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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBRIDIAcast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Nicole Torres.

Our guest today is Todd Rose. Todd is the director of the Mind Brain and Education program at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.

He focuses on how to promote the principles of individuality and the practice of personalization

in the workplace and education and in society.

He's here to talk to us about his new book called The End of Average,

How we Succeed in a world that values sameness.

Todd, thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So our society seems to measure everything from behavior to performance to body size in terms of the average.

So we use GPA's and standardized tests to tell us how smart a student is and employers We use

performance reviews to evaluate how well an employee is.

And I think everyone is used to measuring skills and achievements

against some norm.

But you say that this way of understanding people is scientifically wrong.

So what exactly is wrong with averages?

So averages are really good when your goal is to understand the whole group, right?

And for most of our time as a society, particularly since the industrial revolution,

we really focused on the group and kind of just

...