Taste as a Work Skill

The elusive sense of human judgment is becoming increasingly vital in great organizations. Do you understand how to harness it?

Taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. —Susan Sontag

For much of human history, work was synonymous with physical effort. From tilling fields to assembling cars, the output of labor was tangible, measurable, and generally correlated with the number of hours spent toiling.

Then things changed.

The rise of knowledge work meant that a lot of us do our jobs without breaking a sweat, at least not literally. These “knowledge” jobs, by most estimates, make up 50-60% of employment in the US, and they are very different from their manual counterparts:

• The output isn’t easily defined. A Ford F-150 should come off the line looking the same every time, but a sales presentation could excel (or fail) in a million different ways.

• One person can outperform others by orders of magnitude. One empl…