Is it a career advantage to be a Protestant?

There's actually a really interesting point that comes out of that, that brings us neatly back onto topic. To be a successful senior manager / business leader, and for people to want to appoint you into that position (they're slightly different points), you need to have confidence in your final opinion. Yes, you will take advice along the way, but in the end your role - at least in the US and UK - is to make a final decision. Which will often, because of pressures of time and cost, need to be made from your own "judgment", without having all the facts.


So you only get to that position (or remain in that position) if you have confidence in your own judgment. Dogma if you like. Sometimes you will be right, and sometimes you will be wrong. And the further up the tree you go the more mistakes you will probably make - because you are having to make more and more complex decisions in less and less time. I love this quote (note the title of the article it came from, that's important too):

"...in management terms, [...] you only have to be right 51 percent of the time to be on the Right side of the curve"


 - "Smart Managers Don't Repeat Mistakes", Sir Richard Evans, in "Managing Your Career" Harvard Business School Press

Now, and I'm wording this very carefully, if your internal dogma(s) don't match the world you are working in you will find your decisions falling on the wrong side of that 50% line. But if they do then you're ahead - whether that dogma is mistaken or not. And that situation can change - this is one of the major issues that led to the 2008 crash: not religious etc dogma, but dogmatic belief in market behaviour and the idea that, against all logic, this would carry on for all time.


So it's a problem. We want - and indeed need - business leaders who will have the self confidence to make rapid judgments and stick by them. But somehow the internal beliefs that underlie those judgments must be repeatedly recalibrated against the outside world BEFORE catastrophic wrong decisions are made. No-one has an effective answer to this one yet - as is repeatedly proved!


Now the reason I say that this brings us back to the point is this: it seems very likely that if someone has the mental makeup to have suitably secure convictions about their business / managerial belief, then they will be very likely to have equally secure convictions about their religious (or not) beliefs. It would be no surprise at all to me if a correlation was found. However as (hopefully!) we all know here, you cannot derive causation from correlation alone.


There are other - more significant - factors at play in the US as well (if this Protestantism / success correlation does exist), but I'll bet this supports them. 


Not quite sure where that gets us, but interesting, maybe someone else can take it a bit further.


Cheers,


Andy

There's actually a really interesting point that comes out of that, that brings us neatly back onto topic. To be a successful senior manager / business leader, and for people to want to appoint you into that position (they're slightly different points), you need to have confidence in your final opinion. Yes, you will take advice along the way, but in the end your role - at least in the US and UK - is to make a final decision. Which will often, because of pressures of time and cost, need to be made from your own "judgment", without having all the facts.


So you only get to that position (or remain in that position) if you have confidence in your own judgment. Dogma if you like. Sometimes you will be right, and sometimes you will be wrong. And the further up the tree you go the more mistakes you will probably make - because you are having to make more and more complex decisions in less and less time. I love this quote (note the title of the article it came from, that's important too):

"...in management terms, [...] you only have to be right 51 percent of the time to be on the Right side of the curve"


 - "Smart Managers Don't Repeat Mistakes", Sir Richard Evans, in "Managing Your Career" Harvard Business School Press

Now, and I'm wording this very carefully, if your internal dogma(s) don't match the world you are working in you will find your decisions falling on the wrong side of that 50% line. But if they do then you're ahead - whether that dogma is mistaken or not. And that situation can change - this is one of the major issues that led to the 2008 crash: not religious etc dogma, but dogmatic belief in market behaviour and the idea that, against all logic, this would carry on for all time.


So it's a problem. We want - and indeed need - business leaders who will have the self confidence to make rapid judgments and stick by them. But somehow the internal beliefs that underlie those judgments must be repeatedly recalibrated against the outside world BEFORE catastrophic wrong decisions are made. No-one has an effective answer to this one yet - as is repeatedly proved!


Now the reason I say that this brings us back to the point is this: it seems very likely that if someone has the mental makeup to have suitably secure convictions about their business / managerial belief, then they will be very likely to have equally secure convictions about their religious (or not) beliefs. It would be no surprise at all to me if a correlation was found. However as (hopefully!) we all know here, you cannot derive causation from correlation alone.


There are other - more significant - factors at play in the US as well (if this Protestantism / success correlation does exist), but I'll bet this supports them. 


Not quite sure where that gets us, but interesting, maybe someone else can take it a bit further.


Cheers,


Andy