Decision making biases

I recently heard Malcolm Gladwell (he of Tipping Point fame) give a talk about his upcoming book - Blink.  For those who have not heard him before, he is a fantastic speaker who is able to light up a room with his deep intellect and fascinating factoids.   Blink is about decision making in various situations and in his talk he focused on decision making around hiring.

He started his talk with an anecdote about Abbie Conant.  For those who don't know her, this is a fascinating story.  Abbie was the first female trombonist ever in a major orchestra.  The Munich Philharmonic (which is one of the oldest and prestigious orchestra in Europe) had an opening for a lead trombonist and decided to hold an open audition.  Abbie applied for the audition and due to a typographic error was cataloged as "Applicant #16 - Herr Conant" rather than Abbie Conant.  In an another twist of fate, the selection committee for the philharmonic decided for the first time to institute a black screen between the auditioning musicians and themselves.  This was done because one of the folks auditioning for the spot was related to a senior musician in the orchestra and the selection committee wanted to avoid any suspicion of bias in their decision.  Even though Abbie did not feel she did that well in the audition, the selection committee overwhelmingly felt that she was the best trombonist and offered candidate #16 - "Herr Conant" - the job.  All hell broke loose when they discovered that "Herr Conant" was actually a woman.  And that began a saga of almost 13 years where the philharmonic did everything they could to get rid of her even though she was the best trombonist.  The enduring legacy of Abbie however is that more and more orchestra's started to do blind auditions after this episode and ratio of male to female orchestra players which was 95:5 prior to Abbie is now close to 50:50. 

Couple of insights from this anecdote:

a. People have no idea of the extent of their biases: most orchestra conductors prior to this event claimed that they are just looking for the best musicians and that men are just naturally better musicians than women.  Most of them honestly did not feel they were biased in any way.

b. People start making their mind very early - Contrary to the notion that people would make up their mind on the quality of a musician after he/she starts playing, the reality is that they were making up their mind as early as just noticing the gender of the person.

Another interesting statistic that Malcolm offered is that more than 25% of Fortune 500 CEO are taller than 6' 4".  Only a quarter percent of the male population in America is over 6' 4"!!! Are taller men just better CEO's or are CEO selection committees biased towards height?  What does height have to do with their ability to be a good CEO?

These biases raise some challenging dilemmas for people like me (VC's).  A very high factor in doing diligence in management and founders are:

a. Do I know them personally?
b. Do I know someone who knows them personally and can vouch for them?

VC's take pride in saying that they never do deals that come in over the transom or work with folks
who did not come to them by means for a referral.  Is there a danger that by applying these arbitrary criterion's that we are missing out on a whole section of society e.g. minorities and women?  How relevant is the fact that they were referred to me to the trait of being a successful entrepreneur?

I don't have any answers but I am definitely thinking more about these questions . . .