiated whole, but as a portfolio of companies that make different contributions to the bottom line (e.g. “cash cows” vs. “dogs”). McKinsey struck back by spawning its own business gurus like Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, authors of In Search of Excellence (1982), and Richard Pascale, author of The Art of Japanese Management (1981).

The Romney dynasty is a good example of the growing influence of economic theory. George Romney, who has no university degree, worked in the manufacturing sector for 23 years, including eight years of running American Motors Corporation and becoming “a folk hero of the American auto industry.” Mitt Romney graduated from Harvard Business School in the top 5 percent in his class before moving to three IQ-obsessed consulting firms, first BCG in 1975, then Bain and Company two years later, and finally as CEO of Bain Capital, strategic advice with the shareholder value revolution by investing money in the companies it advises. Under Romney’s leadership, Bain Capital has “rebuilt” more than 150 companies in a bewildering variety of industries, grossing an estimated $ 200 million fortune for the future Republican presidential candidate and Senator.

The new meritocrats changed everything they touched in post-war society: schools became mobility routes, universities became research institutes – with vocational schools; The company was more concerned with the intelligence of its employees. All of this inevitably provoked backlash – first from the left and then from the right – as students held back from the relentless competition and employees got tired of being played around by company madmen.

Excerpt from Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge, published by Skyhorse Publishing. Copyright © 2021 by Adrian Wooldridge. Used with permission. All rights reserved.