The Customer Success Economy

27Professional Development: How Can I Develop My Leaders and My Team?

Writer Tim Urban's blog, Wait But Why, is a popular one among people who love questioning everything in life. Urban posted a puzzle⁸ that continues to fascinate us to this day:

“It's the year 2045 and you and your partner are ready to have a child. So you head to the clinic so they can extract your gametes and prepare to conceive just the right child (then they grow the fetus in a machine with optimal conditions—only the biggest hippies still engage in old-school-style pregnancy).” In this hypothetical world, you can design your child to have different levels of three traits: IQ (classic intelligence), EQ (emotional intelligence), and grit (perseverance). Urban explains, “Each of these traits can be assigned to your future child on a human population percentile scale of 1–100. So an IQ of 100 would put your child in the top percent of all humans in IQ. An EQ score of 50 would give the child average emotional intelligence.” Then you're given 250 points in total. How will you distribute them across the three traits?

This question has sparked hours of conversation among our friends and family. Give it a try at dinner tonight or at your next cocktail party! In the meantime, let's redirect your mind from thinking about your future or current children, back to contemplating the world of Customer Success. You could just as aptly ask the question: “If you had 250 points to dole out for your ideal Customer Success ...