Author: Thomas A. Cole
_Thomas A. Cole_
Reading time: 20 minutes
Synopsis
“Doing Meritocracy Right” (2025) asks you to stop using systems that don’t work well. These systems rely too much on degrees and give jobs to family and friends. This has changed a good American idea into a fake upper class. The book says that business leaders, not politicians, can change how we see success. They can value good character and honesty, as well as skills. By making real changes in how people are hired and promoted, you can make your company stronger. You can also help everyone have a chance to get ahead.
What’s in it for me? Lead your organization to make people trust in democracy again.
When you want to get ahead, you might wrongly think that only hard work and talent matter. This idea can make you want to work hard. It also makes sense of all the late nights you spend working.
But often there’s a feeling that something is not right. The way people get promoted often stops working. Or the rules for leadership are now about keeping some people out, instead of finding the most able people. Seeing this problem is the first step to understanding your own career path. It also helps you check how healthy any company is that you hope to lead.
In this Blink, you’ll find the deep problems that let rich or connected people seem more capable than they are. You’ll learn how to remove the walls that stop truly skilled people from getting ahead. And you’ll see how focusing on honesty instead of just degrees can change how you hire, promote, and build teams. By the end, you’ll have a plan for a new kind of leader: one that gets respect by giving real chances to others.
Blink 1 – Understanding the problems with the American Dream
The American Dream – it’s a very old story. It tells us that anyone can get to the top by being very talented and working hard, no matter where they come from. This idea, called meritocracy, says that people who work hard and are good get ahead. The fastest runner wins. The best musician plays the main part.
But when you look closely at how success actually works today, you’ll see something worrying. The race has become less about speed and more about who can pay for the best start.
What we see is what the author calls merit that is passed down. This is a new upper class where rich people get richer. This stops others from even trying to compete. Rich parents don’t just help their children avoid failure. They buy success for them. This happens through many businesses that create impressive degrees and qualifications.
Expensive college advice is a clear example of this. Experts charge families $30,000 to $200,000. For many years, they help teenagers get into top universities. One company, worth more than $500 million, tells rich parents that it can calm their worries. It promises to make students very attractive to top universities. When a family spends a lot of money to make an application look good, the letter of acceptance looks less like proof of skill and more like a bill that has been paid.
Then there are what are known as special admissions. These are students chosen because their family might donate a lot of money or pay for new buildings. Their school grades don’t matter as much. Thomas Jefferson thought leaders should come from natural talent. But instead, we have leaders from families with a lot of money.
This strong focus on famous degrees has created what’s called only caring about degrees. This is the idea that only degrees from a few top schools show if someone is smart and capable. Society sees these schools as special places for future leaders. It’s like a VIP area. But the facts show something else. A study of top company leaders (CEOs from S&P 100 companies) found that almost 90% did not go to Ivy League schools. They finished their studies at state universities, technical schools, and local colleges. Yet, this idea of special access continues.
The worst part of this unfair system may be the way it makes successful people think. Today’s rich and powerful believe they succeeded only because of their own skills. Many become too proud and look down on others. They act like they got a big success all by themselves, even though they started with a huge advantage.
There’s a story that shows this very well. A very proud airline passenger was very angry with an airline worker. He shouted, “Do you know who I am?!” The worker picked up the microphone. He announced to everyone that a man at the gate had lost his memory. Could anyone say who he was?
When leaders stop being humble, when they don’t see how luck helped them get ahead, they lose the respect of the people they lead. This looking down on others makes society more divided and causes anger. It’s sad that we have reached this point. We have a system that creates leaders who are far removed from the people they should serve.
Blink 2 – How to fix it
If the way success works today is making leaders who think they are better than everyone else, then the whole plan needs to be changed completely. We have to start again and think about how we decide who should have power.
For decades, the idea of what merit means has become very simple, almost like a simple calculation: talent plus effort. We look for pure intelligence, often measured by test scores. And we look for the readiness to work many hours.
But this simple formula has a big problem. It forgets about the human quality that Thomas Jefferson thought was most important for good leaders: goodness. Businesses have focused too much on quick money and quarterly profits. They have stopped caring about good character. This has created leaders who are smart in their jobs but lack strong morals.
