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A winning effort
by Mark Gimein
How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World: The Definitive Guide to Adapting and
Succeeding in High-Performance Careers, Neil Irwin, St. Martin’s Press, 2019
I
n a world in which a greater share of economic benefits go to those at the
top of the business pyramid, there is one clear way to ensure that you will
be a winner: Be a superstar, on a superstar team, at a superstar firm. If you
are confident that will be your path from Day One, carry on. How to Win
in a Winner-Take-All World is probably not the book for you.
For the rest of us, Neil Irwin, a senior economics correspondent at the New
York Times, has written a useful guide on how to turn all the messiness of career
fits, starts, twists, and turns into an advantage. The volume is built around a series
of interviews with senior managers at companies ranging from giants like Walmart
and Microsoft down to much smaller outfits like Danny Meyer’s Gramercy Park
Café in New York. The central conceit is that none of the successful managers
Irwin speaks to are sui generis whiz kids ascending by force of pure talent. Instead,
they are people who have made an effort to learn everything about how their busi-
ness works, often through a zigzag path of lateral moves and new directions.
The key insight that Irwin brings to bear on career advancement is the eco-
nomic concept of “Pareto optimality.” Pareto optimization, named after Italian Illustration^ by^ Noma^ BarBooks in Brief