By Eric Manges, for The New Yorker
We’ve spent decades perfecting the art of hiring the wrong people.
From law firms to tech startups, hiring decisions have long leaned on the polished certainties of intercept: résumés, credentials, and the self-contained narrative of what a person has already done.
These are the visible, measurable artifacts of the past. They offer comfort, familiarity, and the illusion of control. Yet they miss the deeper truth: what truly determines a person’s future value is not where they’ve been, but how fast they’re accelerating.
This is the idea of slope, a concept borrowed from mathematics, but desperately needed in modern human capital theory.
In simplest terms, slope refers to the rate of growth. In a linear equation, it defines steepness, direction, and velocity.
When applied to people, slope measures something more elusive: their capacity to learn, to adapt, to become. It captures cognitive flexibility, emotional resilience, intellectual humility, and what some psychologists call "trait-level self-efficacy", the deep-rooted belief in one’s ability to figure things out.
Intercept, in contrast, is the starting point. It’s where the line crosses the axis, the summation of experience, pedigree, and pre-existing knowledge.
In most hiring systems, intercept is over-indexed because it’s visible. We’ve built institutions around what people have already done: Ivy League degrees, name-brand companies, years of experience in certain industries.
But as the landscape of work transforms, driven by automation, disruption, and information velocity, the past becomes an increasingly unreliable predictor of future performance.
What matters now is slope.
High-slope individuals are not always the most impressive on paper. They may lack the polish of a high intercept. But they possess a kind of quiet force. They ask better questions. They adapt faster. They absorb complexity without collapse. And they carry with them a rare attribute that no résumé can capture: the willingness to be wrong on the way to being right.
This humility, paired with high throughput and emotional regulation, is not just a psychological trait. It’s an operating system. A high-slope person isn’t defined by knowledge, but by speed of learning. In organizational psychology, this maps onto concepts like growth mindset, metacognition, and neuroplasticity. But in a boardroom, it often shows up as an unassuming analyst who rewrites a department’s strategy in a single week.
The late Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, once said: “Only the paranoid survive.” He wasn’t talking about fear. He was talking about perceptual agility, the constant ability to adjust to new variables, reframe one’s understanding, and move with both urgency and intelligence. Grove hired for slope.
And in a courtroom, where I’ve spent much of my fictional life, this is the associate who quietly studies every detail of the case file, anticipates the opposing counsel’s argument, and by the third month has become indispensable. Not because they knew the law better, but because they adapted faster than anyone else.
In economic terms, high-slope individuals are compounding assets. Like a well-chosen stock, their value appreciates faster over time. They require more mentorship up front, yes, but they outperform at scale. They rewire departments, redefine strategy, and reshape culture. Their ROI is not linear. It is exponential.
Intercepts plateau. Slopes bend reality.