So, how do we fix this? We demand that merit includes honesty as the most important rule. Think about what Warren Buffett says, for example. He looks for three things in a person he might hire: intelligence, energy, and honesty. He gives a strong warning: if a person doesn’t have the third quality, the first two will cause big problems. A dishonest person who is lazy and not smart is not too bad. But a dishonest person who is smart and energetic can cause huge harm.
We’ve seen the bad results of only looking for talent and effort many times. The “smartest people in the room” had perfect CVs and endless energy. But they caused the fall of Enron and the global money crisis. Very smart people helped with the scams of Madoff and FTX. In those cases, when smart people had no morals, big companies failed.
So, now that we know honesty is key, let’s also value another kind of qualification: life experience. In a world that cares too much about family background and education, we often forget the lessons learned from difficult life experiences. There’s a special kind of wisdom you get from practical, manual jobs. No business degree can teach this.
Waiting tables, for example, is a great lesson in dealing with people. It teaches you how to deal with difficult people. It teaches you how to help others without losing your self-respect. And it teaches you how important it is to react quickly. Doing basic work on a building site teaches you deep respect for skilled workers. These experiences build understanding of others and strength. These qualities are likely better signs of a good leader over time than high grades.
This brings us to the last, most important part of a fair system where hard work pays off: humility. A truly good leader understands that their success is not just from their own efforts. It’s a mix of hard work, help from others, and simple good luck. When leaders accept this humble attitude, they stop trying to be the smartest one and start listening more. Instead of seeking personal glory, they aim for “selfless ambition.” This is a desire to see the company do well.
By changing what we value to include good character, different life experiences, and humility, we change who becomes a leader and how the company works.
Blink 3 – Why business must lead the way
If good character and humility are the new standards for leadership, the obvious next question is: who actually makes sure this happens? Your first thought might be to look to the government. You might expect politicians to make laws that create fairness.
But counting on the government to fix a system where chances are not equal is not realistic right now. Politics is stuck because of disagreements about culture and strong party divisions. Running the country often looks more like a TV show than serious work. Rules change a lot with every election. This makes it too unstable to help people get ahead in the long run. Waiting for politicians to fix this problem means waiting forever.
So, businesses must take charge. Company leaders have the power to make changes. Most people in America work for companies. So, a hiring manager at a shipping company or the board of a tech company has a bigger effect on a family’s future than any politician. These leaders control who gets in. They decide who gets the interview, who gets a mentor, who gets the promotion. They can act quickly and change things right away. They don’t need to debate or ask for votes.
A plan for this kind of change already exists in how top service companies have changed. These include important law firms, consulting firms, and investment banks. They are at the very top of the business world. For many years, these places kept people out. They were like private clubs with old rules.
But they eventually realized something important: their only valuable thing was skilled people. Only hiring from a small group of people meant they were competing with a disadvantage. They changed because of competition, not because they wanted to be nice. They stopped using old pay systems based on how long someone had worked. Instead, they rewarded people for what they actually did. They learned that a team with different kinds of people was better. It stopped everyone from thinking the same and helped solve hard problems better.
Now we arrive at the point where many leaders get stuck: the worry about “woke capitalism.” People often worry that including more diverse people or changing what “merit” means might go against making the most money for owners. But this way of thinking is old-fashioned and only looks at short-term money. If different teams make better choices, if humble leaders lower risks, and if more varied skills lead to better employees, then changing how we judge merit is very important for business.
Company boards do what’s best for the company when they make sure the company is not run by proud, similar teams that often make terrible moral mistakes. When businesses take action on this problem, it’s not about politics. They are actually protecting their own company’s future.
Blink 4 – A practical guide for leaders
Once a leader accepts that they’re the creator of their own team of skilled people, the work changes from ideas to real changes in how things are set up. The first wall that needs to be removed is what’s known as the paper barrier. This is a hidden wall that stops millions of good workers just because they don’t have a four-year university degree.
For decades, companies have used university degrees as an easy way to filter people. They thought a degree is the only way to show you are able. But this habit stops many people called STARs from working. These are people “Skilled Through Alternative Routes.” By taking away the need for degrees in job ads when they are not truly needed, hiring managers immediately open up chances for soldiers, people from community colleges, and self-taught experts. A degree from an average college often shows less about future success than five years of hard work and determination in a job.
