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

Choose your dictionary or choose your clause, my copy of the OED has "pre-conceived opinion, bias, (against or in favour of), person or thing" as its leading clause. Prejudice might be the condensed group knowledge about something, a useful thing when information is limited and decision time is short. Do you walk on the side of the road with the old men standing outside the building or on the side with the young men gathered around their scooters? Well it might be a gathering of the Lambretta Owners' Club, totally absorbed with a fuel blockage problem, versus a final fling by old lags doing a 'Hatton Garden', to whom a bit of collateral murdering of a potential witness will make little difference to any prison time their billion pound heist might bring, your call.


As to dogma, well there are some rather nasty 'modern' ones going around at the moment, an example being total rejection of 'prejudice', "Well I'm prejudiced towards this candidate because he looks like me, so I will choose the other one who doesn't". And the reason? Well there is no rational one. Many of these modern dogmas can result in people being 'no-platformed' or losing their jobs so the problem isn't trivial. My MP came up with this once: "I will not tolerate intolerance". The dogmatic application of these modern 'critical thinking' (!!!) mantras often sees them biting their own tails; the harm to real individuals is just collateral damage on the way to their 'Utopian' hell.

The situation is further complicated by the Presbyterians being the driving force in Protestantism in Scotland and Northern Ireland (think of Ian Paisley) whereas in England the C of E is the official religion.

I have heard about a case of an engineer from Northern Ireland who was a Catholic but later changed to a Protestant. The secondary school he attended was mixed but when it came to choosing O Levels the science subjects and maths were dominated by Protestant students whilst Catholics gravitated to arts and humanities. At this point his social set at school was more Protestant than Catholic despite his family being Catholic and living in a Catholic dominated street. By the time he was studying A Levels he was the one and only Catholic taking physics. It was about this point in time when he decided that he was really a Protestant and not a Catholic.


It was also notable that Catholics were more likely to be unemployed or in dead end jobs than Protestants were. They always blamed the Protestants for discrimination but wouldn't admit that poor grades or taking crummy subjects had a lot to answer for.