You can never leave high school

WILMA DAVIDSON and Jack Dougherty have divided employees into easily recognisable archtypes from your teenage years, such as:

• the A student
• the Jock
• the Class President
• the Cheerleader
• the Rebel.

The authors postulate that by pigeonholing your peers, you can figure out how to work your way to the head of the class. Churstine Chen caught up with the authors and learnt how they got the idea for the book.

We were intrigued by who gets ahead and who doesn't. Look at your typical Monday-morning meeting. The A Student's eyes roll when the Brown-Noser starts sucking up. People pass notes. The more you look around, the more you realise that it's high school for grown-ups.

Davidson and Dougherty think that once you're typecast in high school, you're stuck with that label for life. "This is a message that some people find distasteful, but being popular in high school was more important than being smart. And for good or ill, in the workplace being popular is as important as being effective. We all know someone in a senior post where we scratch our heads and wonder how he got to where he is. And we also see the class know-it-all who's smart but can't get along with others."

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Christine Chen -- "You can never leave high school" in Fortune, 27 October 2003

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