Now, as you open up more opportunities, you’ll surely face the most tricky issue in this whole debate: the worry about having different rules for different people. In the rush to build diverse teams, there’s a temptation to cheat a little. This means hiring less qualified people just to meet a certain number.
You must fight this urge. A double standard is like making someone a token, but much worse. It harms the feeling at work, and worse, it seriously hurts the person you wanted to help. When someone thinks they were hired just to tick a box for a group, not because of their skills, it makes them feel like a fake. It takes away the confidence they need to do well. A truly fair system needs one strong standard for all.
So, how do you support variety without lowering standards? The answer is in what we can call the deciding factor. Imagine two people who are equally skilled on their applications. One comes from a rich background. They have a perfect CV because of expensive schools and useful contacts. The other has the same skills. But they gained these skills by overcoming big challenges related to money and society.
The choice should go to the second person. This is a way to measure future ability. Someone who started with less and worked harder to get to the same point has shown they can grow. The person from a rich background has not had to prove this.
There’s one more thing to consider: hard talks with your colleagues. The worst kind of corruption in business is not taking money. It’s doing favors. It’s the phone call from an important customer or board member. They ask if you can find a summer job for their child. These requests to pass down opportunities seem like simple networking. But they are what keeps the system of special access strong.
Saying yes to this pressure and hiring less qualified children of powerful people goes against the idea of a fair system. Leaders must be brave enough to say no, politely but strongly. They must know that every chance given to a well-connected child of a friend is a chance taken from a STAR who truly worked hard to get there. Stop giving jobs to family and friends. Start hiring based on skills. Then you’ll start building a system that works well, not one that struggles.
Blink 5 – Why all of this matters for democracy
So far, we’ve learned that business leaders can make changes happen. Now let’s look at what happens when they actually do. When a leader stops giving jobs to family and friends, this affects the whole economy. Changing how we judge merit is very important. It can save the American Dream from failing because it has too many problems.
Take a moment to think about the money cost of keeping people out. When society always stops women, minorities, and people without degrees from getting jobs, a lot of human talent is wasted. When these groups joined the working world, it greatly helped the economy grow in the past. Opening that door wider is the only way to keep our economic system working strongly.
The importance is more than just about how much is produced. There is also a mental side to this that is just as important. When a large part of the population believes the system is unfair, and that powerful people have made it impossible for others to succeed, this turns sadness into anger.
As sociologist Elijah Anderson observed, “Hope makes desperate feelings less sharp.” If people don’t see a clear way to get ahead, society’s agreement starts to break down. Bob Dylan put it another way: “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” Feeling like you have nothing makes things unstable. By bringing back a system where hard work really leads to success, business leaders can calm down a culture that is too angry. They can rebuild trust that has been lost because powerful people have been too proud for many years.
This job goes beyond the workplace. The modern leader must bring these ideas into public life. If you sit on a university board, you must demand that children of alumni no longer get special admission. You must not let universities, which pay no taxes, act like special schools just for the rich. You must check political candidates as carefully as you would a possible CEO. Democracy, like business, needs skill and good character. It means nothing if you ask your young workers to be honest, but then vote for politicians who don’t care about the truth.
So here’s the final message. The way ahead is not hard to understand, but it asks a lot of you. It means using a meaning of merit that values honesty more than just being smart. It demands checking your own humility every day. Remember that too much pride creates angry, popular movements. You must fight the urge to have different rules. Make sure diversity comes from truly helping people grow, not just picking a few people to look good. You must refuse to give chances to children of your friends who don’t deserve them. And you must help those who have no other mentor. Give them the gift of expecting a lot from them.
By doing these things, you build something larger than a successful company. You help create a future where the American Dream is still real.
Final summary
In this Blink to Doing Meritocracy Right by Thomas A. Cole, you’ve learned that bringing back the chance for everyone to get ahead needs business leaders. They must remove the walls built by caring too much about degrees. They must put in place a system that rewards good character, honesty, and determination.
You discovered that real merit is now hidden by the benefits of being rich and having connections. To correct this, businesses must lead the way. They need to go past political problems to make real changes, like hiring based on skills and saying no to giving jobs to family or friends. By valuing the strength that comes from different life experiences and not lowering standards just to look good, you can build stronger, better companies. This work matters for how well companies perform. And it matters for fixing the deep divisions in society caused by the pride of powerful people.
Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
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