The Dirac dilemma
Are communication skills for a job as ‘business relevant’ as sheer intellectual horsepower?
Over the last few weeks I’ve developed a new habit during my commutes. I’ve started leaving my books and Kindle at home. Instead, I’ve taken to carrying a sturdy set of headphones and listening to lectures on my mobile phone.
add_main_imageThis takes some getting used to of course. First of all you need to deal with that little voice in your head. The screechy, Luddite one that insistently reminds you that reading is a more “literary” activity than “listening”: “On the weekend when you meet your friends what will you tell them Sidin? That while they were reading the half-kilo Hilary Mantel you were listening to your phone like some antisocial teenager?”
That voice, I swear, is what stands between many people and a life well lived.NextMAds
But once you reconcile yourself to the pleasures of listening, the benefits are manifold.
These lectures are both mostly free and widely available. And they are fascinatingly diverse. Most recently, I have learnt many new things about crystallography, stellar seismology, the Upanishads, Judah Maccabee, and the history of the stethoscope.
I doubt if I’d have been able to cover so many topics, so quickly, if I relied purely on the printed word.
But I know what you’re thinking to myself by now: “Boss, I read this column for tips on how to quickly become CEO/steal the petty cash/aren’t they the same thing? And he is going on about stellar seismology.”
Patience, my young padawan.
So last week, I was listening to this lecture on the life and works of Paul Dirac. Dirac is one of those truly great modern physicists. So great that mostly anybody with a good high school education should at least recall his name. And so modern that his work is incomprehensible.sixthMAds
But Dirac was a great man. And a strange man. I won’t linger on his strangeness except for one anecdote from his childhood years. Dirac’s father, a horrible martinet by all accounts, spoke to his children only in French. His mother spoke to her kids only in English.
Poor Dirac grew up speaking very little at all. But by the time he graduated from engineering college it was quite clear that young Dirac was brilliant. Graham Farmelo, a Dirac biographer and the lecturer I was listening to, suggests that Dirac is perhaps the greatest engineering graduate the UK has produced in the 20th century.
Yet, Farmelo says, Dirac simply couldn’t find a job. Partly because of the post-depression British economy. And partly, Farmelo suggests, because Dirac had not the foggiest idea of how to handle an interview. He was a terrible communicator. Later, at Cambridge, other scientists made up a unit of measure called the dirac. One dirac was equal to one word per hour.
Of course, the snub from employers only pushed Dirac back into science, and we are all the better off for that.
But listening to that lecture made me reconsider one of my long-cherished beliefs: that communication skills are at least as important as technical and academic ability.
This belief is mostly rooted in my engineering college experience. Where several academically accomplished colleagues floundered through placement interview after placement interview. Laplace transforms and digital signal processing were mere putty in their hands. But ask them where they saw themselves in five or 10 years time, and they’d collapse like a Kochi-based multi-level marketing company.
Then a few years later the exact same thing happened in business school. Some of my most academically gifted colleagues had a torrid time getting jobs. In some cases they’d have the exact skills the employer was looking for—they could structure options, actually calculate provisions for taxation, model market demand forecasts—but they’d get passed over for less qualified but more extroverted candidates.
The interesting and somewhat tragic thing is that many of these chaps would eventually get picked up by some employer and then, in a year or two, really blossom into adequate communicators.
But even if you set aside the potential for such a transformation…why does everyone harp on about communications skills so much?
No really. Bear with me here for a moment.
But how many job profiles really, really need good communication skills?
Let me put that another way. How many jobs out there are so dependent on strong communication skills that you’d choose a good technician with great communication over a great technician with bad communication?
I don’t think that many. Sure you want people to be able to communicate within an office, or work within teams. But are those skills as “business relevant” as sheer intellectual horsepower? And surely people develop those skills quickly?
The more I think about Dirac, his predicament and my own experiences, the more I wonder if my belief is flawed. Maybe communication skills is just another subjective metric. Maybe it is just an excuse to hire the people we want to work with, rather than the people who will get the job done.
What do you think? Do you hire people a lot? Or work in a highly technical environment? I’d really like to know. Send me email. Even short ones.
Cubiclenama takes a weekly look at pleasures and perils of corporate life.
To read Sidin Vadukut’s previous columns, go to www.livemint.com/cubiclenama
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First Published:7 Dec 2012, 06:45 PM IST
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