Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World - Softcover

Stuart, Toby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1668001888 ISBN 13: 9781668001882

Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A leading organizational theorist takes us deep into the realm of humanity’s most powerful invisible force—social status—and how it shapes everything from who we trust and what we value to which ideas and innovations change the world and who gets credit for their success.

Why does an authentic Rembrandt fetch hundreds of millions while a nearly identical painting by his most talented disciple goes for a tiny fraction of that price? What makes a restaurant “hot,” a neighborhood “up-and-coming,” or a technology “the next big thing”? Why do people often choose the same seats in recurrent office meetings? Who is most likely to interrupt someone else mid-sentence? Why do big name lawyers earn so much? Why are health disparities so pronounced? And why, when someone gets a bit ahead in life, does the small advantage so often compound?

The answer to all these questions is social status—invisible hierarchies that influence every aspect of our lives, from our health to our personal relationships and careers to how we behave in social and work settings to the tastes and preferences we form. Without it, we’d be lost and paralyzed when faced with even the simplest decisions. But it comes at a steep cost: status works as a powerful amplifier, turning small initial advantages into insurmountable leads. Inequality is baked into its core.

Through compelling examples from business, economics, literature, art, fashion, and beyond, Anointed demonstrates how status cascades through society, creating winners and losers in ways that often have little to do with merit. And how new technology offers a glimpse of a more equitable future.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Toby E. Stuart is the Leo Helzel distinguished professor of business administration at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He is faculty director of the Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program and faculty director of the Institute for Business Innovation; and distinguished teaching fellow. He previously has held named professorships at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago. Stuart is the cofounder of a tech company and on multiple corporate boards. He has published dozens of academic papers on social status and social network dynamics. He was the long-time department editor for entrepreneurship and innovation at Management Science, and has been an editor at many prominent journals, including American Journal of Sociology and Administrative Science Quarterly.

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Chapter 1: The Other Uncertainty Principle 1. The Other Uncertainty Principle
On September 7, 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover, a metric ton of insanely ingenious robot created to scour the surface of Mars for evidence of ancient life, successfully drilled a hole into a rock. On Mars. Specifically, into the Jezero crater, a 3.9 billion-year-old lake bed. Perseverance extracted a small sample, which it gingerly tucked into a storage compartment in its own belly. Some years down the road, NASA plans to send another spacecraft to retrieve the sample and others, fly them back to Earth, and then examine them for the presence of microfossils that could prove the existence of past life on Mars. The ETA for the sample’s return voyage: 2033.

Let’s pause for a moment to marvel at Perseverance’s journey. Many of us feel groggy after a six-hundred-mile road trip. When the rover touched down in the crater in February 2021, it had traveled 292.5 million miles and then completed a final, dizzying, seven-minute-long parachute ride through the Martian atmosphere. Perseverance entered the atmosphere at a speed of 12,000 miles an hour and endured 2,500-degree temperatures on its final plunge. After all that, the rover landed exactly where and precisely when NASA’s mission team had planned. It hit a landing area of just a few square miles on a planetary body that itself flies through space at about 54,000 miles an hour while also rotating around its axis.

NASA pulled off such an amazing feat because, when it comes to understanding the physical world, human beings have become incredibly smart. We know the exact speeds and trajectories of planetary orbits, the precise moment of the minimum distance between Earth and Mars, the strength of the sun’s gravitational pull, the topology of the Martian surface. Our remarkable ability to understand the physical world and its natural laws has not only allowed us to send rockets to Mars; it’s also how we produce thumbnail-sized semiconductor chips that contain a trillion circuits and store gigabytes of data. It’s how we generated a full map of the human genome. It’s how we created cars that can do nearly everything except fly you to work—though soon enough they will do even that.1

Before we get too high on ourselves, I’ve got some sobering news: although we’re wizards at understanding the physical world, we’re demonstrably thickheaded when it comes to predicting the social world, and we’re often inept at choosing what to do when human judgments and interpersonal relationships are involved. Even when highly trained experts try to make predictions about areas they know well, they miss. Often. The Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson eloquently captured the difficulty of anticipating the future of human activity this way: “The worst historian has a clearer view of the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live. The obscurest epoch is to-day…”2

You would think experienced publishing professionals would be able to reliably spot the next massive bestseller. In fact, authors like J. K. Rowling and John Grisham withstood numerous rejections before finding success.3 In a tragic example, John Kennedy Toole ended his life after multiple publishers rejected his novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. When his mother submitted the manuscript posthumously, the book went on to sell millions of copies and win the Pulitzer Prize in literature. Or take the indie rock band R.E.M.’s biggest hit, “Losing My Religion.” As one critic wrote, “Nobody would expect a five-minute song with no chorus and a mandolin being the lead instrument to be played on the radio at all—much less become a worldwide number-one hit. It was just crazy. Anybody that says they saw that coming is lying to you.”4 The veteran producers and judges of talent-spotting television shows like American Idol or The Voice also make big mistakes, passing over musicians that later go on to win Grammy awards.5

In the venture capital industry, where firms amass fortunes for their partners and investors by sourcing and selecting the best investment opportunities, highly paid pros routinely pass over pitches from founders that create world-changing companies. At Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the VC industry’s most storied names, the list of cringe-worthy misses includes Google, Apple, Tesla, Airbnb, Intel, and FedEx. Visionary leaders, too, often get the future wrong.6 David Sarnoff, the longtime CEO of RCA, wrote an editorial in the New York Times in 1939 predicting, “TV will never be a serious competitor for radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.” And Steve Ballmer, the aforementioned CEO of Microsoft, once confidently declared, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item.”7 Oops.

We routinely fail at predicting the future because of its inherent, oftentimes irreducible uncertainty. Which of the three pairs of shoes that you just tried on would you actually wear most often? Will the majority of cars produced in 2035 drive themselves? When, if ever, will we discover evidence that there is life on another planet? Will the stock market rise or fall next week, month, or year? Will a meaningful relationship begin for us or will one come to an end? If we’re being honest, the answer to so many interesting questions we might ask about the future is something along the lines of “Who the hell knows” or “That’s beyond my pay grade.” When it comes to the future, we face a sense of doubt that blocks or delays us from taking action—which is a good working definition of uncertainty, according to decision theorists.8 We always possess imperfect knowledge about what the future will look like. We also lack a full understanding of how our current-day choices will impact our futures.

Even when we’re not directly prognosticating about the future, uncertainty remains one of life’s most consequential and inescapable realities. You’ve heard, no doubt, of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the notion in quantum physics that we can know either the exact location of a tiny particle or its speed, but not both at the same time.9 I’d like to propose another uncertainty principle, one that applies to people, not electrons. This principle says that we’re confronted with uncertainty at practically every moment and in practically every dimension of our daily lives—that life, in essence, is a high-speed ride through clouds of maybes and what-ifs.

Uncertainty’s omnipresence can leave us not only scratching our heads but feeling like we’re standing knee-deep in mental quicksand. Fortunately, we’ve developed individual and collective approaches that help us get a grip. Foremost among them is the dynamic of anointment, which dramatically reduces the number of options at our disposal, making the act of choosing much easier. To understand why the workings of status pervade our decision-making processes, we must think about what they do for us. And one of the most important things they do is help us navigate a social world that otherwise would be far more mystifying, paralyzing, chaotic, and, frankly, dangerous than it already is.

The Other Uncertainty Principle

Uncertainty—defined as a sense of doubt that blocks or delays us from taking action—is one of the most consequential, inescapable, and potentially debilitating realities of social life.

Three Flavors of Uncertainty
The future looms as a generic source...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1668001888
• ISBN 13: 9781668001882
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland